The Elysian Fields: Trodden Upon

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Tom Clark: Baseball and Classicism, plaque on pavement, Addison Street, downtown Berkeley, California: photo by O. Bermeo, 9 July 2008

One morning, about 10,000 years ago, in that small window of dwindling opportunity just after the Dawn of Time and before the first thumping footfalls of the Epoch of Deconstruction, one was dawdling-about, as per the custom of the period, under a faint cerulean glimpse of sky that had momentarily opened up in the overhanging marine cloud layer adjacent to the spiky tips of the branches of a large cypress tree on the dirt margins of Nymph Road, just off Cherry, when the fair and gentle Eurydice returned from her underworld voyage to the roadside postal box with the day's mail.

A postcard from a total stranger, dispatched from a remote quarter of this large and mysterious land. Well, in fact, from Conesus, New York. Perhaps not so remote -- these things are so subjective -- if you hailed, as had Vic Raschi, from New Jersey.

The card contained a brief, but, to one whose routine daily existence was at this time almost entirely uneventful (ah, the bliss!), most interesting message.

"I showed your poem 'Baseball and Classicism' to my neighborhood liquor dealer, Vic Raschi...", this unfamiliar correspondent began.

Naturally one held one's breath. For heaven's sake, the last thing one had ever intended was to offend Vic Raschi.

"...and he loved it!"

That was nice. It made the morning brighter. As the years went by, moreover, whenever recalled, less and less frequently perhaps, but still, over the trundling-on of the decades, every now and then, accidentally summoned to the night courts of curious remembrance, it made the increasingly ponderous expiring passages of the century more friendly, more forgiving, somehow.

The world has changed a lot since those mornings. What ingenues everyone must have been, then. Everyone is so much smarter now. "People" have "learned" to Distrust Strangers. The police chief of New York boasts of the power and intent to shoot down any airplane that appears the least bit out of the ordinary. Never trust a stranger. He (or of course She) might be a Terrorist. But to Hell with all that. One takes one's Elysian Fields where one finds them, gratefully. And with humility. If also a bit of confusion.

Unsolicited correspondent from Conesus, may you still live and breathe!

And Vic Raschi, your mortal frame now twenty-three years in the grave, here's to you, wherever you are! Your spirit yet lives. Your name is etched in stone upon the pavement of a faraway city you were perhaps fortunate never to have known. Now everyone in the world is able to tread upon your good name!

Vic Raschi: 1951 Bowman baseball card

Orphée ramenant Eurydice des enfers: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1861 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

This post dedicated to Angelica, conducted out of the underworld without benefit of rational consent