Joseph Ramelo
There are some basic things that you should know about me. Usually, you pick up a book because it was something that you heard about. Usually, you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. Gone Girl? Becky in accounting can’t stop talking about it. There’s a new Sloane Crosley out? I love him! What was that thing I read back when I did the thing with the thing in the thing and we were all doing the thing… wait. Sloane Crosley?
You already know that I’m a liar. Who among us isn’t? As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had two cell phones. This was a revelation so enormous that it required a press conference. I, for one, would love to give a press conference. The sad truth is that it would be impossible. I’m not newsworthy.
Also, I never learned how to drive. If you were raised in the suburbs, this is anathema. Anyone who wants to get anywhere has to learn how to drive a car. Speaking of transportation, I also can’t ride a bike! You must be wondering how I get dates. More accurately, you’re wondering if I’ve ever been on a date at all.
This is a short story about love—no, that’s already been written. This is an essay that mentions baseball, starts with basketball, mentions baseball some more, but doesn’t mention baseball statistics like ERA or WAR. You have probably heard of ERA. But WAR? Yeah, no—we’re all just pretending to know.
1. My first crush was on a basketball player.
We are living in a time where awareness about sexual and gender identities is so acute that your whole life could be over if you use the wrong pronoun. But none of that matters to my traditional Filipino parents. Growing up, we went to church every Sunday. When I moved away for college, I was required to call my mom at least once a week. All seven days were preferable.
As the only child who happens to be cismale, I have shouldered the weight that is the expectation of marrying a woman and having children. The responsibilities of gender identity have haunted me my whole life. My dad is generally mellow in temperament but his disappointment was palpable whenever he would see the ‘B’ grades for PE that I brought home each quarter in elementary school. By ‘palpable’, I mean that dad would put down the report card, chuckle, and ask, ‘Do you play any sports?’ My consistent response was to gaze into the ether, usually in the direction of the TV.
The biggest mystery of my childhood was athleticism. For starters, I never heard the word ‘athletic’. If you were athletic, you just were. To be athletic in school meant that you were popular and you knew how to play a sport—bonus points if you played all the sports. In my elementary school, all the sports were basketball and soccer. Maybe there was little league, but it was off-site. All I remember about baseball from that point in my childhood was that Cal Ripken’s name seemed to be mentioned every time I turned on the news or my dad got together with his non-Filipino coworkers. This was the price you paid growing up in Maryland.
My dad and his coworkers loved to clink together bottles of San Miguel beer that he picked up whenever my mom went on her Saturday runs to one of the two Filipino bodegas in Oxon Hill, the region where most Filipinos had chosen to settle, probably because of all the roomy single-family homes. (When Filipinos settle in America, they like to make a statement.) From the vantage point of my barely three-foot stature, I would hear ‘Cal Ripken’-this and ‘Cal Ripken’-that. Meanwhile, my dad would react to his friends with the same chuckle that he used for my PE grades.
Popularity in elementary school is generally similar to popularity in adulthood. Back in 2011, I did some temp work for a consulting firm in San Francisco’s financial district. With his winning smile, the achievements that he’d racked up in just five years with the company, and constant stream of anecdotes set in places with either too many palm trees or too much beer, Bobby was one of the most popular guys in the office. Like my dad’s friends with whom he had to grudgingly chat about Cal Ripken, Bobby was a white guy. He was slender, with sandy brown hair short enough that he never had to push it from his wide forehead (a minor flaw), and when he strolled through the office his hands were always in the pockets of his well-pressed slacks as if he were strolling along a cobblestone pavement in one of his international anecdotes. Bobby’s elementary school equivalent was Andy, who was taller than me by virtue of lankiness while I had always been round. Even today, I can still remember the effortlessness with which that wiry SOB could shoot a free throw or stand outside the paint awaiting a strategic pass. And by ‘wiry SOB’, I mean that I had a huge crush on Andy.
One late spring day during my fifth grade year, central air had conked out and the best we could do was open all the windows in our classroom. For Mrs Porter, who had once patted my head in response to a recess confession that she reminded me of Claire Huxtable, opening all the windows wasn’t enough. The heat had reduced me to a listless stupor lingering half-heartedly over a mimeographed sheet of fractions. Suddenly, I was jolted upward by the change in lighting. As soon as I looked upward to see all the fixtures going out, I darted my eyes in the direction of Mrs Porter, statuesque and very Claire Huxtable-like, standing at the doorway to the classroom and pulling down all the light switches. My fellow classmates oooh’d and aaah’d in wonder. As an introvert, I accordingly processed everything internally. I neither oooh’d nor aaah’d, and instead found the experience of the lights going out thrillingly similar to Captain Picard declaring a red alert on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
That was not the end of the day’s excitement. Taking advantage of the newfound dimness, I slid the fractions aside and put my head down on my desk so that I could pick my nose behind my arm. It took a few seconds, but there was treasure! I would have escaped detection if only Charlie Short, who was in fact short but mean, had not been sitting in the desk across mine and staring intently at me. As soon as I peeked beyond the arm that I thought had successfully camouflaged my booger hunt, my eyes met his grotesque gaze. ‘JOSEPH IS PICKING HIS NOSE!’ he helpfully announced.
Filipinos are a people of belief. This is a large part of why I want to get my Master’s in Divinity next year. When I look back on my nose-picking confrontation with Charlie Short, I can see that God was looking out for me. Charlie’s announcement lingered long enough that the first waves of disgust began to pour in. Mary Ellen Salazar, who was my enemy and who I often acknowledged as Mary Ellen Salad Bar, was already eeew’ing. Here’s the part where God intervened: in the adjoining classroom, there was a commotion rowdy enough that everyone in Mrs Porter’s class leapt from their seats as well. I joined the stampede, but not before first pitching the huge booger I’d pulled out. Neatness counts.
Mrs Valdez did not look much like Claire Huxtable. Instead, Mrs Valdez resembled the kind of character actress you could count on casting when you needed a kindly authority figure like a teacher, or the diner waitress that everyone underestimates. Sometimes our classes combined in one room whenever her adult daughter visited to teach us sign language. Mrs Valdez’s daughter was the first deaf person I’d ever known.
All the kids who’d raced into Mrs Valdez’s classroom stopped just short of the chalkboard. She towered over all of us in a way that seemed magical, especially when she aimed the palm of her right hand toward us to halt the stampede. Her face was grim. Meanwhile, Mrs Porter was in the back, trying to corral all of us and generally attempting to bring order to chaos.
‘It’s okay, Mrs Porter’, said Mrs Valdez as she dropped her hand to her side. Then she addressed the rest of us: ‘I’m sure you want to know what happened. Vanessa Truss came in crying. PE was just getting out for my students. Some of the kids were coming in but some of the kids were still playing basketball. Apparently, someone ran into Andy Boatright while he was driving the ball and he hit the pavement hard.’
All the kids gasped. I looked behind me for Mrs Porter’s expression, and I was duly met with her flabbergasted gaze accompanied by her hands covering her mouth. Mrs Valdez went on to explain that Coach Etta had to call for an ambulance. Suddenly, it was in that moment I remembered you could see the blacktop from Mrs Valdez’s room. I weaved my way through my classmates for the nearest view into the blacktop. I was at the window sill long enough to recognize Coach Etta in one of the track suits she wore as her voluntary school uniform. I gasped as I saw Coach Etta and some other teachers all huddled gravely around Andy, who was lying flat on the ground. All I could see were his legs. The adults obscured the rest of him.
Mrs Porter’s hand came for my shoulder at the same time she scolded, ‘Joseph! Now is not the time!’
For most of my elementary school life, I had been a well-behaved child. A goody-goody. The model minority. If it weren’t for PE, I would have brought home straight A’s all the time. Few were the times that I had been disciplined by a teacher. Mrs Porter’s apprehension of me at Mrs Valdez’s window had left me exposed with the revelation that I could misbehave. In her shrill exclamation, I heard the disappointment of a teacher who was appalled that one of her students would go run to check out a grisly scene like Andy’s basketball injury. But morbid curiosity was the furthest thing from the truth. I wanted to be at Andy’s side. I wanted to help him in some encompassing way that I could not yet explain.
2. I am the chosen one. (I chose myself.)
My adult life is full of worries that make me doubt that I am adult enough. For example, ever since I went back to school as an adult college student, I have harbored a vague anxiety that the admissions people at the grad schools into which I want to apply will see my transcripts and think, ‘Girl, is he for real?!’ My grades are good but not great. The school itself, Golden Gate University, is a fine institution. I highly recommend going there if you’re like me and in need of a second chance for your college education.
When the time comes in high school for you to wrap things up and prepare for college, there are countless books about test prep, university rankings, and even lifestyle manuals about how to deal with your inevitably cooler roommate. There are not very many helpful books when it comes to dealing with adulthood. Everyone thinks they have the answers and, let’s be real, this faulty assumption is what keeps self-help going as a profitable genre. Jon Kabat-Zinn and the Chicken Soup people may have cornered this market. But everyone loves free advice, and I have never read or owned a self-help book that I purchased on my own dime.
And so I blew thirty bucks at my friendly neighborhood independent bookstore on the hardcover of The Art of Fielding, the ultimate unofficial field guide to adulthood and regrets by Chad Harbach, who Wikipedia describes as ‘an American author’, but has only written the one novel as far as I know—and, really, what do I know? Five minutes ago, I was browsing Soapcentral.com. Anthony Geary—he of Luke and Laura fame—is retiring and I have to know the scoop about his final storyline.
You couldn’t have a cooler roommate than Owen Dunne. Alas, he wasn’t real—he was a character in The Art of Fielding. Owen was a right fielder on the school baseball team. More often than not, he was on the bench, and he liked it that way so that he could read and, oh yes, contemplate the affair he was having with the school president. Well-read, conversational, and focused, Owen was the kind of guy that I never was in college. About twelve years after I dropped out of college, I discovered The Art of Fielding. Unlike Owen, I was never attractive enough for the school president to come onto me. It was just as well because, unlike Owen, I have never been into older men. I’ve always been into guys who were either exactly my age or within range. This is the price I pay for having an adolescent film diet of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and Love Affair, which came out after Sleepless in Seattle, which referenced An Affair to Remember, which was a remake of a 1939 movie called Love Affair, which was remade into the movie that came out after Sleepless in Seattle. Got all that? Stay with me here.
When I first saw the title The Art of Fielding, I was reading People magazine. Many would say that People is not very sophisticated reading. But I say that something is sophisticated to me if that was what my mom was reading when I was a kid and consequently I picked up the same habit. Tradition equates sophistication. Just as my parents and I faithfully went to church every Sunday when I was growing up, I picked up some of my own traditions: my mom and dad’s reading habits (my dad prefers newspapers, even now when he has an iPhone); my dad’s laugh and my mom’s smile; the way my dad can snack on a jalapeno pepper without breaking a sweat; the way my mom can’t resist the temptation to snack on potato chips when she’s watching TV or out at the movies. All of these peculiarities live on in me.
Immediately, I suspected that the title The Art of Fielding was related to baseball. The review in People, famous for letter grades and bite-sized critiques, told me all that I needed to know. It was the word ‘fielding’ that gave it away. Prior to 2009, there was a good chance that I would have overlooked this book, drawn to it probably only because of The Art of part. In what I now look back and recognize as a stereotype, I fancied myself as an artistic soul. I’m vomiting in my mouth pondering this stranger who masqueraded as my past self.
Owen the college roommate—here addressed minus proper comma usage, as if that were the character’s proper name, like Iron Man—was a cool part of The Art of Fielding, but not the coolest. All the characters were interesting, even Henry, the protagonist who, for a baseball prodigy, felt a little flat to me. His best scenes actually weren’t even when he was up to bat. For me, Henry really came alive when he was interacting with his younger sister. Now I just sound like a book critic, one of my many jobs.
When The Art of Fielding came out, I was 29. That was a big year for me: I lost my virginity. We live in a time when this is a shock to many, yet also, when it is also par for the course of evolving identities: sexual, gender, moral, personal. The man in question was wonderful. For my first time, especially for my first time during what is generally regarded by the world as hilariously way too late, he was sweet, gentle, conversational, and vulnerable. We kept in touch but we weren’t a long-term match.
A combination of factors held me back for a long time. It wasn’t just about waiting for the right one—an expectation that, like waiting for any right moment to do anything you’ve always wanted to do, materializes on your own terms, your own choices. And it wasn’t just because of my upbringing or my faith—although it would be disrespectful to downplay how those factors shaped who I am, and my feelings about sex.
In a society where sex is still a big deal for a lot of people, the year that I turned 29 was monumental in other pressing ways. I was about to emerge from a two-year personal slump that saw me going from barely having any work to none at all. I didn’t know that the tide was about to turn, though. That summer, a temp agency placed me in a consulting firm where I would spend a little over a year in a reliable job making fun new friends. But the work started slow: that summer, I was scheduled for just 24 hours a week. If I got lucky, sometimes I had three eight-hour days and I could fool myself into thinking that I was a productive human being. The older you get, the more having a lot of time on your hands becomes less about freedom and more about, Oh my God, what am I doing with my life?
Ten years earlier when I dropped out of college, I had commingled time with freedom. When I was still a high school senior, the books that I read about college warned about all the extra time you would have between classes. San Francisco State University was, and probably still is, a solid school. I remember being quickly drawn to their Creative Writing department, particularly one instructor who opened his class by regaling us with how he had spent the previous week in a Mexican jail. Now I’m far enough away from that period of my life where I can safely assess that part of the reason why I dropped out was the culture shock: sure, just because I was a suburban kid from Maryland who wanted to escape to the west coast and explore his artistic and sexual identities, didn’t exactly mean that I was ready for it. So fast was my descent from model minority to mere American minority that I could have blended in with the other day laborers in the Mission district, but in addition to not knowing how to drive or ride a bike, I’m no handyman.
In the intervening years between my second and final semester at San Francisco State, I lived the life you might expect of a twentysomething in a big, expensive city. When you see the words ‘big, expensive city’, you might not automatically think of San Francisco which, let’s be real, could easily be a borough in New York. (I’m well-aware of the shade that’s about to be thrown at me by native San Franciscans, especially those hooligans lurking in the bushes that lead up to Baker Beach.) The only thing keeping my life together was a tenuous dream about writing the Great American Novel. As we all know, this is not a new dream. Many a twentysomething has been voluntarily burdened with this conceit. And like many a twentysomething, I neither thought it was a conceit nor that it was impossible.
You might say that I was full of myself. You might also say that after all the time I spent dreaming, drafting, and dreaming some more—let’s be real, I spent more time thinking about being a writer than actually writing—it turns out that I became a typical adult anyway. Here I am, telling you, my young (?) friend, to stay in school. Full of regrets. Bad knees. (It might rain.) Perhaps it is an affliction of being an only child and an early model minority, but I refuse to believe that I have lived a typical life. Like the multimillion dollar athletes who play major league baseball yet are simultaneously aware, and sometimes even acknowledge, that they are getting paid big bucks to play a child’s game for a living, there is a part of me that will always want to stretch reality to make my life somehow more special than it deserves to be.
3. More than anything else in the world, I want to be with Denard McGuiggan.
How the hell do you say ‘Lamoille’? It’s probably ‘lam-wah’ but my first instinct is ‘la-moyle’. I may be Filipino, but I’m also very American.
The danger of loving someone like Denard McGuiggan is that he is handsome, charming, smart, and not at all a lethal asshole like he might be in a romcom. The other danger is that someone like him would never love someone like me. I met Denny when I reunited with Dr Elena Tercero, one of my old roommates, who had called it quits in San Francisco after two years so that she could go deliver babies in the same Chicago hospital where Sasha and Malia Obama were born. In San Francisco, not only do you have to accept living with roommates as a fact of life, but you also have to accept the possibility that you have to befriend complete strangers on Craigslist. Seeing as how I managed to write this essay without having to cross the hurdle of reaching out to you from beyond the grave, for the most part I got lucky with Craigslist. If it hadn’t been for my chance friendship with Elena, then I would have never been standing outside a café in Berkeley, reuniting with her and straining to exchange the following salutation:
Me: Elena! It’s so good to… oh, hey.
Elena: Joe, babycakes! I’ve missed you. Yeah, this is Denny. He’s my roommate in Chicago.
Me: Hi.
(Grudgingly extends hand. Shakes hands. Thinks dual thoughts: ‘Who is this interloper?’ and ‘Hmm, not bad.’)
Denny: Hey.
Elena: I hope you don’t mind if Denny joins us for lunch.
Me: The more, the merrier!
Ugh.
It was another two years before I heard from Denny again. To my surprise, he thought of me when it was time for Elena to move on in her career, which eventually took her to North Carolina. (And, once, Zambia. Dr Tercero is kind of a big deal.) In the two years that had passed, either Denny forgot my hostility that day in Berkeley, or maybe I just have one of those faces where I never look hostile. This exchange of private messaging in Facebook was much more authentically cordial.
Denny: I was wondering if you had any pictures of Elena from when you were roommates. I want to make her a farewell slideshow.
Me: Sure, I’d be happy to send you whatever I can find.
Oh my God. That is the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.
(Stalks his Facebook profile while also wondering how strict the privacy settings really are if he managed to contact me even though we aren’t connected.)
Me: You have a lot of pictures of fried chicken.
Denny: Yeah, this great new restaurant just opened up and everyone is going.
Me: Can I go with you?
Shit, that was a little bold.
Denny: Ha ha. If you are ever in Chicago, sure.
Me: I would love to visit Chi-town sometime! BTW, do people still call it Chi-town or am I totally out of the loop?
Denny: Yes, it is still called Chi-town. And if you visited, you could totally be in the loop if you wanted to because there’s an area here called The Loop.
Me: Sounds great. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, Eric Love Bear.
Whoops. I’ve conflated memories. The thing with ‘Eric Love Bear’ didn’t actually happen until a few months later. By then, not only was Denny my Facebook friend, but he was also my real friend. He came back for his own visit to San Francisco without Elena. Two years after that, we hung out in Washington DC, where I now lived after having moved back in with my parents while I finished the rest of my degree through Golden Gate University’s outstanding online platform. By that time, Denny had been in a tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship and the ensuing drama had cast me as the protagonist in the first half of the Vanessa Williams song ‘Save the Best For Last’. Denny had come to me with all of his hopes and dreams, but only in friendship. When I gave him my heart, he didn’t want it.
Aside from writing The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach sounds like a hell of a guy. Also, I’ve seen pictures of him. I could live with the receding hairline. Is he single? Does he play for my team? I don’t mean the San Francisco Giants. By the time the Washington Nationals opened their first season in the spring of 2005, I was long gone. Even though I have fond childhood memories of chanting Cal Ripken’s name without really knowing who he was, the Baltimore Orioles will always be my hometown team. But the Giants are my actual hometown team. That happens after living in San Francisco for over a decade during your formative years.
In the summer of 2009, a fictional baseball player by the name of ‘Linc’ debuted in a series of blog posts. At the same time, little did I know that Aparicio Rodriguez, a fictional baseball legend, was being shaped into the reality that would be the 2011 literary sensation The Art of Fielding, topped only by the 2017 literary sensation Game of Joans. Obviously, it’s not 2017 yet. Obviously, Joan Callamezzo isn’t a real person, either. (Watch Parks and Recreation, people!)
The difference between Linc and Aparicio is that while Aparicio is part of a legitimate publishing success story, Linc toils in obscurity on Tumblr, lost in a sea of meme reblogs and justifiably pissed off liberals. ‘Linc’ was my imaginary boyfriend. I started a Tumblr of letters to him. Sometimes I thought of these letters as epistles, like Paul in the New Testament writing to all those churches. I shudder to think at what Paul would think of baseball and imaginary boyfriends.
Linc was my response to June 14, 2009. This was a very good day. Out of all the employment misadventures of my misspent twenties, temping at the San Francisco Department of Elections had produced not just inspiring job experience, but lasting friendships. That day, Theo Lang had an extra ticket to a Giants game. We had hung out so often outside of work, especially during the grueling 2008 presidential election, that I took any excuse to hang out with the clique I’d formed. Picture it: San Francisco. Me, having a clique. If only Charlie Short and Mary Ellen Salazar could see me now.
What Theo didn’t know was that I had been to Giants games before, with friends from other cliques. Despite the academic and professional failures of my twenties, I knew how to click with people using interpersonal skills that took years to hone. It is said that the writerly mind is borne from a keen sense of observation. I guess when you’re an only child who doesn’t end up making close friends until high school, you take a step back from the world and start depicting it on paper. On balance, my twenties weren’t so bad, but don’t mistake this self-validation for advice. If you’re reading this and you have the chance to make some changes, then make some changes.
The Giants games that I’d attended in the years before 2009 were mechanisms for friendship. I cared about the game about as much as I had cared about Cal Ripken. Lip service. Rote. Back in 2003, Travis Park was a robustly shaped friend I knew from the San Francisco State chapter of the Asian American Christian Fellowship. Although I’d dropped out of school, I still hung out with this religious group I’d joined in my first semester. Travis merrily went by the nickname Buddha, and along with some other mutual friends, one day he took us all to a Giants game. What I remember the most about that game was all the laughter we exchanged from jokes, commentary, and other kinds of chatter hardly related to baseball. Travis, who was much more of a fan, would sometimes disrupt the flow of conversation to celebrate or condemn a play. In the seventh inning, I remember being mystified by the call to rise to our feet and sing. Worse, everyone did it! Some tradition unknown to me had inspired this bizarre collective behavior of over 40,000 people that forced me from my seat and paused the laughter of my friends. How dare they?
Many critics celebrated The Art of Fielding as a book that was about more than just baseball. This point was repeatedly emphasized in reviews as if to say, ‘Look, Lindsay Lohan had some great movies before her life went south. Look at Mean Girls. Freaky Friday. Bobby. I Know Who Killed Me – well, maybe not that one.’ Baseball as the setting of The Art of Fielding was exactly what I liked about it. Life was happening with the game in the background. On June 14, 2009, the weather was perfect. There was a calm wind steadily moving the water in the bay, which I could see from my nosebleed seat next to Theo and a couple of our other friends from the department. My unprotected skin tingled from the unexpectedly uninterrupted brilliance of the sun. Matt Cain was the starting pitcher. They called this game ‘The Bay Bridge Series’, which the Giants would sweep. I don’t know what formulations of chemistry bonded together to make that game so different from all the others. I was 27, two years away from having steady work, my first hookup, and three years from turning 30. Was there something about the impending end of my twenties that suddenly recast the stadium as church and baseball as religion?
That day, I went home unexpectedly giddy, as if I had just come back from the best date ever. Theo was cute, had a nice smile, and once let me run my fingers over his knee when we went out for drinks. But he was also straight. It was too early for me to describe that June game as love, but such were the extra bounces in my step when I went home that I went straight to my computer and Googled all that I could about the Giants. The article that I found about Tim Lincecum, the starting pitcher who had opened The Bay Bridge Series two days earlier, was not the first result to materialize. But it was the one that stuck. The accompanying picture of him on the mound about to make his pitch brought me back to the tranquility I felt sitting with Theo and the others earlier that day. ‘Lin… see… cum?’ I said out loud, giggling. Of course I giggled.
I spent the rest of that summer going to more games. I went on my own, charging the games onto a credit card that I’m still paying off, having at that time tossed any sense of long-term planning. Conversely, becoming a baseball fan had emboldened me to think seriously about what I wanted to do with my life. I accepted that I would not be writing the Great American Novel anytime soon, yet at the same time, I had become so enamored with baseball that I was reading plentifully: Take Me Out, The Dreyfus Affair, Ball Four. Would you believe I’d never seen Field of Dreams and Bull Durham? Now they are among my favorite movies of all time. Because of all this, I wanted to write about what I saw and what I felt.
The ad for the Vermont Studio Center was in a magazine for writers that I was flipping through at the expansive Beaux-Arts public library downtown. There was no election to work; I wasn’t in school; and I was living off of my savings, credit, and a reasonable monthly allowance from my parents, who still patiently spoiled their only and aimless child. But this time around, time suddenly felt like freedom again. Baseball had given me purpose that college—at least, college right out of high school—had not. The magazine ad said that there were still scholarships available for a two-week winter residency in Vermont. I gave quick thought to the idea of spending Thanksgiving with complete strangers in a small, snowy town. I was intrigued. I applied.
The poet Leslie McGrath became one of my closest friends outside of the residency. I also befriended the artist Avantika Bawa, who sometimes reaches out to me about making a submission to her literary journal. There were a host of other contacts that I made in Vermont, but not even my well-honed interpersonal skills can guarantee that I’ll establish anything more than an acquainted relationship with most people. I’ve still got hang ups. When I talked to Ananda, a writer at the residency who was getting her MFA at Yale, my reaction to her schooling was, ‘Wow. I could never get into Yale.’ To which Ananda said plainly: ‘Nonsense.’ In all the time that I was in Vermont, I was not social with Ananda. All I felt deserving of was saying hello to her during meal times and formulating questions that I hoped sounded intelligent when we did an open studios walk-through.
Even Leslie and Avantika were unaware that I was a college dropout. At the residency, I’d introduced myself to everyone as a graduate of San Francisco State University with a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing. I had volunteered for two open mics, one of which was an official program of the residency and another that was an informal and mostly drunk get-together, and each time my stomach twisted with the anxiety that my fraud was on display. After all, I had both heard and read the work of much better writers in the audience. I had meals with them. Walked and sometimes slipped in the snow with them. And then there I was, at one open mic or another, prattling about baseball.
For over five years after Vermont, I continued my blog of imaginary letters to Linc. That blog lasted through three World Series titles for the Giants. Every letter was an honest assessment of my current situation. Each time I hit the ‘Post’ button, there was no caution about whether I’d said too much. Often, I emphasized in my letters that I had no expectation for the real Linc to write back. This may have been true in words but not in feeling. No matter what year it was, I was fundamentally the same person: longing for Andy while Mrs Porter fetched me in disapproval; writing letters to an imaginary version of a very-real baseball player; nursing my broken heart after saying ‘I love you’ made Denny go away.
Joseph Ramelo is a blogger at Baseball 2.0 on sarka.tumblr.com. He is nearing completion of his BA in Business Management at Golden Gate University. Although he relocated from San Francisco to the Maryland suburbs in 2014, he remains active with his congregation at Mission Bay Community Church as a remote volunteer for the church website. He is investigating graduate-level divinity programs at the University of Chicago and Harvard, both of which he doubts he can get into until he remembers what Ananda would say: ‘Nonsense.’