It's Personal

I actually wrote this last week during the agony/ecstasy of the final game of the NL play-offs and sent it to our San Francisco NPR station, KQED. They picked it up and invited me to come to the studio to record it. It aired on Thursday on KQED's Perspectives segment. If you've read it already, sorry. You get more Giants love today! If you want to give it a listen, you can click on the link below and hear it online. http://www.kqed.org/a/perspectives/R201010280735


I learned to speak baseball from my father. Dad worked in the yard with a transistor radio in his breast pocket, scratchy Giants baseball buzzing in the air around us. He translated for me. Double play. ERA. RBI. Sacrifice fly. Radio baseball hypnotized me. Mays and McCovey played better when I listened, I felt certain. A thin thread connected us through the small crackling box in my Dad’s pocket. It was personal, this invisible game, and I knew that my faith in the Giants paid off at the plate.


Occasionally my intrepid parents piled all six kids into the station wagon and headed for Candlestick. We never quite made it into the park for the first pitch. Stuck in gridlock at game time, my Dad would mutter “Scrud!” and turn on KSFO. Fine by me--radio delivered baseball in its purest form. By the top of the third, we would make it to our seats. The brilliant green infield and the sing-song chant of the concessionaires distracted me. Was this about baseball or frozen Carnation malts? Then the crowd would erupt for the home team. Our shared passion for the game and the guys who played it electrified me. It was personal--to all of us. We believed in the boys in orange and black.

This week I will somehow carve twenty hours out of my life for baseball. It’s not the high-tech, sexy entertainment-event or Gilroy garlic fries that draw me to the game. No. The irresistible thread hooked me forty years ago, in rasping low-tech play-by-play on AM 560. How we watch or listen to the Series will vary. Why we watch probably aligns pretty closely. We believe in our unlikely grab-bag team: the unproven kid and the “washed up” veteran; the Freak and the Panda and the whole roster of likable guys who don’t grab the spotlight, but who get the job done. It’s personal. We’ll tune in because we love to see nice guys win. And we’re pretty sure they play better when we’re listening.

With a perspective, I’m Jerie Sandholtz Jacobs

Unfinished

Yesterday I found the nubby blue almost-scarf that I started knitting in March 2007. Last month’s selection for book club sits on my nightstand, a bookmark sticking out somewhere near the middle. Half of a poem, scribbled on the back of an obsolete to-do list, fell out of my purse over the weekend. It will slip out again in a few weeks and nudge me to close the loop on the musings that prompted me to jot it down in the first place—I probably won’t.

I’m OK with unfinished. That sounds blasphemous as I say it, seditious somehow. My Puritan ancestors with their much-touted work ethic must spin in their graves at my confession. Thanks to them, we live in a culture consumed by a model of success that focuses almost exclusively on end results. Unfinished things represent sloth or weakness or failure. “Produce,” our forebears whisper from the dust. So we do, without examining the product.

The mentality reminds me of the Play-Doh Fun Factory that held my interest for about fifteen minutes on Christmas morning the year that I begged Santa for it. I crammed the Factory full of the artificially-colored substance provided and pushed the handle as hard as I could. Voila! A uniform and utterly useless rope of Play-Doh extruded reluctantly from the other end. Period. That was it—a finished product that was neither meaningful nor beautiful. Sound familiar? How often do we cram our days full of whatever society tells us matters and squeeze as hard as we can, strangling the life out of life, determined to finish what we start? Is it any wonder when the outcomes are neither meaningful nor beautiful to us?

“Life is too short. You can’t do it all.” my parents often told me. As a teenager I knew better, naturally. “Hah!” I secretly thought. “Maybe you can’t do it all. Watch and learn, folks.” It took a few melt-downs and miseries before I would acknowledge that every book was not worth finishing and that all deep thoughts did not require the symmetry of verse. I realized that I can’t do it all. Now, I don’t even want to.

I will never finish knitting that blue scarf, but I’m not ready to throw it away either. It reminds me, like a snapshot, of Joan. She sat in her hospital bed with me beside her and patiently taught me to cast on and knit and purl. The business of guiding my awkward hands distracted her from pain and the fear of dying. My knitting was never about the scarf, not even a little bit. Joan talked as we worked the yarn—talked about things she loved. We laughed together and we wept openly. Eventually Joan came to peace. For a month the scarf took shape, but it never mattered. The process mattered.

Process matters to me. I exist to become, not merely to produce. Choosing what to begin is no small trick. Recognizing what is worth finishing is even more difficult. When I find myself pushing hard toward an outcome that holds nothing for my spirit, I allow myself to lay it down. In the end I suspect that the things we have abandoned along the path will explain much of what we have become. I’m OK with unfinished. Just consider me a work in progress.

-Jerie
*photo credit

Originally posted on The Peanut Gallery Speaks
 http://www.peanutgalleryspeaks.com/2010/10/unfinished/