Hello all! Thanks for checking in. My name is John and I’ll be your tour guide for the week. There are all sorts of things that we’ll explore together: UFOs, my father’s poetry about Amish cashiers in Ohio, the time I almost went searching for Bigfoot in Washington State, why the Honeymooners is the best television show of all time, and some reflections from my time spent as the “ball crawl” guy at Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza when I was 18. Oh, and poetry.
For my first post, though, I wanted to talk about something important, something that doesn’t really get the attention it deserves. No, it’s not a post about the themes of supplication and resignation in the work of James and Franz Wright, but if you’d really like, I can post that as well or you can go searching for my Master’s thesis at The New School. What I’m talking about is perhaps the most beautiful, most perfect object in existence: the Wiffle Ball.
Picture it: Fairfield, Connecticut, 1953. David N. Mullany was watching his son, David A. Mullany, play baseball in the backyard using a plastic golf ball and a broomstick, when he had an idea. A perfect idea. It was a simple white plastic ball with eight oblong holes in one side. It should be on display at the MoMA. On the side of its simple box are two words put together in a beautifully minimalist poetry: “It curves!”
Now fast forward to the early 1990s and the creation of the only professional Wiffle Ball league in the history of Pequannock Township, New Jersey (birthplace of Derek Jeter). A motley group of 15 year-olds made their way to Greenview Park with a few gallon jugs of Mr. Thirsty brand Fruit Punch, a clipboard, a folding lawn chair (for the strike zone), a few brand new balls and a yellow plastic bat wrapped in black electrical tape nicknamed “The Maaster” after New York Yankee phenom Kevin Maas. The Wiffle Ball League of Pequannock was born (WiffBLoP for short). We used the same rules as found in baseball, except for only two outs an inning and a rallying cry of “The chair never lies.”
That first year I led the league in homers, Ted “Crash” Rainey set the pace in RBI, and my brother Mike somehow won the batting title by reaching the minimum number of required at bats in the last game where he had five hits. Those were good times: Steve “Biscuits” Cannizzaro running into a telephone pole trying to snare a foul ball, John “The Commander” Hanek, who was a few years older than us, pulling up on a motorcycle and wearing a leather jacket on a 100° day, Ted’s younger brother Dan sort of getting hit by lighting because we dared him to run the bases during a thunderstorm.
Yesterday I took my daughter for a walk through Greenview Park and passed the spot where we used to play wiffle ball. There was a soccer net where home plate used to be, but if you moved a few feet to the right, it was still playable. When we got home I spent twenty minutes laying on my back and throwing a wiffle ball straight up into the air and catching it.
What does any of this have to do with poetry? you may ask. After all, this is the Best American Poetry blog, and there has to be some much deeper meaning. Well, it has nothing to do with poetry, really, and the much deeper meaning is just the fact that sometimes, as an adult with a family and responsibilities, sometimes it’s nice to think about a time when the most important thing in the world was throwing a white plastic ball with eight oblong holes on one side. And then there’s the meaning that kind of snuck up on me when I wasn’t paying attention: when you’re an adult with family and responsibilities, sometimes the most important thing is being able to take your one year-old daughter for a walk past the field where you used to play as a kid and watch her point at the trees.
