I am sorry for not writing lately. It is baseball season, and I, King of All Jewish Baseball, am, after all, a baseball coach. I have been on the field every day due to a lack of rain, and general foresight, and I have not had the time required to compose yet another genius blog post.
With the arrival of spring each year, like the whole world around us– birds, flowers, badgers – me and my fellow BASEBALL MEN OF THE WORLD go through a physical transformation, we re-adjust to our natural habitat, the ball field, where there is no shade, and less sympathy. We awaken from our bear-like slumber, soft and new, we burst from our cocoons as beautiful butterflies, and then we turn into hoarse-voiced, dehydrated, sun-burned, chapped-lipped, weathered, gruff, old men, surviving, just barely, after an off-season of careful diet and exercise, on coffee and cheap meals between practices and games and meetings and conversations about why Harold batted 13th. Ah yes, behold, the natural cycles of the universe.
Become one with the Earth! Every Big Leaguer knows the key to success is warming up in bare feet.
Something occurred to me today… I AM MOVING TO ISRAEL IN 7 WEEKS, 52 days, to be exact, but who’s counting.
I’ve known it all along, that I am moving to Israel, but today, for the first time, I knew it was real. One of the many super-powers that comes with being a neighborhood hero magician baseball genius, is a well-tested, highly developed inability to understand that the future is real, and that it is in fact going to eventually become the present, and even the past, if I remain lucky, that is to say, alive. I am convinced, and this assumes, of course, maybe falsely, that all readers of this blog are human beings, and assumes, also maybe falsely, though I suspect not, that, as humans, our emotional and intellectual palets are 99.9% similar to one another (and 68.7% similar to an Oreo Cookie), that we all suffer from this. I am also convinced I have a particularly nasty case. It is a defense mechanism, it must be, right, right? For if we were truly able to imagine the future in all is realness and vastness, we would be paralyzed to experience the present, we would be nervous wrecks – I believe we have a medical term for this condition, it is called “Being Jewish”, if I am not mistaken. If I were truly able to comprehend that to move to Israel I had to actually move to Israel, prior to today, that is, I surely wouldn’t have been able to commit to it. I committed to an idea, a hypothetical scenario that places me on June 20th, 2013, in Israel, 7,000 miles from where my life currently takes place.
There is so much to do…
Bills, phone plans, bank accounts, insurance, jewelry, leases, shipping, storage, sub-lets, silk head-wraps, flights, white gloves, ensuing apartment hunts, medical, electric, feathers, internet. I need new speakers. I need sheets. Do they have sheets in Israel? – An air mattress for guests. Are there air mattresses there? IS THERE AIR? What do I bring? What do I store? What do I do with 3,000 records and 6 tons of painted rocks?
For now, I have to go, it’s 6pm, and I have a 7pm practice with the Yeshiva girls. So, as the sun sets on my already burned neck and arms, I at least will not have to think about the list, or the future, or anything, I will simply yell many of the same instructions I yell every day, my phone will ring in my bag, my inner dialogue will quiet, and I will be where I belong, where I have spent most of my life, on the ball field.
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