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Hoke

There’s a very specific sort of sunset that happens here in the far, coastal Northwest that I don’t think you guys have seen on your visits. After a long, dark day of solid rain—the sky nearly black—the sun drops low over the Sound to the west, where the clouds stop along the coastline. A terrific golden lamp then blasts sideways into the dark room of our valley, as if God has lifted the edge of our heavy gloom, peeked under it with a glorious flashlight, and found us.

This happened last Friday night—as you and Sarah, Wuck, ate the first half of your pizza—as Rachel and Abram and I cruised west through slick fields to our friends’ farm house. The telephone wires, rows of cabbage, barns, and sleeping tractors were all ablaze with fiery light on one side, deep shadow on the other. The foothills thick with evergreens were half-brilliance-half-nothingness.

When we pulled up at Tara and Brennan’s house—Abram off immediately to a tire swing beneath a yellowing cherry tree with his four-year-old buddy Annabelle—Brennan grabbed his camera and ran past me. “It’s happening, babe!” he shouted to Tara over his shoulder. “Hold up!” I shouted after him.

My feet sloshed in the overgrown grass as I jogged between the still barns and half-picked apple orchard, making my way toward the edge of an immense, open field of perfectly combed soil. When I arrived—standing there in the gummy muck, the front of my body painted gold, my shadow forty-feet behind me—I got out my phone. I wanted to capture the scene for later: the black sky above and the bronze glow coating one side of every blessed thing in sight. I even tried a selfie out there. That’s when I saw my dark blue Dodger jersey peeking out from my coat, there in the mirror-screen. So I summoned my childhood hero Christopher Reeve, opened my coat a bit wider, and snapped another selfie for the guys on the Dodger Thread, figuring you’d all appreciate the jersey more than the light.

As I stood in the middle of that field, staring down at my phone, all the other guys began chiming in with their “Let’s do this” selfies, each of us from wherever the moment found us: reclining on couches, grilling in backyards, seat-belted into drivers’ seats in rush hour traffic, giving thumbs-up in bars, standing in WA fields—even holding babies in Brooklyn apartments. Our screens aligned as windows into our little habitats, head-tilting portals connecting us through a kind of half-magic.

Brennan found me standing in the field, my back to the light, texting. I explained the Thread to him, our group of friends, as we walked back to the house, through the slop grass and residual glow. The plan was to hang out in their wide-open garage, a cold weather compromise during this pandemic. Tara had set a table for the kids to carve pumpkins. Apologetically, I balanced my phone atop their freezer <quote-01>so that I could silently stream the Dodgers and Braves while our families enjoyed the evening together<quote-01>.

Brennan, however, offered his laptop: “You want a bigger screen?” This was extreme hospitality. See, this family doesn’t really own a TV. And they don’t follow any sports. He’s a junior-high science teacher who reads poetry by the wood stove at night. Tara helps elementary school teachers better engage childrens’ minds and spends her evenings knitting wool shorn from their sheep. They both blush about their “addiction”: compulsively planting too many trees all over their farm. Hazelnuts were this year’s obsession.

So as Brennan rushed to set up his laptop for me there in the garage—old computer speakers ablaze so we could all hear the game—and as I logged in to MLBTV with your password, Murph, Tara smiled upon this little frenzy and asked me a question.

“So, are you more of a baseball fan or a Dodgers fan? If you know what I mean.”

What an educator. Follow the kids’ line of interest. Get them talking with your added curiosity. Peek into their excitements.

Without a pause, I began telling her about <quote-02>how I hadn’t liked baseball for the first thirty-three years of my life<quote-02>. But then one of my childhood friends took me to Dodger Stadium six years ago on a perfect fall evening—the Los Angeles sunset sprawled behind palm-tree silhouettes in left field—and the spirit moved in the temple: Kershaw was mesmerizing on the mound, bending curveballs and catching line drives behind his back; Puig launched homers and gunned out runners at third base from deep right field; we clinched the division—confetti and fireworks and all—while the stadium pulsed with ritual music and applause. I told Tara it was a refresher course in evangelism. After the experience, my friends crowned me with a blue hat of belonging and plugged me into a text thread that buzzed in my pocket with fellowship all year round, daily communion with guys I otherwise wouldn’t see very often, some living a thousand miles away.

I was ready to go further, anticipating their reaction to my comparison of baseball and religion. It’s a tradition, I might have argued, with a deep canon of obscurities for backyard and bleacher rabbis to expound upon to young listeners or debate with grisly old scholars. I’ve also found baseball to be more liturgical than other sports: its gentle, cycling rhythms through the year, its high holy days in April and October.

I didn’t get this far, though, because Tara asked another, better question: “So what’s up with tonight’s game?” She seemed genuinely excited. “What’s at stake?”

I went back to 2017. I told her how the Astros—get this—in the World Series, used an illegal camera to steal signs from the catcher’s crotch, relaying the real-time information to batters at the plate by banging on a trashcan in the dugout. They knew what was coming before it left the pitcher’s hand.

<quote-03>Tara’s jaw dropped. What a good soul.<quote-03>

Tech-savvy baseball zealots, I went on, had compiled and released undeniable supercuts of evidence making clear the Astros’ treachery: we had been robbed of a World Series championship, victory stolen from under our noses. All of this came to light, I told her, just this past winter offseason. The league office had concluded their investigation within the same weeks of Trump’s impeachment. The results were similarly disappointing. The team was issued a minimal fine, and none of their conspiring players faced a single sanction. They kept their championship rings. And, I continued, because of the pandemic, the Astros have enjoyed a season in empty stadiums with none of the booing stored up for them around the country. What’s worse, the Astros were once again in the playoffs and winning.

“And in 2020, it feels bigger than baseball,” I said. “We’ve seen too many injustices on camera this year.”

“Hhyeah!” Tara’s nostrils flared.

Sadly, I concluded, the Dodgers were not poised to set things right this season. Actually, they found themselves down three games to one in <quote-04>the unfortunately titled NLCS<quote-04>, facing elimination before even entering the Fall Classic’s arena for vindication.

“Awwww shit,” Tara said, and pulled up a lawn chair. “Brennan, can you get the <quote-05>pizzas<quote-05> out of the oven?”

So we watched the first few innings around that laptop screen, there in folding chairs in their garage, one wall open to the autumn night, while Dustin May on the Arlington mound flashed his mane of orange hair like a sophomore Wuck. <quote-06>With all our friends into it together, even Rachel seemed to enjoy the game, rather than seeing baseball as a distraction pulling her husband away from the conversation<quote-06>.

A few innings in, their daughter Annabelle burst into the garage from the night outside: “Mama, did you see the owl fly by?” Both parents were on their feet. Annabelle asked if we could go owling. Tara and Brennan turned to me: “<quote-07>Are we at a place where we can take a break?<quote-07>”

“Totally,” I said. “It’s only the third inning. They’ll be here when we get back.” Baseball, like any good religion, <quote-08>recognizes there are larger wonders transpiring beyond its scheduled services<quote-08>.

I pulled Abram and Annabelle in a tow cart through the darkness as our families followed Brennan out to the barn. He told us how his friend had made him an owl box from scrap wood this year. I asked what an owl box was. His headlamp pointed up into the night and shone weakly against the pinnacle of the barn three stories above us. He lowered his voice to a whisper, and the kids listened. With fewer and fewer rotting trees around, and old family farms nearly extinct, owls are hurting. A simple movement has begun picking up momentum in rural places: cutting round holes in barn walls, like the one way up there, and affixing a three-walled wooden box on the inside where barn owls can safely nest their future. The kids and I felt the excitement in his voice.

Just then, Annabelle squealed and pointed to <quote-09>the silent, flapping silhouette swooping away from the barn<quote-09>, barely visible against the starless sky. Brennan said he didn’t know if that was the mother or the father. But right now, he whispered, there was a clutch of two baby owlets way up there.

I loved that: <quote-10>a clutch<quote-10>.

Brennan asked who wanted to go up and see them.

Minutes later, I was ascending the wooden ladder with Abram’s muddy little boots in my face. We got nearly twenty feet up, to the first rafters and landing, <quote-11>before Abram changed his mind<quote-11>. I went back up alone. Over thirty feet in the air, my weight bending a second ladder of flimsy aluminum lashed to the barn’s top beam, I did as Brennan instructed me from far below: I reached my left hand with the headlamp to shine its light through a small hole drilled in the far end of the owl box; then I leaned one eye to a second viewing hole right in front of me.

I think I expected to see a pile of nest debris and, maybe, to spot some little pink heads nestled in the corner.

Instead, I faced two softball-sized puffs of white and wiry feathers with round black eyes. They had curved beaks and reminded me of those creatures in Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. They shifted their gaze inside a plywood cell now illuminated with an eerie, sideways light. They were so calm, so still. Though almost facing me, nearly nose to nose, I realized they couldn't really see me.

Maybe they heard me. <quote-12>I forget what I said to them<quote-12>.

I heard Rachel below say that this was the voice Chris uses with kittens or animals he encounters on our neighborhood walks. “He’s happy,” I heard her say. “He’ll be up there a while.”

The two white owlet puffs rested against each other. One hovered over its sibling, slowly sweeping its head back and forth as the other held still, tucked in beneath. It seemed as though neither blinked the entire time I balanced way up there on the ladder. They steadied me. The ladder was gone, like I was inside the box with them.

Why am I so drawn to hidden life inside confined spaces?

Earlier that week, I’d sat in a pew in the COVID-emptied sanctuary down the hall from my office, a videographer to my left, his big camera pointed at a man telling the story of his release from a state prison.

Wally began with the anxiety of sitting alone in his cell, wondering what would happen when he got out. He told the story of writing letters and slowly building trust with a handful of new people, a support community through our program. An hour later, we repositioned the lens and light toward his big brother, Tony, sitting in another empty pew. Tony explained how he and his little brother Wally were locked up in the same prison and had become cellmates for several months. They stuck close. They prayed together, talked in their bunks late into the night. Tony said they were kind of reborn in that space. He got emotional when describing the weeks before his own release: he didn’t want to leave his little brother Wally in there for two more years. He considered intentionally losing his good time (endless infractions to choose from) and staying longer. He knew that he himself could make it in the community but wasn’t sure if his brother would survive prison alone—that is, this new and unguarded version of him, since they’d both dropped out of the Norteño gang rank and file.

Looking at me—the camera lens and lights flanking us—Tony described the relief of discovering there was a team of folks out in the community that wanted to know and support and embrace his brother, write him letters, not let him get lost in there—a local One Parish One Prisoner team. He lit up when talking about how Wally’s small team had invited him, Tony, to join them, help them, teach them, as they all came together to bring his little brother home.

One of the team members, Erin—as pale as a childhood Wuck—was part of the video as well. She told stories of finding an unexpected connection with Wally in the first months of letters and then Sunday afternoon collect calls: how she felt safe disclosing to Wally her own self doubt, panic attacks, suicidal ideation, and time in a mental health hospital in her twenties. Wally could then talk freely about the voices he heard sometimes. On camera, Wally and Erin now both laughed about how they’d agreed to be “mental health buddies” during those months of prison calls. My eyebrows stayed raised the entire interview.

It was just the five of us in that empty church. But what we’d captured through the small aperture of that camera lens—what we’d later project to a hundred Pacific Northwest pastors we couldn’t see—might help men and women like Erin and these two brothers feel less alone in the years ahead. We shared our story so that more people out there, those who cannot necessarily see each other, might still crown each other with belonging, practice a better religion, all of us trying to find our way home.

The game was still on, of course, when we got back to the garage. After some more pizza, shouting, rule explaining, pumpkin carving, and cleanup, <quote-13>Rachel told me it was past Abram’s bed time<quote-13>, so we said our goodbyes before the game ended. We were losing to the Braves—again. A few more innings and the season would be over.

Even so, <quote-14>I kept the game streaming on my dashboard-mounted phone as we pulled out into the night<quote-14>; I can’t follow the Dodger Thread when watching like this. As we drove, Smith came up to bat. I brought Rachel into the moment the best I could, asking if she knew what a full count was. No more balls, no more strikes. Two runners on base. “He could do this,” I said in flimsy hope. “Just get on base, bro. Don’t be a hero. Just get one guy home, if you can.” <quote-15>That’s when Smith knocked it over the fence, and everyone stranded out there on the bases came home, and the dark series turned<quote-15>.

As Rachel actually joined me in the cheering, and Abram as well, I was aware of you guys. I couldn’t take my hands from the wheel to switch from the live stream to the Thread, but I didn’t need to. Across the dark and increasingly cold land reaching miles around us, I knew you guys were all out there, cheering, lighting up a different, unseen thread between us. I felt it even more without my phone, just looking out the windshield, over the night’s barely visible southern horizon.

That night, after putting Abram down, I got a text from Brennan: “<quote-16>Dodgers did it!!!!<quote-16>” They’d kept watching.

Two days later, having just concluded a Zoom session on cellular respiration with seventh graders—huddled, no less, in a homemade cedar sauna that now doubles as his home office—Brennan opened a small cardboard box that had just arrived in the mail. He texted me a shot of himself wearing the brand new blue cap—beaming.

“Welcome to the team,” I replied.

October 19th

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<pull-quote>so that I could silently stream the Dodgers and Braves while our families enjoyed the evening together<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Christ, is this all I want in life.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>this action reminds me of the first time i can recall being made aware of murph’s devotion to the game—possible i’ve mentioned this moment before. we got to hang in new york for a night or two a good while back—some writer’s workshop upstate, was it, murph? i remember you watching a day game in the early evening, exiting the bathroom after a shower, streaming the video feed on your phone. what a great thing to be a dodger fan on the east coast, you exclaimed. night games don’t start until 10!<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Totally. I was going to insert something about this in the letter but didn't: when Murph and Kristen visited here in 2014, we sat down to dinner, and he had the game on silent on his iPad within his line of sight as we ate. I was like, uh, OK. He was very discreet and polite about his necessary object in tow, of course, like someone with a back pill or inhaler.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>how I hadn’t liked baseball for the first thirty-three years of my life<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Just like Jesus!<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>lol<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>Tara’s jaw dropped. What a good soul.<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>indeed. i picture her busy with other tasks—preparing food, assisting the children with their pumpkin carving, refilling beverages, managing the room—all while effortlessly dividing her attention.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Actually, she leaned in the garage doorway with arms crossed, full attention. Not that this merited it. The fullness of her attention is what pulled a longer sharing out of me. As in Upland with you guys, I can be pretty quiet when there's not a desire to go in on a convo. So I'm quiet often in CA.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I love—LOVE—her curiosity. I'm realizing that this is my disposition with students, as well. The incurious can take a fucking hike.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>the unfortunately titled NLCS<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I'm laughing at this aside. You must say more. Another acceptable shorthand would be to call this round "the pennant."<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Yes, the pennant! I heard that growing up. Why do the TV networks pump this clunky acronym?<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>indy, diary in hand, approaching the first device of lethal cunning: only the pennanted man will pass, the pennanted man, pennanted, pennanted, the pennanted man, pennanted...<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I love that movie. As well as learning to say words as a kid I didn't understand.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I love you, Hoke, love your curiosity.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>pizzas<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>pizza for everyone! curious, you have pizza that night too, murph?<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Let me think.<p-comment>
<p-comment>I...<p-comment>
<p-comment>had...<p-comment>
<p-comment>PIZZA!!<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>no you didn't.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>If I said I had pizza, I had pizza, Wuck. Take a hike.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>With all our friends into it together, even Rachel seemed to enjoy the game, rather than seeing baseball as a distraction pulling her husband away from the conversation<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>This all sounds just dreamy. Whether or not they actually are, I imagine the children totally occupied with each other and leaving the adults utterly be.<p-comment>
<p-comment>Again, this is about all I want from life.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Yeah, it was a perfect fall evening. I’m glad you feel it, Murph, as this is largely a portrait of your baseball evangelism bearing fruit.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>Are we at a place where we can take a break?<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>"You guys go. Have fun, buddy!"<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>recognizes there are larger wonders transpiring beyond its scheduled services<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>a lovely hoke sentiment.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>That’s probably the subtitle to my entire career. I only work with churches to help them make the connection and get out of the box.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>the silent, flapping silhouette swooping away from the barn<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>is there no fear of owls attacking people? mind my goes straight to the documentary the staircase, as well as the famous twin peaks line: the owls are not what they seem.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Well, if you mess with their nest and young when they are there...you can imagine they won't be happy.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>in the staircase, she was just walking back to house from the yard at night, drunk, minding her own business.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>An an owl attacked her?<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>it sliced her head open with its talons. she died in a pool of blood at the foot of the staircase.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Talk about a spoiler with no alert.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Not sure if you guys will see this comment ten days later:<p-comment>
<p-comment>I was finally able to get around to watching The Staircase. I hit it hard for two nights, waiting for the damn owls. They never came. I got impatient and googled which episode. Then found it's NOWHERE IN THE DAMN SHOW, other than a suggestion that's overlooked, and later resurrected by fan theories online. I wanted to punch you in the nuts, Wuck, up at 3am. Like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, with the decoder ring: "A lousy fan theory hardly even in the show??" I marched off to bed.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>yeah, i for sure ruined the documentary for you. shame too, because i think it’s a really good one. i sang its praises earlier this year. murph watched it, and then was disappointed when i told him about the owl theory—which for sarah and me, ain’t no fucking theory, goddamn owl obviously did that shit—after he’d watched it. no winning for wuck here with his true crime recommendations. onwards.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>True crime. Hilarious. <p-comment>
<p-comment>Oh well, there's about 19,873 other multi-episode shows pouring out each day I can find a way to enjoy.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>indeed. may i get a job on one of them.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>a clutch<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>again, i think of the long razor-like slashes on the back of kathleen peterson’s head in the staircase—those and the coked-out socialite at the club: omg, where’s my purse? my baby owls are in there!<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I gotta watch this now.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>before Abram changed his mind<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>i remember being at knott's berry farm as a kid after the second rollercoaster was introduced. what was it called? the ninja or some shit? not sure. it was blue, i remember that much. point is, i was enamored with it and really wanted to ride it, but i just couldn’t bring myself to do it. i remember my dad walking us past it on the way out of the park, allowing me one last chance if i wanted to take it. i couldn’t do it. much as i wanted to see those baby owls, that ladder was too high up.<p-comment>
<p-comment>i went on that shit a whole bunch of times later though. i remember the first time my dad puked in the trash can after a ride. guess i’m getting older, he said. i remember feeling very protective of him then.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>The Boomerang. That backwards-upside down thriller at Knott’s gave me nightmares. Its opening month we went and while I already said Hell No to it, later in the day it got stuck at the pinnacle and we all stood and watched as emergency measures were taken to carefully help one person out of their torso brace and down the thin emergency stairs along the tracks. While the rest of the train sat and baked nearly upside down in the Anaheim summer sun.<p-comment>
<p-comment>I like your comment about your dad and aging. I’m very aware that I’m an older dad to Abram, and definitely this next boy, than my dad was to me. And he was older than many of my friends’ dads already.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>boomerang! that’s it.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>The body remembers.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>I forget what I said to them<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>this reminds me of your recounting of the river baptisms of grammar and renzo. like before, i’ll go ahead and ask: what might you have whispered to the clutch?<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Like the baptisms, I don't remember well. But I could guess again: maybe something like," Heeeeeyy! Hi, little guys! [Deep inhale, face-stretching smile.] Hi. Whatcha doin'? You're so beautiful. Where's your mama? ... I'm just saying hi ... You warm enough in there?" I dunno. I was so content, looking at their tiny eyes, their gentle puffiness and newness and utter stillness.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>Rachel told me it was past Abram’s bed time<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>This no longer jives with my dream.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>what are your parental thoughts on bed times, murph?<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Murph: let him live his life.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I mean, bedtimes are a necessity if a boy has things to do the next day.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Said even better.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>I kept the game streaming on my dashboard-mounted phone as we pulled out into the night<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Atta boy.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>with you driving? sarah would flay me alive at the mere suggestion.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>My eyes were on the road, mainly listening, but the screen was mounted on the dashboard like an Uber driver's.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>sarah and i once got in a cab and the driver was watching one of those liam neeson taken movies, on a mounted ipad no less. um, scuse me sir, would you mind not watching taken with liam neeson while you're driving? 'preciate it.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>That’s when Smith knocked it over the fence, and everyone stranded out there on the bases came home, and the dark series turned<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Every moment of this NLCS feels so much different now, as if the bitter memories left cooling on the rack turned out delicious somehow.<p-comment>
<p-comment>I'm left wondering about the cleansing power of a World Series title. How far back could the effects of such a victory reach?<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>surely not to 2017.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Do you mean, Murph, that in a losing season such pennant-race magic would eventually feel empty? Far more bitter than sweet?<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Watching TV with Grammar has been reminding me of the nature of narrative, how the classical narrative pattern often makes things look impossibly dire. When these seemingly insurmountable moments arise, Gram always yelps for me to change the channel, to turn it off. "It's...it's too scary" or "It's too bad" or "I no like the naughty one." Wanting to help him through his fears, not wanting my boy to be a quitter already, I'll tell him, "It's not over, bud. Things will be okay." And if that doesn't work: "It's not real, buddy." I think he's already getting better, more acclimated, beginning to realize how often the protagonists weather the storm. It may not be the best lesson for real life, but it should prove helpful while he navigates all manner of storytelling.<p-comment>
<p-comment>I don't think we can overstate the importance of the real-life happy ending when we get one.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Well said.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>indeed.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>Dodgers did it!!!!<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>if my therapist doesn’t open our session today with congratulating me on a dodger world championship—we were down 0-2 our last session—i’m firing him.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Good discernment.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>...so?<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>i suck. i brought it up before he had the chance. anyways, he always opens in silence. i suppose asking him to break that pattern is unfair.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
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Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

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