Snow on the Pitcher's Mound

By Jamie Reno

My lips are chapped again. It always happens once Little League starts, and there's nothing I can do about it. Time's the only thing that heals chapped lips, I don't care what they say in the commercials. It's hot tonight, and dry, especially for Iowa in May, and I've got the fan going full blast on me and Arnie, who's sleeping over again and snoring again. Arnie's in sixth grade with me but he's almost six months older and almost three inches taller. He's 12 already.

When Arnie sleeps over he goes right to sleep once I turn out the light, then he starts snoring until I nudge him and he grunts and looks at me with half-open eyes and shuffles and goes back to sleep and starts snoring again usually in about 15 or 20 minutes. But Arnie's my best friend, and he doesn't snore on purpose. It's just that with some guys you can always hear them breathing, even when they're awake. Every breath you can hear, and it drives me nuts. Breathing should be a silent thing.

It was a good day for Arnie and me. We usually spend Saturdays outside if the weather's like it was today. We played tennis this morning, then came home for hot dogs and then went riding around the neighborhood on our bikes. We had mom's pork chops and garlic mashed potatoes and salad for dinner then played Nintendo for a couple hours in the den then had a sock-throwing fight in my room then watched the sports news on TV then we went to bed about 10:30.

But I woke up again a few minutes ago. I don't know exactly what time it is now, but I know it must be really late. It wasn't my chapped lips that woke me up or even Arnie's snoring. It was a bad dream. I had another one. I still have them sometimes. Not as often as I did last spring and summer, thank goodness, but I still have them.

Last winter pretty much sucked. For a while there I turned into practically a different kid. Even though it was football season, which is one of my favorite times of year, I got depressed and angry and started feeling sorry for myself and I fell way behind in math class and I got in a fight at school, well, sort of a fight, and that's just not like me. My mom and dad got really worried about me and made me go see the psychologist at our school, and he's the last person I ever thought I'd have to spend any time with.

I've changed some since last winter, though. It's not like I've gotten weird or anything, and Arnie's still my best friend and I still love baseball, but I'm not as depressed or angry as I was last winter and I'm not flunking math any more and I haven't gotten in any fights for a while. I'm definitely a different person than I was then, and for the most part I think I'm a better and stronger and smarter person. I'm also less scared.

It's just that so much has happened that I never expected, some good things and some bad things, and I think I've grown up some as a result. It all started — the weird stuff, the fights, the bad dreams, the psychologist, the surprises, all of it — last November. It was almost exactly six months ago, come to think of it, when my Grampa Jack died.

Grampa Jack, my dad's dad, lived with my Grandma Paulson in a brown, two-story brick house three blocks away from us. The house was old but sturdy, like Grampa Jack. But last April he had a heart attack while he was on a fishing trip up at Lake Okiboji and died on the boat before they could even get him to the hospital and before I even had a chance to say good-bye. When my mom came into my room that night and told me Grampa Jack died fishing, I could not believe it.

I was old enough to know what dying meant, but it never occurred to me that it could happen to someone in my own family or even to someone I knew because it had never happened before. I was mad and scared and shocked, all in one. It didn't make any sense. Grampa Jack was so alive, so healthy, and I had just seen him and talked with him and laughed with him the week before. How could this be?

I never thought my Grampa Jack could or would die, especially not right at the beginning of baseball season. He was so big and alive, like a bear. He had a deep voice, a beer belly, a snore louder than Arnie's, an almost-bald head and thick, bumpy, red callused hands. He was a carpenter and he could build anything with wood. Any kind of wood, from cedar to oak. He built a drafting table for my big brother, a computer desk for my dad's office, a doll house for my little cousin that she keeps next to her bed, and an awesome playhouse for me for Christmas when I was 8 that I still have downstairs in the basement.

The playhouse was the talk of the neighborhood when I first got it. It has all kinds of side doors and passageways and portholes, and there's a slide on it that I'm too big to fit through now. A bunch of kids in the neighborhood and even a few parents came by to check it out in the back yard that Christmas, and everyone was impressed. No one including me had ever seen a playhouse quite like it.

But the best thing Grampa Jack ever built was this really cool wooden model of a Spanish galleon, which was a large sailing vessel with four masts that carried freight and was a warship in the 16th century. I keep the galleon now right here in my room on my dresser. On nights like tonight when there's an especially bright full moon, the moonlight comes through my open window and when it hits the galleon, the shadow it makes on the wall behind my dresser makes the ship look gigantic. And when the fan hits the galleon's sails they move in and out and when you look at that shadow on the wall it looks like the ship is actually moving. It's really cool, like a ghost ship sailing through my bedroom.

I pointed that out to Arnie tonight before he went to sleep and it sorta freaked him out. Not enough to stop him from going right to sleep once I turned out the light, of course. But I think it spooked him. The galleon's shadow on my wall doesn't scare me, it just makes me feel sad because it reminds me so much of Grampa Jack. He built the galleon out of wood scraps, mostly. The sails were made from my grandma's sheets, but I don't think she minded.

Because we lived so close, I saw Grampa Jack almost every day. I got to see him more than my dad because my dad sometimes works late. I spent almost every Friday night at Grampa Jack's house, which was small on the inside but had a big back yard with a garden and a detached garage and really wide driveway. Grampa Jack would let me hang out with him in the back. He not only let me, he loved having me around, you could tell. He converted the detached garage into a workshop when he retired, just after I was born, and from then on kept his car parked in the front of the house.

Every Friday I'd ride my bike straight over there after school and hang out with him and I didn't come home until after supper on Saturday. I'd sit sometimes for hours on Friday nights in the wide part of the driveway in the back yard in one of Grandma Paulson's wrought-iron patio chairs even after it got dark and sometimes even when it was freezing and the cushions were inside somewhere. It wasn't that comfortable but I never got too cold or bored. I loved to watch Grampa Jack work. Sometimes, he'd look up at me while he was working and wink.

"Hey, kid. How you doing in school?" He'd say. It was always something like that. He never said much, but just the wink was enough for me.

Even though Grampa Jack retired from his job as a carpenter when I was still a baby, he never stopped working. He was always busy on one project or another for a family member or Grandma Paulson or a neighbor. There was always work to do, there just wasn't time for idle chatter, as he called it. Grampa Jack wasn't a big talker.

My dad's the same way. He doesn't talk a whole lot. Most of the guys in our family don't talk a whole lot. I do. I sort of broke the Paulson mold, I guess. Some people tell me I talk too much, but I try not to unless I have something to say. It's amazing to me how some people can go on and on without saying anything at all.

When Grampa Jack worked out in his workshop and I watched, Grandma Paulson was usually right inside talking on the phone or cooking or doing dishes or reading the paper. Usually she stayed right there in the kitchen because the window looked out on the back yard and her garden and the detached garage. From there she could keep an eye on us, and she did.

That house and the garden and the detached garage were all sold last summer after Grampa Jack died, and my Grandma Paulson lives with us now. But she's moving slower and she's quiet these days. She's not as outgoing or fun as she used to be when she had her own house, but she must be so lonely. She and Grampa Jack were married for a long time and she probably misses him even more than I do, but she'd never admit that because she's kind of a stubborn old lady.

At Grampa Jack's funeral my dad made me wear my dark blue sport coat, which I never wear, with a white shirt buttoned all the way to the top and a tight blue tie and khaki pants and loafers. My family — that is me, my brother, my mom, my dad and grandma — rode to the funeral home in the back of a long black limousine and I had to act like an adult all day that day and talk to all these people I didn't even know. I even had to walk past Grampa Jack in his coffin and touch him on the forehead, which I didn't want to do but dad made me. He said that I'd regret it as I got older if I didn't touch Grampa Jack one more time. But I don't know about that. It's been a year and I still wish I hadn't touched him.

It just didn't seem like Grampa Jack lying there, so cold, so pale, so still. When he was alive you never caught him lying around. He liked to listen to the radio, but practically the only time he watched TV was during the Summer and Winter Olympics and sometimes he'd watch the news. For the most part he hated TV and thought I watched way too much. He wouldn't let me watch it when I came over on Fridays. He did let me watch cartoons or baseball on Saturday mornings, and he did like that home improvement show and some nature shows, but that's about it.

Even when he was asleep there was always plenty of sound and movement. His snoring was loud, way louder than Arnie's. It was so loud it used to make me laugh when I slept over on Friday nights. I don't know how my grandma could sleep in the same room with him all those years, but she did and she didn't seem to mind.

Grampa Jack's snoring was the same every Friday night. First, he'd inhale twice, then he'd let out a long exhale. And the weird part was that unlike Arnie and everyone else I've ever known who snores, including my dad, the exhale part was actually louder than the inhale part. Grampa Jack's three-part snoring ritual always used to crack me up when I'd hear it because it sounded just like those frogs in the beer commercial on TV.

\After Grampa Jack's funeral, me, my brother, my mom, my dad, and my grandma were driven in that limousine again over to my grandparents' house. Normally I'd think that was pretty cool, riding in a limousine. It was my first and only ride in one. But Grampa Jack is the first person I've ever known really well who died. I just wasn't into it.

When we got to the house we were greeted by a big group of smiling, dressed-up people who all seemed way too happy considering we just buried Grampa Jack. There was music playing on the old console stereo, the same big band stuff Grampa Jack used to listen to after dinner, and there was a ton of food. It was unbelievable. There were casseroles and fruit salads and vegetable platters and tortilla chips and French onion dip and salsa and roast beef and pretzels and sodas for the kids and Canadian beer, which was Grampa Jack's favorite, for the grown-ups. It was like a party, and I wasn't in the mood so I decided to go outside for a while just to be by myself. I was already halfway out the kitchen door when I turned around and told my mom, "I'm gonna go outside for a while."

Usually I ask her instead of tell her, but I wasn't in the mood to ask anyone anything, even mom. She was tossing a big green salad and surrounded by a bunch of people and was too busy to say no.

"OK, honey," she said. She always calls me honey. "Stay in the back yard, though, and come back in when it gets dark, OK?"

I nodded and stepped out to the patio and sat down in the grass, which hadn't been mowed for a while you could tell. But I could still hear mom and dad and everyone talking and laughing and telling stories about Grampa Jack, so I got up again and walked farther away from the house to the back of the back yard where I couldn't hear anything but my own thoughts. I stopped for a minute to look at grandma's asparagus, tomatoes and onions and then walked over to the detached garage where Grampa Jack's workshop was.

It was starting to get cold and the garage door was closed and padlocked. I had never seen a lock on that door before, and that kind of freaked me out. But I wanted to see inside one last time, so I got up on my toes, cupped my hands against the dirty glass and looked through the window. It was pretty dark inside, almost black, but I could see some tools and there on top of the work bench I spotted the galleon.

I always loved looking at the galleon when I used to come over Friday nights. It's not as fragile as it looks but I was always afraid to touch it because I didn't want to rip or break it. It was one of Grampa Jack's prized possessions. He made it years ago, before I was born, and it must have taken him a while to build because it's really detailed and intricate. It looks just like the encyclopedia picture of what a Spanish galleon is supposed to look like. He knew how much I loved it. I must have stood there on my toes looking into that dark garage at that galleon for at least 20 minutes — until it was totally dark and freezing and mom called me back inside.

"Come on in now, honey, it's dark and it's getting cold out," she shouted.

But before I went back in, I took one last look into the garage, took a deep breath and said softly so no one else could hear, "Bye grampa." No one heard me. But I'd like to think Grampa Jack did. Somehow, I just think he did. It was a much better good-bye then the one at the funeral parlor earlier. It just felt to me like he was listening this time.

I couldn't stop thinking about the galleon for the rest of the night, and after we got home and got out of our funeral clothes I went into my parents' room and asked my dad an important question.

"Do you think I could have Grampa Jack's galleon?"

He smiled. "You bet, buddy." Dad always calls me buddy. "But on one condition," he said. "You have to promise me you'll take good care of it, OK? It meant a lot to Grampa Jack, as you know."

I promised. And I've kept that promise. It's still sitting there on my dresser in one piece and making cool shadows at night on my wall.

I just looked out my window. The sun is starting to come up. It's still dark, but you can see the light just starting to crack the horizon. Most of the lights in the houses on my street are still off, and the street lights are still on, but I just heard dad's clock radio going off down the hall, and now I can see a little light from the hallway sneaking through the crack under my door.

I better get some sleep because I have a game tomorrow. I mean, today. I always get pretty excited the day of a game. We're playing the Tigers and it's a pretty important game. They won their first two games and so did we. Neither team is gonna want to lose. I play for the Pirates this year, which is OK, but I wish I could play for the Cubs but they don't have a Cubs in my Little League this year.

I can hear my dad's footsteps now. Lucky for me, we have wood floors in the upstairs hallway in our house and a couple of the floor boards squeak, so I usually get some advance warning. Dad checks up on me sometimes after he takes a shower and before he gets dressed to go to work. He opens the door really quietly. I think he thinks I've never heard or seen him do it because I always pretend I'm asleep, but sometimes I'm awake, like now.

Oh man, there goes Arnie's snoring again. I have to close my eyes now and pretend I've been asleep for hours. Hopefully when I fall back to sleep I'll dream about my game. If I do fall back asleep I can have a good dream about Grampa Jack. I'll probably dream about baseball, though, I usually do the night before a game — even though it's morning now. I hope we win today.

I think life is kind of like baseball, or baseball is like life, take your pick, and if that's true you could say that after some rough at-bats I'm starting to see the baseball pretty good again. You know how the pros talk about how sometimes the baseball looks really big when it's coming toward you and how it's so easy to hit, while other times it looks like a golf ball or even smaller and it's almost impossible to hit? Well, that's really true, for some reason, and right now I'd say the baseball is starting to get bigger for me.

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