Vintage

Today, I finally made it out to my first softball game of '06 -- in the very last game of the regular season. I can't say I played real well, going 0 for 2 at the plate, but it felt good to be out there with my old friends wearing the colors once again for the Michigan Mafia.

Best of all, we won the game in a come-from-behind, one-run victory in the last half of the last inning, just as the fog coating the outer Sunset reminded me why I never want to live out there. Fortunately, as I drove home to the Mission, the fog gave way to bright sunshine.

Peter and I grilled steaks, onions, tomatoes, and garlic, boiled red potatoes, and had a couple sweet ears of corn on the cob for dinner.

Summer is fading here. Next weekend is Burning Man, the certain end to the season.

I had to play softball today to keep my streak alive -- all 29 years our team has been around I've played with it. Since I didn't get to play any organized baseball as a kid, courtesy of rheumatic fever, the Mafia experience has been my second childhood.

You know I like numbers, and that's a big part of baseball. Here are my "career stats,"FWIW:


(Y)29 (G)328 (AB)1176 (R)393 (H)675 (D)62 (T)25 (HR)24 (RBI)364 (BA).574 (TB)859 (SP).730

I admit that I was proud to win four batting championships , though the most recent time was in 1996. Next season will be the Mafia's 30th; our coach has hair the color of snow now; when we started it wsa black, like mine. That silly baseball "card" above is from somewhere in the past, around 1990, I think. The ridiculous mustache is long gone.

Hundreds of people have played on the Mafia over the past 29 years. But we only made the championship game one time, in 1994 (I think). We lost badly but I remember that I hit 3 for 3, so my "World Series" batting average is perfect.

We play hard but with a certain self-knowledge, as captured by our team motto: "Only the mediocre are always at their best."

***

My friend Erica and I met today, partly to talk about family memoirs. She has convinced her grandmother -- one of two surviving siblings from a family of 14 African Americans -- to tell her granddaughter her story. I lent Erica a tape recorder and tonight was to be their first conversation. I can't wait to hear how it went. Like so many black people in America, Erica knows very little so far about her family's origins, when they got here, and from where, though of course she knows her grandmother's grandmother was certainly a slave.

She knows they lived in Louisiana, and that her grandparents migrated here during World War Two, when her grandfather got a job at the shipyards in Hunter's Point. Besides her memoir project, Erica is talking to a friend about researching her geneology, including the option of using DNA to find out information about her African origins.

It is stories like hers that inspire me about the potential of technology in our time to help us discover things that previously seemed unknowable.

***

I'll be teaching memoir writing to boomers and seniors again this fall. This type of teaching is stimulating if emotionally exhausting. I do it at night, in downtown San Francisco. As I emerge from class at 8:30 or so on Monday nights, I am tired, hungry, and anxious to get home. I'm also grateful to people for their honest story-telling and their willingness to explore things about their lives that they may have never before discussed, let alone in a public forum.

This work has coincided with my own chaotic life these past few years. For instance, I still have a message on my cellphone from two autumns ago...I played it as I walked out the building housing our classes into the chilly night air. I'd assumed I would be spending that night alone. But the message was from my new friend. "Um. I'm changing my mind..." She explained she had ordered food and if I wanted to come over, I should.

You know what I did, and I've never regretted it...