If it was from him she would be faced with the same future but at least she could hold on to a fresh memory. A memory that would have to last her a lifetime.
The past beats inside me like a second heart.
Memories mean more to me than dresses.
The town was paper, but the memories were not.
I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys.
Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us – Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass – swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.
Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple.
It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.
Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation’s literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.
The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.
The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.
Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it’s still being made all over the place, all the time.