Sawdust and Blood

Sawdust and Blood The first time was a man lying on 8th in front of the bus station. I was just a kid. A small clot of passersby, gawkers, stood silent sure that they should do something but uncertain what. An old woman blessed herself and whispered a prayer. Someone finally called EMS but life had already limped away by the time they arrived. The cops came with yellow tape. It’s meant to mark where life ends and death begins. But it had already trespassed into the eyes of living. The medical examiner came and made a few notes and the EMS lifted him into a bag. A cop began to argue over who was going to write it up. Another began to spread sawdust on the spot. Then straw. Sawdust soaks up blood. So does shoe leather and time. The straw is meant to cover it all. Eventually the wind takes hold and sweeps it away like there was never anything there like a heart that finally quit beating against worry or a dream that gave up it's ghost. I went by that spot a thousand times after. It looked like any other concrete. But there is no sawdust for memory. I always walked around the spot like it had been touched by something terrible and eternal. The next time was in an emergency room. I had broken a blood vessel in my leg. It turned purple and swollen and they wanted X-rays. I couldn’t really walk so they put me on a stretcher with wheels then rolled it into a cue in a hallway filled with a couple dozen others lying on beds with wheels. I was there for a few hours waiting right next to an old man…face to face. So eventually we began to talk. He was a mason. Real Italian. Came here because he wanted to be American. He talked about his children grown and gone. He told me about his wife and still being in love after so many decades. He was a baseball fan. He said he didn’t like going to the park anymore but never missed a game on the radio. He asked if he could listen, would it bother me. No of course not. So lying next to each other in a hospital hallway, two strangers, we listened to the game. Baseball is a kind of time machine. Baseball soaks up years like sawdust does blood. It connects men to their boyhoods and then to each other. Baseball is for the Davids of this world. It doesn’t require the Goliath size of basketball and football. And though the odds are long in baseball, one bat against nine gloves, its always the same ancient story. One man starting at home, leaves alone and then tries with all his might to return to it. That day the game ended with a home run, a long fly ball that cleared the left field wall. The crowd cheered. The radio battery faded and then died. I noticed that he was quiet, tired I thought, from waiting to be seen. Tired of it all. From carrying Time. A nurse came up, touched him on the shoulder and quietly called his name. Worried, she took his pulse then sighed like someone who spent 80 hours a week flailing away at calamity. Then she gently pulled the sheet up and wheeled him away. I was stunned at the suddenness of it. At how quietly it came. How it had come so close to me without me recognizing it. I rolled off the stretcher and hobbled away as heartbroken for a stranger as I have ever been. But in the years since it has changed. I think something like sawdust or shoe leather soaked up the sorrow. Now I think of his soul, like a long fly ball. I think of his life clearing some left field fence. And I think of a crippled old man once more a boy. Running for home. And all I hear now is a crowd somewhere on it's feet. Cheering. WLM