At nearly ninety miles per hour the slider bore in at his fists. He fought it off with a long foul ball to the left upper deck, the baseball nearly hitting an overhanging tin roof. The next pitch, a blazing fast-ball, dusted him off the plate and made his knees buckle. But he was ready for the next one. He just knew it would cut the outside corner, be belt-high, and he was ready. He kept his hands back and waited for it to close the distance to the plate. His cleats dug in and his swing was a picture of beauty: smooth and silky, a Joe DiMaggio—effortless, as if swinging through thin mountain air. The baseball met the sweet spot of the bat. It lifted high with the seams nearly frozen in lazy rotation as it caught the breeze to the upper stands and it was gone, a homerun—ten rows up in left-center field. It took a single bounce against an empty seat and she caught it before it ricocheted back onto the playing field. She glanced at him and smiled with pearly white teeth framed by glossy red cupid lips.

She looked special, but what else would a person expect: a dark complexion, but not the simple darkness of an olive color, but a mixture of mysterious browns, blacks, and little known hues that occur only by accident. Her skin was clear and crisp except for an occasional sprinkle of freckles near her shoulder and one or two near the bridge of her nose. That was just enough of an imperfection to make her seem real, not an airbrushed canvas painted in his imagination.

* * *

The television blurred fuzzy as the national anthem signaled the end of the evening’s broadcast. It was 2 a.m. and yet another long day had passed, and nothing new had happened, other than the Chicago Cubs had won
four games in a row, the last one, beating the hapless Milwaukee Brewers in the bottom of ninth inning by a Sammy Sosa homerun that cleared Waverly Avenue and bounced into the hands of an awaiting fan.

“What are you thinking about, Mr. Dean?” the young aide asked as he scurried impatiently around the old man’s wheelchair, intent to do something seemingly important. But he was reluctant to stop and give a quick tuck-tuck to a brown blanket that now trailed onto the floor and failed to fully cover a frail frame which sat there, half slumping and nearly falling off the edge like an unwanted rag doll haphazardly thrown onto a chair. The aide’s uniform displayed the same decorum as yesterday, a splat of a brown badge across his chest. But how tidy can one be if you empty bedpans for a living.

“Same stuff. Same stuff I’ve been thinking about for the last few weeks,”
the old man’s voice graveled as his tongue and lips failed to work in unison, as his vocal cords strained against a retained plug of mucous in his upper airway that just sat there, stubbornly, causing squeaky wheezes as he breathed in and out.

“Private stuff I bet,” the aide commented, “maybe wishful thoughts about that Ms. Sue Bolan in room 189, right, Mr. Dean? How about you telling a young guy what an old cuss like you thinks about when you’re just sitting there, you know, when it’s…”

The aide studied the eighty year old, not with pity, but with youthful contempt as he finally pulled up the half-fallen blanket to cover the old man’s gray-haired chest: a layer of kinky hair that matched the kink of his eyebrows--sprigs of curly bristle that fought their way through pajama button holes like clumps of aggressive sprouts pushing through small pores of an aging earth, seeking the promise of life that lay beyond.

The aide turned to check the red rubber catheter coming out of the old man’s penis, the cloudy urine draining into the bag like liquid puffs of yellowish smoke. He looked at the pressure ulcer oozing a brownish serous fluid from the back of the old man’s elbow, which at the beginning was a tiny innocent abrasion, but now becoming an infection seeking the brittle bone underneath. And the old man’s paralyzed arm hung useless, bent at a right angle with his fingers curled in a seemingly perpetual fist of anger.

“Want a puff before I put you to bed, Mr. Dean?” The aide’s head turned to the side, checking the long hallway ahead with rooms lining each side that seemed to go on forever. He listened to make certain that all was quiet, that the third-shift cleaning crew was still on the floor above going through the motions of vacuuming and a nightly ritual of floor buffing.

“Sure.”

The aide brought the flattened weed to the old man’s lips. “Just one puff, now.

What’s it feel like, you being so old Mr. Dean, you know, knowing it’s the last inning, knowing this may be your last at-bat?” The two chatted frequently late into the night, usually about the Chicago Cubs, or baseball in general. The aide did most of the talking, did most of the puffing--the other patients long ago put to bed, their urine bags hooked to side-railings like clustered yellow balloons ready to burst come morning, their feeding tubes taped to their flanks anticipating the infusion of a daily vanilla-flavored, high-caloric supplement, and clear vinyl tubes hugged crusted noses, hissing to the slow flow of a colorless oxygen.

The old man looked at the aide for the umpteenth time, looked through him for the umpteenth time. How does one communicate with untested youth he thought. The old man’s eyes, his pupils outlined with a full eclipse of grayness, settled upon the aide. His vision rested upon the aide’s full, carefree hair that hung with an untested freedom upon the young man’s shoulders. His eyes saw past a ruddy complexion that mirrored the youth’s unending surge of testosterone, and finally they penetrated into an inner turmoil which trembled from the affliction of youth, and in doing so, the old man felt what he, himself, had felt a long time ago.

The old man’s replied slurred, “Sammy Sosa doesn’t think about his next at-bat, he focuses on what has to be done at the moment. He knows it takes only one good swing, he knows to be patient, to be selective and not swing at a sucker-ball dipping low outside of the strike zone.

You do understand what I’m telling you, don’t you?” the old man rasped.

“Huh?” The blankness, the inexperience of his youth spread across the aide’s face.

“Sure, I understand. What do you think—that I’m going to spend my whole life taking care of old people. I got plans, big plans. This situation is only temporary. I’m going to be in the big league one day, not stuck in a pit like this.”

And as the imagined scene of the homerun came to the old man’s eyes, his heart slowed, nearly coming to a stop. He saw himself rounding third base and all that was left was the trot to home plate…just ninety more feet and the winning run, the final run would score. The fans rose and cheered. Their faces were full of optimism and hope that the pennant would finally be won. That finally, the long wait was over.

The pain seized his chest, not with that usual dull heaviness, but with a deep sear, a crushing heaviness that penetrated to the inside, a pain so severe that the uselessness of his arm rose to his chest, a pain so forgiving that time marched backwards and the creases of an old face gave way to a smoothness, and the dark grayness that once raccooned his eyes brightened and with a renewed, youthful spring to his spindly legs he strode within a step of home plate, within a step of winning the pennant. And from above, she smiled with cupid lips. Her hand reached out to touch his, and he felt her softness, he saw the sprinkle of starry freckles that fell to her shoulder as his foot touched home plate.