I once told a friend. Not only did I like your book. I read it.
Im making an exception. I just heard of Wherever I Wind Up a few days ago, and have read only half of it. Still, Im writing about it. I can share my excitement without giving away the end. I dont know it. As the author might say, I havent gotten to the final period.
This is a baseball book which is also not a baseball book. Its about growing up in a divorced family.
About deciding not to follow the alcohol addiction of ones mother.
About learning how to throw a knuckleball in one day, but needing a lifetime to learn how to throw strikes with it.
(Knuckleball? Thats a pitch that has no spin, and twists and turns in unpredictable ways, making it hard to hit, and hard to catch. Theres only one knuckelballer in the Major Leagues right now, and thats our author, R. A. Dickey.)
About a guy from the other side of the tracks who ends up marrying into one of Nashvilles most prestigious families, from whom, however, neither daughter nor knuckleballer will accept much funds. How quaint. They still want to make it on their own.
About a high school kid who cant live with his mother, because shes an alcoholic, nor with his father too often, because hes very distant, and so the kid just slips into vacant houses for rent, like a regular vagrant, to sleep at night remember, this is the kid whom an up-scale Nashville family, the Bartholomews, like.
About a guy whos abused by a babysitter, and suffers with the secret for 31 years.
About a vivid, arresting writer a knuckleballer who majored in English at the University of Tennessee and closes his chapter on his college baseball career with a quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
O, yes, also about a guy whos missing an ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching arm. Its not damaged, its not attenuated (and, inexplicably, it doesnt hurt). Its simply not there an orthopedic oddity that stymies the doctors but cost him $735,000 of his signing bonus.
And this. Call it serendipity (as we say in Judaism, hashgachah). I am just a random reader from Denver, Colorado. You know that. I have never heard of R. A. Dickey, who mentions his buddy on his college baseball team.
His name is Todd Helton.
After a while, even Todd Helton is overshadowed by another sports guy who comes to the University of Tennessee, even though he doesnt play baseball.
His name is Peyton Manning.
Did I say the author could write?
Heres a few disconnected gems, cited just for the beauty of the expression or the idea, from Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball (Blue Rider Press):
I just live that way, a fugitive who doesnt know what hes running from.
As much as you keep faith as the centerpiece of your life, you still want answers to unanswerable questions.
Now that I am a Christian, I want more. I dont want to be a tenant in my own house.
I care about stories. I love telling stories, but the fine points of grammar bore me. I am the king of sentence fragments. Dangling participles. Run-on sentences. Sentences that slither snakelike and are overly ambitious and try to do too much and are sometimes excruciatingly overwritten and almost always have the reader gasping for air, waiting breathlessly for the verbosity to end and the period to arrive.
Dickey is blessed (cursed?) with an astonishing memory for every detail of his life and of his feelings at critical moments. He recalls himself in seventh grade:
I am not one who makes friends easily. I am much more comfortable sitting in the back, observing, calculating and measuring my options, a kid who has a hard time with trust. A kid who has secrets. What terrifies me more than anything is that those secrets could somehow be uncovered.
He recalls the details of being abused (while managing not to be explicit). One day, years later, he meets by accident the babysitter who imposed his deepest secret, who abused him. The worst part is that she pretends she doesnt remember.
Then he never sees her again.
None of which impedes him from marrying Anne Bartholomew, having four children, making it finally to the Majors, now with the New York Mets. He is a member of the one, tiny baseball fraternity that crosses team lines: knuckleballers. As in, one will spill all his tips to the other, even though they are on opposing teams.
Thats not the case just now: R. A. Dickey is the only pitcher of his kind in the Majors today (maybe hes doubly singular, both as the lone knuckleballer and the only pitcher with no ulnar collateral ligament).
His book is surely singular. A treat for baseball fans, for aficionados of good writing, for people who like to see how guys who started life with cockroaches muster the character to move up, marry up and stay stable.
And . . . crazy. Fun crazy.
He and one of his baseball colleagues think its swell after hours, in the dark, surreptitiously, to drag lakes in golf courses for lost balls, in order to refurbish them and sell them at $10 a dozen to supplement a Minor League salary. Except that, at this point, only Dickey is in the Minors. His colleague has kept his $1.1 million signing bonus and hes trudging through alligator-infested lakes, scrounging for golf balls, which eventually net the both of them $3,000. Mr. Big Bonus, who is not missing his UCL, turns over the whole pot to Dickey.
Thats just one of the incidents of Big Sharing in this book.
You might want to read it, wherever you wind up.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
