Position Player

Dear San Francisco Giants,

            I know what you’re thinking.  You’re sitting there thinking you’ve got all the bases covered, if you’ll pardon the phrase.  You’ve got a five-star rotation if everyone either stays who they were last year or, in the case of Tim Lincecum, returns to who they were every year but last year.  You’ve got a first baseman on the cusp of breaking out as a solid 280-290 hitter who’ll bring in 20 homers and make opposing pitchers regret ignoring the bottom of the order.  You’ve got a third baseman who hits better when he loses weight and then hits unbelievably better when he gains wait after his second hand surgery, and someday will hit a homerun off a pitch bounced in front of the plate.  You’ve got a second baseman who is sitting on a 20 game hitting streak as a new season looms and seemed impossible to get out in the playoffs.   You’ve got a shortstop that got this quote, “I'm prepared to say with confidence that Brandon Crawford is the best defensive shortstop in baseball,” from believe it or not, a dodger; A.J. Ellis.  You’ve got four exciting outfield choices all with World Series experience, a solid bullpen with more options than a Hyundai Sonata hybrid, experienced coaching, and the greatest ballpark in the game. You’ve got Buster Fucking Posey. Which is all great, but you need one more thing.

            It’s not chemistry and it’s not luck.  Winning brings both of those.  It’s not je ne sais quoi (which is French for I don’t know what) because I do know what.  The Giants need a team mom.  Not only do I know what position you need to add to the twice-winning World Series team but I know who should be first to occupy that position; my sister Donna McClosky.

            Donna is the greatest Giants fan between Eureka and San Luis Obispo.  She has been to more games, both at AT&T and Candlestick, than I’ve had hot meals.  She has a foul ball off a John Montefusco pitch that magically evaded outstretched hands and wide open mitts to land in her lap.  She has properly raised her children to follow the book of Giants and even converted one from the cult of dodgerdom.  Her credentials are beyond question, beyond reproach, and beyond Thunderdome.

            As the official team mom of the San Francisco Giants she would sit in the dugout and console players who flub a grounder, strike out, or give up hits. She would both relay signs to base runners and steal signs from opposing coaches and catchers.  If an opposing player, say for instance a hated dodger, takes out Marco Scutaro with a cleats-high slide into second to break up a double play, the team mother can grab a handy grounds keeper’s rake and chase the offending player off the field and halfway back to Echo Park.  A long standing family tradition. 

When the Giants win their third World Series in four years after adding this valued position to their team, every other club will scramble to do the same.  There will be some misfires sure; when the Yankees, thinking she is a beloved New York icon, add Yoko Ono only to have to fire her by the All Star Game when she insists switching the players caps to jaunty berets, or when the Reds hire Marge Schott only to realize she’s been dead since 2004.  But that will all be straighten out and sometime after the 2020 season they will start giving out an award for best team mom.

Baseball is big on naming things after players; Cy Young Award, Tommy John surgery, The Mendoza Line.  The award for the best team mom, which I’m sure will be as important to the sport as each league’s MVP, will be called the Donna-Momma-Verdict and given out on the following season’s Mother’s Day.  The first 5 DMVs will go to my sister and she will be the first team mom voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Tommy Lasorda’s plaque will be moved to indefinite storage in a janitor’s closet to make room for her’s. 

Bad Apples

One bad apple don’t spoil the whole darn bunch.

     -The Osmonds

            First of all I must admit that I thought Michael Jackson sang the above referenced song, but I guess it makes more sense for Mormons to sing about food storage techniques.  This song popped into my head recently as I was thinking about particularly bad apples in my former church.

            In Los Angeles - a city you’ll remember is actually named after the Catholic Church’s favorite mother, Mary - Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has been in the news lately because of the release of thousands of formerly secret church files that speak of 122 priests who molested children.  Mahony’s name is associated with these priests and these files because those same files lay out how he and an auxiliary bishop plotted to prevent law enforcement from learning that children had been molested.  Church law may be sketchy on how criminal these obstructions were, I wouldn’t even know where to look it up, but the California Penal Code is not.  According to that document it’s a crime:

            California Penal Code, Section 182, a-5, "If two or more persons conspire to...prevert of obstruct justice, or the due administration of the law."

            Mahony wasn’t protecting these priests so much as protecting the church.  He certainly wasn’t protecting the children.  Perhaps his thought was, as the Osmonds suggests, that a few “bad apples” don’t spoil the whole darn priesthood.  He’s probably right, but by stymieing the police and prosecutors he is leaving the bad apples in the barrel with the potentially good ones.  And perhaps he, as an apple, has become brown and rotten because he left those bad ones in.

            Roger Mahony started in Fresno, at the church my family attended.  He confirmed my sister and probably at least a couple of my brothers.  When he became Cardinal of Los Angeles, even though I don’t attend Mass any more, I took some pride that he had risen to such an important position and was from Fresno.  Maybe he took some pride in that too, and you know what goeth before a fall. 

            Monsignor Kevin Kostelnik at the Los Angeles Cathedral said he has grown weary of the intense media attention since the files were released.  In his own way as he is complaining that those outside the church want to know who broke the law, both while molesting children and covering it up, he is leaving those bad apples in there too.  He doesn’t seem to get it, but neither do his bosses; last year the Vatican issues a statement that said essentially that ordaining women is equal to child molestation.  Protecting these “criminal” priests is illegal in California, across the United States, and I would hope within the Catholic Canon.  To Mr. Kostelnik I would offer this advice about media attention, “Tough Titty.”  

           

            Sure, if you throw it out, one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch.  But how may do?  Five, ten, one hundred and twenty-two?  

          

There and Back Again

          That morning we hardly talked about it at all.  Robert already knew and we told Carson on the drive home from school.  We had planned a get together with friends and family for that Friday so when we got home we went into pre-party mode.  Food was already cooking, wine and tea were purchased and brewed respectively, and the inside table and the outside chairs were cleaned off.

            The children ate outside around the fire pit while the adults sat around the table.  There was no consensus of not talking about it; we just spoke of what we usually do.  People commented on the inclusion of cranberries in a salad or talked about being caught up on their favorite TV shows or what movies they wanted to see.  After dinner we examined wine labels like archeologists over shards of pottery like we knew what we were talking about, and decided which dessert we wanted.  Or just took a sampling of each.   

            People congratulated me on finally finding employment, said our house looked great with the halls decked, agreed that Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Riviera Paradise -which was playing in the background- was a pretty good tune, probably drank too much, definitely ate too much, and generally relaxed from a long week that got a little longer Friday morning.

            The kids were sent to bed and mom and dad crammed as much as possible in the dishwasher before following them.  Sleep came both gratefully and quickly.

            The next day Carson said simply, “I want to see The Hobbit.”  Our finances won’t swing a first run movie excursion right now so I told him maybe after Christmas.  Likely after the new year when paychecks start coming in again.  He wandered around the house muttering the cry of the pre-teen, “I’m sooooooo bored.”  I suggested he read a book, perhaps, oh I don’t know, The Hobbit.  He instead asked if I’d read it to him.  At first I was tempted to tell him he’s too old to have books read to him, but then I decided, why not.

            We lay down side by side on his bed.  I read about Riddles in the Dark and the escape from goblins.  By the time I was describing entering the dark and brooding forest of Mirkwood and struggling with the names of 13 dwarves -I think they are Fili, Kili, Thorin, Bombur, Dasher, Dancer, Groucho, Stucco, Romney, Speedo, Fantine, Prius, and Fiscal, but I could be wrong on a couple of those- Robert came in and lay down on my other side.  I caught a glimpse of Andrea in the doorway snapping a picture with her phone.

            There is something pure and simple about reading to your children.  Something that I know no matter how  many times I did it there still could have been many more.  I haven’t read to them out loud in years so it was nice to come back again.  I know that their innocence is a shadow of what it used to be.  I know they know the horrors of what happened last Friday, but for maybe a half and hour or so they were safe in their beds, warm in their beds, visualizing those forests and caves, and fat and silly dwarves falling asleep in enchanted streams, and a father and mother who love them and will protect them forever.

            I hope their last thoughts as they fell asleep were of fantastic worlds full of magic, where the good guys win and the bad guys always loose.  I know what mine were.

One Man's Ceiling is Another Man's Floor

“Dear Corinthians, how are you?  I am fine. Come down to Rome sometime.”

-Dave Thomas’ late night priest character from SCTV adlibbing one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians when his Bible accidentally closes on live TV.

An Okalahoma teenager and his friend were drinking.  They got in a pickup and for some reason the driver swerved off the road and hit a tree, ejecting his friend who died.  Tragically commonplace.  The blood alcohol level in the driver was 0.07 percent, just under the legal limit for an adult, but far above the legal limit for a 16-year-old which is 0.00.

            He pled guilty and was sentenced to 4 years to life with parole.  But the judge said he didn’t have to go to prison if he graduated from high school, spoke about the evils of drug and alcohol use/abuse, took periodic drug tests, and oh yes, went to church every Sunday for 10 years.

I was raised Catholic.  It was pretty much expected that I to go to mass every Sunday until 18 or so.  I don’t remember the day my parents actually said I didn’t have to go any more, or if they ever did, but I do remember how much I grew to dislike church.  To me mass (church) was the same thing every week, literally, the exact same thing.  We would repeat prayers precisely as we said them the previous week, and the week before, and the week before ad nauseam.  Give me a few minutes and I could probably remember the Profession of Faith.  The priest would get up and repeat what he had probably said a thousand times, word for word before that morning, and then deliver (what was to me) an uninspiring sermon, most of which was reciting long passages from the Bible, Paul’s letters to Corinthians and such; I don’t remember a single point from a single one. 

I would watch the clock, daydream, flip through the hymn book or the missalette; anything to make the time go by. It got to the point for me that I would put off going until the final service of the weekend, 8:00 PM Sunday night, so I could sit in my dad’s car in the darkened parking lot where I would listen to the radio instead of going in.  I feel bad about that now with my parents gone and all, but I can’t change it.

Maybe it was and undiagnosed ADD, maybe the priests were just going through the motions, maybe I was lazy, but I feel I got absolutely nothing from the hours I spent in a church pew.  I was curious about God and faith though.  I joined the Christian group Campus Life in high school, maybe at first to see if I could meet girls rather than to build a strong faith, but I did show up and I did listen.  But my constant questions to the poor, under-prepared counselors about why they believe and how they knew, and my obvious dissatisfaction with their answers left both of us frustrated and eager to move on.  I quit after awhile, leaving both faith and those girls I wanted to meet behind.

There are people I love and respect for whom church is the greatest joy of their week, their lives.  I look at them and I get a little jealous.  What did they see that I didn’t?  Were the people working at their church better at conveying the message than those at mine?  Did/do I not have the intellectual chops to “get it?”  Why does something that brings utter happiness to them bring only boredom and frustration to me?  Why is their reward my punishment?

Over the years I’ve tried to find some form of faith that works for me.  I’ve prayed, I’ve talked to some of those loved and respected people from the previous paragraph, and I’ve read.  But I guess I’m still the kid sitting in his father’s car behind Sacred Heart Church on Clinton and Cedar in Fresno, listening to ELO or Led Zeppelin, waiting until it’s time to go home.

Freeways of Tolerance

The City of San Ramon sits on Highway 680 between the Cities of Walnut Creek and Pleasanton, along the commute between the Central Valley and Silicon Valley, with workday traffic somewhere between bearable and infuriating.  I drove from Fresno to San Ramon and back on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, what arguably could be one of the busiest travel days of the year.   No, I’m not a glutton for punishment but rather a desperate job-seeker who had been granted an interview for that day only, and like the fisherman who gets strong nibble at a hole that he thought had long ago been fished out, I needed to keep my line in the water.

I hate driving on freeways.  I’m using the work “hate” here on purpose and specifically.  I really, really don’t like it.  I’m not a great driver.  Probably not even a good driver.  I get distracted, I get stressed, and I am quick to judge my fellow motorists, especially when they merge.  (Here’s a tip: the on ramp is designed so that a merger can get up to freeway speeds before he/she needs to commit to said merging.  Please do so.  Oh, and freeway traffic has the right of way.)

Weird things happen on freeways.  I once saw a convertible in North Bakersfield zip from the far left lane to the right shoulder, while the driver relentlessly beat something unseen in the back seat with the steering wheel locking device The Club.  I once saw a semi coming down the north side of the Grapevine with two wheels fully engulfed in flames, and a guy hanging out the passenger side door with a fire extinguisher waiting for it to slow down enough to jump.  And back in the early eighties when I drove LA freeways a lot, I saw this.

So here I was, driving the majority of a 165 mile, each way, journey on those hated freeways.  Fully expecting to be miserable for somewhere between three and much-greater-than-three hours. 

But that didn’t happen.

I started early, real early.  My appointment was at 10:00 but I left home at 5:30, well on the side of caution.  I arrived at 8:50.  Was there traffic?  Yes, there was traffic.  As I motored up I-5, there were so many RVs lined up at the rest stops they looked like dealerships.  Semi-trucks moved along in long convoys so close to one another that they might as well have had their bumpers tied together.  There were work trucks with and without trailers, SUVs with extra cargo pods strapped to the roof, and sedans with heavy and drooping trunks.  There was traffic and lots of it.

But I was among professionals.  Professionals seasoned by years of weathering Altamont Pass williwaws, Livermore construction, and accidents and breakdowns that pop up more often than Starbucks franchises.  Simple put; we moved along.  Sometimes we zipped down like leaves on a breeze, other times we clogged up like cigarette butts at a storm drain waiting our turn through the chute, but simply put, we kept on truckin’.

So a quick thank you to the drivers of the East Bay commutes.  I wouldn’t want to do it daily, but if that ever become necessary, I may abandon hate and replace it with… tolerable. 

Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign

             In September of 2004, Dad and I took a cross-country drive.  The high water mark for our trip was the Gettysburg National Monument (which ironically has its own high water mark).  That is where we turned back and where the Union turned Lee and the Confederacy around.  Somewhere along the way, after noticing that some cars motoring along the amber waves of grain sported Bush or Kerry bumper stickers, we decided to take an extremely informal poll about the then upcoming election.  We would count the respective stickers and figure who would win that election by using a complicated algorithm; whoever had the most bumper stickers would win.  John Kerry left George W. Bush eating theoretical dust.  Well, it was Kerry that ended up being the dust eater that November.  But I suppose we should have known that.  After all, there were far more stickers for “Shit Happens.”

            This recent election I noticed far fewer bumper stickers.  A couple of “NObama”s, a Romney here and Obama/Biden there, her Mitt, there a Mitt, but not everywhere a Mitt, Mitt.  That being said, there were a lot of yard signs.  I’ve always wondered who puts up signs for a political candidate in their yard.  No one I can remember knowing ever has.  Do they get paid for that?  Do they have to pay for them?  Do those signs work or do they have to a placebo effect; allowing the supporter to feel like they’re helping when in fact they may just be just pissing of the gardener who has to move it and put it back every week?

            Trying to determine the outcome of an election by yard signage proved unreliable at best.  In the more affluent neighborhoods Romney signs, where there were any, took the day, but in the less affluent burgs, there really wasn’t a dearth of Obama placards that I could tell.  There were few signs at all.  Taking the lesson I learned from the great Shit Happens debacle of 2004, when voting on Tuesday, I probably should have just written in one of the names I saw on the most lawns over the past year; For Sale, Price Reduced, or Bank Owned.

            When we lived in Auburn there is an interchange at highway 80 and Bell Road that sees a lot of traffic because 80 is the only route through the Sierras that is open all year.  Understandably during elections political signs popped up like dandelions at each corner of this interchange.  Except for one.  On that corner, the owner of the land presumably, put up a sign that said, “No political signs.”  There was however a piece of cardboard one day that had scribble on it, “No Carpool.”  I don’t know if this was a statement, lament, or informational.  If I found the person who put it up, my only response would have probably been, "Shit Happens."

Burning Flares

“Is there gas in the car? Yes there’s gas in the car.”

                              -Steely Dan, Kid Charlemagne

On Thursday I’m scheduled for an interview with the County for an IT position.  That would be Placer County.  Placer County stretches from the Sacramento suburbs though the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Nevada State line.  The position would be in Auburn, the county seat, which as it happens is just about 200 miles from my front door.  Thankfully the interview will be over the phone.

Should I be offered the position, and should I accept, although I don’t see myself turning down any offer at this point, either my family and I would move to Auburn like we did back in 2006, or I would move by myself and continue to look for employment closer to home, hoping someday to return.  My likely tiny apartment would serve as a weekend getaway for the rest of my brood, or I would make the drive to Fresno on weekends to try and retain the family unit.

            Does applying for jobs hundreds of miles away make sense?  Is it logically sound to apply for a job from so far away when it’s likely that there will be local applicants?  In this day when relocation assistance is so far removed to have dropped into fable, is it wise to apply remotely?  Would a business consider looking at an applicant from so far away, running the risk that after the entire hiring process the prospective employee might decline an offer, prompting said business to start over from scratch?

            Yes I’ve heard the “we’ll retain your application on file should another position come up,” but I believe that like I believe the check is in the mail.

            But back to applying remotely and back to logic.  Logically it makes sense to stay in my yard when asking for work, but perhaps there are times when acting illogical is the logical thing to do.  In an episode of the original Star Trek show a number of the crew, including Spock, Bones, and Scotty among others, were marooned on a hostile planet when their shuttle threw a rod or something.  After the red-shirt crewman was killed by giant cavemen, Scotty used the group’s phasers to give the shuttle enough power to lift off.  But once out of the atmosphere, it was determined that they could not achieve orbit and would fall back and burn up.  In a move that smelled of emotional desperation, Spock jettisoned and ignited the remaining fuel in what the others thought was a last ditch effort to break away from the planet’s gravity.  It didn’t work.  Bones said something about Spock abandoning his strict adherence to logic but just when it looked like the red-shirt guy had been given the easy way out, the Enterprise appeared and scooped (beamed) them up.  Kirk had seen the trail of burning fuel.  Spock made some snarky comment about acting illogical being the logical thing to do and everyone had a good laugh.  Star Trek, is there nothing it can’t teach us?

I have to write in the names and contact information of six businesses I’ve applied to every time I fill in the form for unemployment benefits, but other than that no one other than me is tracking where I apply for work (I’m doubtful that anyone at the unemployment office reads those entries but they are all true and verifiable).  But I’m ensnared in a no quit scenario where I must keep trying to find work because the alternative unthinkable.  But there are days when there is nothing, absolutely nothing out there locally.  So that’s how I ended up interviewing at a small Catholic College in Oakland, at a broadband fiber provider in Utah, at a world class aquarium in Monterey, and with, believe it or not, a telecommunication company in Illinois.  I was this close to moving to Champagne. 

Then there is karma.  Will the employment gods bestow upon me a cubicle and paycheck if I only apply within the greater Fresno area?  I’m not taking any chances.  So every day I search first in Fresno then I expand my search.  It doesn’t always reach to Illinois, but as far as the Golden State is concerned, I’ve got it covered.  Now if only a passing star ship would see my flare of burning fuel.