The Final Roster
Spectacular Failure • Missive 1
How could I have so many dreams
And one of them not come true
- Paul McCartney; “On My Way To Work”
The list of the final roster for my high school baseball team was posted.
My name was not on it.
Cut.
Again.
Cap pulled low, at the foot of a tree near the baseball field, I sat and cried. Only now, looking back, do I introduce myself to the Spectacular Failure.
Crying, as it would turn out to be, for the last time until my late 50s. It was such an emphatic, almost predetermined cry, I couldn’t help feeling there would be no success ahead for me in life. So, there was no need to save any tears. Get them all out now. With every single tear representing another passion that I would find, strive for, and then fail at. All to come. All at once.
How could this be? I thought. I was so convinced. Certain I was born to the Big Leagues. That this was no dream — an eventuality.
I was so sure.
Yet, seeing that list without my name on it, I knew there was no mistake. Knowing — and even silently admitting — I just wasn’t good enough.
Not big enough. Not yet, I first hoped. I was a 16-year-old still trapped in a 10-year-old body. Too early. Not strong enough. My ambitions and desires outsized my abilities. My adult body would not arrive until my mid-20s. Always a late bloomer. To this day.
Like a mayfly that slept in.
Getting back on my bike to ride home, I left my glove and hat beside that tree. Accident? Maybe. But it wasn’t there an hour later when I rode back. Gone. Poof! As if, like my dreams, they belonged to someone else. I searched, but the ground was dry as the tree drank up my tears. But I knew I was there. I felt it. And that feeling would become a lifelong companion.
“Do what you love and the rewards will come,” my mother would say to me. Unaware of her own tears as she showed the old photos of when she wanted to be a dancer.
I have lived a fearless life of pursuing every desire. Every ambition. Every instinct and inkling that “this would be fun” without ever considering normalcy, convention, or consequence. I didn’t want to be that person. At the end of the day. The faded murmurs of “what if” escaping from a recliner.
I knew I had to be something special! I heard the praises from teachers: How smart. How clever. How industrious. A born leader. The man on the TV said I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be. I bought it all. That there is a world out there. For you. For everyone. Life should be fun. That there is nothing to fear and that all will be well. Imagine no restrictions…
Then, on the first day of kindergarten, I became ghastly aware that the most important thing society instilled was the docile act of learning to stand in line. Quietly. As you are told. Forever.
Lines are boring.
Childhood dreams of playacting detectives, magicians, comedians, athletes, musicians, all fueled an exploration of film schools, nightclubs, reading rooms, theaters, typewriters, and comedy festivals.
And the walking. All the walking. Investigating the dark streets of everywhere. Big cities. Waterfronts. Tenderloins and manicured suburban surreal estates.
Watching. People. In crowds, alone, on buses, in cafes.
Thinking they are alone. Observed. Unaware. Everywhere.
Passing through without passing by.
Some people have vivid dream lives. They awake with amazing tales of what they dreamed. I am not one of them. I never remembered my dreams. Never have. It didn’t bother me, and I never gave it any thought. The dreams of childhood became my waking life. There was no need to dream when you can live, I thought.
Until recently.
The past few years have brought change. A lifetime of inquiry driven by no concern for the end, only the vibrancy of the means. The many lives I’ve lived, and failed at, are worn like charms. The many more never lived — trapped in the amber of my imagination — sparkle and tease. As if they could be reborn, at any moment, into the life that remains — the one life I intentionally set out to avoid.
I find myself crying again, for the first time since watering that tree outside the baseball field. And I awake, remembering the echoes of a dream.
Perhaps I remember my dreams now, because I am no longer living them.
Next: Interlude
Previous: Missive 52: Funeral For A Friend
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