It’s baseball season, and I personally can’t think of a better way to start the season than by reading a bitingly funny, poignant and timely memoir of a baseball season by a New York City writer and fan. That she happens to be my daughter is irrelevant, of course. Emma loves baseball, as her spanking new blog reflects, and her book is a wonderful exploration – I call it a cross between O Henry and Red Smith – of young writer and fan coming to terms with the reality of the sport. And of life in the big city. Check it out. It is available in bookstores and online, of course.
Emma and I will be appearing together at Northshire Books, Manchester, Vt., at 7 p.m., May 8. She will be reading from her new book and talking baseball and fending off outraged Mets and Red Sox fans, and I will be offering a preview of my first novel in ten years, “Rose In A Storm.”
A close friend of mine, also divorced, asked me in puzzlement why I am getting married. “What’s the point?” he asked. He was genuinely baffled. Why not just live together, share your lives?
It’s a good question, I suppose. It seems clear to me. I believe in marriage. And commitment. And the security marriage brings a couple, in life, mind and the law. I have wanted to marry Maria ever since we became a couple, and although she thought long and hard about it, it always seemed clear to me.
I remember when I was struggling, and some days and weeks the only thing that kept me going was knowing that at some point she was going to come through the door. She always did. When she comes through the door even now, my world lights up. I like marriage. I want to do it right. Every morning, I ask myself how I can make life better for her, brighter. And she does the same for me. It’s not for me to tell anybody else to get married or not, but nothing could be clearer for me.
I see that relationships of any kind are hard work. You can’t take them for granted, or make assumptions. Yesterday, when I was writing the announcement, I wanted to put up a photo of Maria on the blog. No, she said, she didn’t want just a photo of her announcing our marriage. She wanted one of both of us. My first reaction was that that was silly – why not a photo of her? Then I got what she was saying, listened, and put up a photo of a crocus. And I said, “are you comfortable,” and she smiled and kissed me on the head.
Listening and hearing is something I am working hard to do. It is one of the things that is important, I think, in a marriage. So I’m happy beyond words – rare for me.
And thanks so much for the many, many messages coming in of congratulations and good wishes. We appreciate them.
It was odd, but when the chickens were here, I would go out every day and collect my daily egg, and then I noticed the wonderful photographic possibilities in the shape of the egg and I began taking a photo of the Daily Egg. Posed the right way, with the right backdrop, the egg became almost artistic. Well, it was artistic, I guess, because so many people responded to it. So I am bringing back the Daily Egg as a Bedlam Farm notecard, sold at Redux and on the gallerys’ website for viewing and purchase. This in keeping with requests for affordable art. And function too. I do not understand many things. I do not understand why I took photos of the Daily Egg, or why so many people like it. But here it is.
