They said Daddy Jack Russell had forgotten more baseball than most of us would
ever know. I always thought
it was a strange compliment, to be held as formidable for the knowledge you could
no longer command. But now,
since I’ve done so much of it myself, I’ve arrived at a more nuanced model of
forgetting. Thumbing through
the books on my shelves, I come across marginal comments by the yard written in
a hand exactly like my own,
underlinings of passages that, for the life of me, seem strange and not especially
well chosen. I’m lucky enough
to have kept some loose recollection of a book’s contents; I almost never can tell
you what I was thinking
when I first read the page, what I felt then, how the words’ music moved me. So
what good was it? Remembering
is most often an accident, anyway, like the one that started these notes, the old
baseball coach still boyish
in his spotless uniform, calling time to make a trip to the mound, the words he’ll
say to his struggling pitcher scripted
by ten thousand forgotten games trailing him across the infield as audible as the
distracted murmur of the crowd.