Watermelon on a Sunny Day

*

People love scrapbooking. They take photographs from their adventures and curate the memories beautifully. They purchase kits of readymade art to thematize the photographs. It’s a gallery and a shrine and a museum for the experience.

*

Art is worth something different in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. That is to say, it too is worth something different.

*

Wanna play third base?

*

*

Not holding onto them makes them worth something, not having something makes you want it. That’s what worth is, that’s what want is.

*

I liked the people named Guillermo Hernandez. I liked that Hrbek was missing a vowel. I liked how Jerry Reuss looked like a constipated septuagenarian on the front of his ’87 Topps. I thought it was funny if their ERA was over 10, altering the kerning of the four-point Times New Roman on the back of the card.

*

Walter Benjamin understood that objects obtain their value through scarcity, even objets d’art.

*

*

*

I remember playing baseball, the long grass slowing the baseball down and barehanding it. Lights cracking a black sky. Umpire with his plate brush.

*

One boy said of my unique collection, “You’re a two-Fleer queer and your daddy’s name is Donruss.” Only partially true. I am weird, not gay, and my father’s name is Russel.

*

Well then learn how to throw!

*

*

We take pictures of the stuff. As if there aren’t a billion pictures of the same thing we can own the same way. As a pixel dump we can access whenever we want. I guarantee you I can look at the picture you just took of the Grand Canyon from my couch on Flckr.

*

Stale pink gum, stalactite detritus, wax paper. I’d look through them for the one that was worth something. I look for an error card. Might I have missed it on the first go-through? I go through them again. Nothing but no-names and repeats.

*

Your daddy’s name is Donruss.

*

 *

One very serious scrapbooker found a remarkable scrapbooking kit designed specifically for someone who had enjoyed watermelon on a sunny day. She had never done that, and therefore had no photographs. The next sunny day, she acquired watermelons in order to fill that page in her scrapbook.

*

You’re ugly and your mother dresses you.

*

*

When my empty-nested folks downsized, they said I needed to get my baseball cards. They didn’t have room for them. Neither did I.

*

My brother hated baseball and he was afraid of the baseball and so my father paid him to get hit by a pitch. He leaned out over the plate and absorbed the dull thud of some pudgy kid’s 30 mph pitch. He and the local ice-cream shoppe advertisement on his t-shirt trotted down to first base. There he was on base squinting at the sun and rubbing the red spot. He got $10 later and I think that was the only time he enjoyed baseball.

*

In the Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot writes, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”

*

*

Well then learn how to throw!

*

Because it was my eleventh birthday I got to bat first and we ran out into my yard and I swatted a baseball through the window of my dining room.

*

I have a photograph of myself and the boys I disliked from my baseball team. It’s in a box with my baseball cards and yearbooks, and my poems. Loads and loads of poems.