Casinotes 53.4- You Can't Go Home Again

[chicoruiz]

This was, I was beginning to think, not my best idea ever.

Four hours on a plane, sitting in between a morbidly obese man and his morbidly obese wife. I had offered to change seats so they could be together, but they declined. “Gert likes a window seat, and I like the aisle, so we’re fine the way it is” the husband explained. So instead, I got to relay all the food the two of them had brought onboard back and forth between them, all the way to El Paso.

El Paso? Yep, back to the old stomping grounds. I had a bunch of stuff, junk really, that I’d been keeping in a storage locker there for a year, and it was time to sort through it and pitch ninety percent of it. I was getting tired of paying the locker rent. Plus, truth be told, I was bored in Atlantic City. The team was doing too well for me to get rid of any players, and I didn’t have the budget or the prospect capital to acquire any new ones, so I was basically sitting at my desk playing endless games of Freecell. Part of me kind of yearned for the old days, when I was constantly shuttling players in and out, trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

I made quick work of the storage locker; believe me, you don’t want to linger in a storage locker in the West Texas heat. I hauled most of my nasty El Paso furniture to the local Goodwill store (when I passed the store later that day I saw that most of it had been consigned to their dumpster). My collection of vinyl LPs had been unwisely left in the storage locker; they were now the approximate shape of Pringles. About all I took with me was some memorabilia from my time in Jerusalem; some personal letters from my old secretary and a ball signed by my 96-win Hebrew Hammers team- those who could write, at least.

With the Chilis no longer in town, most of my acquaintances from the past few years were gone with the wind, so I ate dinner by myself, and then decided to swing by the old ballpark, just for old time’s sake. There’s not much sadder than an abandoned baseball field, and Mother Nature and a dry summer had really wreaked havoc on the old place. I was about to turn and leave when I saw a familiar face: Benjy, the night watchman when I was here, still improbably on the job. The cliché was that the night watchman should be an old guy named Pops with a white moustache, but Benjy was a younger guy. He was supposedly working on his masters, but since his thirst for education was dwarfed by his need to consume as much weed as humanly possible, he was making a slow go of it.

“Hi Mr. Ruiz... What’s happening?” He didn’t seem surprised to see me after a year’s absence; I think his sense of time was pretty eroded.

“Hi Benjy. Boy, the old place sure has gone downhill, huh? What’s the city going to do with it?”

“Nobody knows, man… They might turn the field into an impound lot. Right now there are a bunch of immigrants shacking up here. A few a-holes, but mostly good folks. The family that lives in your old office is super nice. I’m supposed to just keep an eye on the place, but most of them pretty much take care of things on their own.”

“Well, I’m glad things worked out well for you, Benjy.”

“Yeah, but I gotta be honest. I still kind of miss the Chilis. Even though they mostly sucked, I still remember hearing the crack of Chenowith hitting a dinger, or watching Cano hit one into the corner and stretch it into a triple. Good times, man. I guess even if the present is good, there’s still some parts of the past you wanna hang on to.”

I knew just what he meant.

[Trebro]

nicely done

[Jwalk100]

We learned a trick in El Paso for fixing warped records. We would put the record between two sheet of glass out in the sun. After a few minutes it was hot as the surface of the sun. Take it inside and let it cool and it would work every time. You can also cook eggs on your sidewalk if you got hungry waiting.

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