Antidote For A Bringdown
The third and deciding game of the 1951 National League pennant between the Giants and the Dodgers was decided by a ninth inning home run by Bobby Thomson. The hit, dubbed “the shot heard ‘round the world,” was fictionalized by Don DeLillo in his novella Pafko at the Wall. Andy Pafko was the Dodger center fielder who watched the ball go over his head into the left field seats.
The story eventually led to the author’s monumental doorstop of a novel Underworld, but the shorter work only dealt with the events of October 3, 1951 at the Polo Grounds. In it, a kid jumped the turnstile and ended up getting the actual ball, later worth an incredible sum. The Giants went on to lose to the Yankees in the World Series (Joe DiMaggio’s last, but the first for rookies Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays) and the game stands as one of baseball’s greatest moments.
I have wondered from time to time what Pafko was thinking and feeling as he watched the ball, and the Dodger’s season, disappear. In his New York Times obituary he’s quoted as saying–
“Then came the shot. I started back. In Ebbets Field I might have gotten it. In the Polo Grounds it was gone.” (The Polo Grounds’ left-field fence was only 315 feet from home plate.)
The moment was “my biggest letdown ever,” he said.
The kid who got the ball in the story also had a letdown. DeLillo wrote “It is all part of the same thing, the feeling of some collapsible fact that’s folded up and put away, and the school gloom traces back for decades — the last laden day of summer vacation when the range of play tapers to a screwturn. This is the day he has never shaken off, the final Sunday before the first Monday of school. It carried some queer deep shadow out to the western edge of the afternoon.”
And here we are again, looking at the messiest and strangest end of summer in any of our lifetimes. Maybe we are feeling the kid’s gloom and the deep shadow and maybe we are feeling like Andy Pafko, looking up and hardly able to believe what has happened.
The author writes more about the kid.
“He gets to his street and goes up the front steps and into the front of his building and he feels a little bringdown of fading light that he has felt a thousand times before.
Shit man. I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.”
Bringdown is the operative and brilliant word here. We’re all dealing with a major bringdown in America and it’s better to say so than pretend otherwise.
Shit, man, we might say, I don’t want to go through this again tomorrow. When’s it going to end?
Clearly, there is an emotional continuum on which every student returning to school finds him or herself, whether learning will be remote, in person or some hybrid. Not every kid is gloomy. Not every adult is miserable, either. We’re all having our own experience. It is what we might well call a mythic moment, a moment for which we need the right tools in our toolbox.
Thomas Merton had a good antidote for a bringdown. “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going,” he wrote. “What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope.”
