How To Throw A Ball
Walking around a big city on a crisp cool day near the beginning of summer is like watching the scenery from an air-conditioned movie theatre, with a box of popcorn, some Junior Mints, maybe Milk Duds if you can get them. You feel protected from the ugly (I'm sorry but I cannot suspend disbelief) reality of heat and steam and those mysterious flying particles that seem to come exploding from the corroded insides of exhaust pipes. Those ones that land and stick on the gooey wet exterior of your eyeballs and can at their worst ruin a part of your day, if vision is important to you, or at their least make you look bloodshot, bleary-eyed, unfortunate, perhaps even untouchable; certainly undesirable.
Say what you will about the conversation of weather, about how mundane is the subject matter, but it is or can be so important to people, I think, because of how profoundly different it can make you feel. If there was a pill that could make you cool on a hot muggy day...what?...oh there is...?...what...?...how much...?...can I buy them in a smaller lot...?...a sample?...sure, that would be nice...ok...well, assuming there was not a pill that could make you feel cool on a hot muggy day, and then one were introduced, I think it would be very popular, assuming you could run down to your neighborhood drug store to procure it. As it is, for those of us who haven't discovered the pill, we whimper all drag dog on hot days, maybe cringe and huddle on the cold ones, and, at some point we must talk about it. What I have said so far though, is about all I have to say about the weather, which today was pleasantly cool and just plain lovely really, the air was lovely today, still is in fact, and I will go so far as to say it was better than was the air two days ago. I have made a value judgment.
Which does not make a lick of difference to that woman who was hit by the bus near the corner of Grand and Clinton today. The school kids coming in to get pizza while I finished up my two slices told the proprietor about it. He had been sticking his head out the door and looking up the street but until one of the kids said, oh yeah, a lady got hit by a bus (the kid seeming neither concerned nor excited), I did not know what he was looking at. I remembered the few minutes earlier the impatient honking of motorists and feeling slightly annoyed but mostly glad I was not them, and then after learning that they were honking, essentially, at a woman down on the ground in front of a bus, I was even more glad not to be them. Now in my life there were two opposing forces working. The one was the simple, uncomplicated goodness I derived from the pleasant weather and the delicious pizza, and the other was a generic sense of concern for a fellow human being, who had in a most cliche fashion actually been hit by a bus.
That's the example people use when they want to illustrate that we cannot know the mysteries of the future, who knows I might get hit by a bus today, they say, never really meaning it literally. But when I finished my pizza and got back out on the street there it was, that thing that is usually just a figure of speech, someone hit by a bus. I did not want to seem disrespectful by gawking and at the same time I did not want to seem too blase about someone else's misfortune. So I paused briefly, craned my neck a little. and felt at least a little comforted by the speed at which this woman was being attended to (she was already on a hard stretcher board).
In the end it is something you just file away, in between the mostly awful headlines you read that morning and the unknowable future that awaits to fill up the rest of your day before you fall asleep. It is filed between the memory of a nothing fancy but well-prepared slice of pizza, and that large group of kids you saw in the park just a few minutes later. They were being taught, in groups of five, how to throw a ball.
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