Memories

Cesium and Desistium

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Dr. Oliver Sacks gave me a gift for my birthday some years ago: a writing prompt that I use each year for my special-ish day: Write an essay in which you equate your age with the corresponding element number on the periodic table.

Since I am a nonscientist, this seemed like an invitation to a find a metaphor in a reflection of the year past and in one’s hopes for the year to come.

Today, November 18, 2023, I am 55. A Scorpio, whatever that means. A dear friend composed my birth chart a couple years ago and informed me that I am a “double Scorpio,” which sounds neat and intense, and my ego-driven side (in other words, all of me) hopes that this makes me sound mysterious and sexy, but it just means that both the sun and moon were in the same sign at the moment of my debut on life’s stage. To my non-astrology believing ears it just sounds like “double thing I double don’t believe in.” The periodic table as the source for an annual metaphor about one’s age, though? I fully endorse this exercise.
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Kyiv/Minsk, 1989; Grief, Today

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

We almost died in Kyiv. It’s a funny anecdote, but as a person who has since experienced some moments in which my mortality pointed finger-guns at me and said, “Catch you later,” I know now how valid my opening sentence remains. Sometimes one’s present and future existence depends on the reflexes of a cab driver in a foreign city.

I love Kyiv, perhaps because I experienced one of my first glimpses of my own mortality there, and thus experienced my own love of life for one of the first times as an adult. I love Kyiv because it’s a beautiful city, and my memory of it is full of music. It is a treasured place in memory.
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Me and the Curve

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My body, six feet tall and cartoonishly slim, resembles no known athlete’s body, which makes sense because it performs like no known athlete’s body.

* * * *
Major League Baseball opened its 2023 season today with a clock to govern the time between pitches, something that has not ever been used in baseball. Poets who were baseball fans were known to rhapsodize over the inner rhythms of an individual game and about baseball’s “timeless” qualities, but in recent years games took three-and-a-half hours to play, which is not at all timeless.

Today’s New York Yankees victory took two hours and thirty-three minutes to play, a full ninety minutes less than last year’s opening day performance. I think that the length of time it took to play a single game is a reason why it has been several years since I have watched a game from start to finish; three hours deep into almost anything I start to think about household chores I want to work on. Perhaps this season will see me watch a game again.

If you had told me when I was sixteen that I would live entire years without watching even an inning of a major league game, I probably would have asked you what had gone wrong in my life. I learned math, arithmetic, from the backs of baseball cards. I memorized famous players’ stats. I had a baseball card collection whose organization was maintained with an attentiveness that a librarian might envy. I wanted to be a baseball player, my lack of athletic skills be damned.
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