1. This afternoon, I finished The Meadow and my first thought was that I'd like to go back and reread it. I think I'll do that another time, but I have other books I want to read right now, so I'll move on to them.
The Meadow intrigued me. It's a series of vignettes verging on prose poems about ranch life in the often brutal conditions along the border of Colorado and Wyoming. The book's series of episodes, which jump around in time, cover several decades, combine actual occurrences with imagined ones, and explore the permanence of some things, like weather patterns, that is, the way seasons come and go, but mostly the book explores impermanence, mortality, and aging. It's a remarkably concrete book. Its author, James Galvin, has a remarkable grasp of the details of the topography and meteorology of the book's setting (he lives here part of the year), of the inner workings of ranch life, of how to build things, like log structures, or manufacture things, like tools or wheels, and of how any number of things work. Out of this attention to detail emerges detailed portraits of the book's main characters as each of them contends with the demands of the psychological and physical demands of living in such rugged conditions with long periods of isolation.
Jeff Harrison passed this book on to me. I would have never known it existed otherwise. I'm grateful beyond measure that he sent me back to Kellogg with The Meadow during our trip to Eugene.
2. Upon finishing The Meadow, I decided to read a book entirely unlike it. Some time back, Cas dropped me off the book The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip through Buck O'Neil's America. The book is set in 2005. In it, Joe Posnanski chronicles a baseball season he spent with 94 year old legendary Negro League player Buck O'Neil. I first experienced Buck O'Neil's vibrant personality and passion for baseball history and storytelling when I watched Ken Burns' superb documentary series, Baseball. I'm eager to deepen my knowledge of Buck O'Neil and to read more of his stories and reflections on both baseball history and jazz as I read deeper into this book.
3. Before I returned to reading, I spent a couple of hours this morning watching a superb college basketball game between two of my very favorite teams, Marquette and Providence. Today these teams played hard. They defended one another with steely determination. On offense, both teams were aggressive, doing all they could to penetrate one another's defensive walls and get to the hoop. I wanted both teams to win -- and since they both could not, I enjoyed every second of these two teams scrapping with great intensity.
In the end, after being behind most of the game, with 45 seconds left to play, down by point, Providence's agile and muscular center, Nate Watson, prevailed when a teammate missed a shot. He rebounded the carom in thick traffic, exploded to the cup, and slam dunked the put back. He was also fouled. He converted the free throw, giving the Friars a one point lead. Justin Lewis for Marquette and Noah Horchler for Providence then both went 1-2 at the free throw line. Marquette had possession with twenty seconds left in the game and called a time out with fifteen seconds to go.
Marquette's Tyler Kolek got a step on his defender and drove to the tin, but Providence's interior defense denied him an angle to the hoop and he put up a short jumper and missed.
Justin Lewis, though, rebounded Kolek's miss and slightly rushed his short shot near the rim and misfired, a heartbreaking miss.
Providence prevailed, 65-63.
It's hard for me to determine Providence's razor thin edge in this game.
I'll try.
Providence's interior players out rebounded and outscored Marquette in the paint, led by Nate Watson.
Providence kept Justin Lewis in check, holding him to 4-12 shooting from the field and 13 points.
It's more difficult to quantify experience, but I thought Providence's older players, their deeper experience in close games, was decisive. I liked seeing this. Part of what is making this year a most enjoyable college basketball season for me is the number of older players who stayed in college, many as transfers, and are adding maturity to their teams' performances. Providence is an older and more experienced team than Marquette and, in the end, this might have been the factor that made them today's slightly better team.
Well, it also helped, in my opinion, that this was a home game for Providence in front of a packed and raucous house, fans undeterred by the blizzard that had buried Rhode Island the day before!
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