The Bread Man

Adapted from the many bed-time stories my grandmother, the late Sadie Grynberg-Fischer told me. Written in response to this week's Sunday Scribblings: www.sundayscribblings.blogspot.com

There was once a town composed entirely around a big, red-brick house. The house was round, and all of the windows were curved outwards. At the top of the house, was a balcony, on which Sophie sat in her chair holding a box of chocolates in her lap. The chocolates were filled with wine and her father only let his children have one of these at a time on Friday evenings in honor of the Sabbath. Sophie liked to hold the box after it was passed around to the other children. She took a long time before she plucked the round disk out of its appointed slot and placed it against her lips.

The town around her seemed very small from the view of the balcony. No one had ever measured the distance between the top floor and the ground, but to Sophie, it seemed above the clouds. In fact, she could see the tops of the trees and of the silo next to the house, which held her family's grain. Every week, Sophie's father took a train to Germany to sell his grain.

The town around her was full of languages -- Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish, which was what Sophie spoke at home. At school, she spoke Polish, at the bookstore, Russian and when her father's business friends came over, she spoke the few words she knew in German. The town around her house had been invaded by so many countries over the last few decades that, depending on how long your family had been living there, you might speak one or two, or like Sophie, four languages.

Every year, the town had a parade to celebrate it's history. The Russian bookseller would march next to the Polish carpenter and the town band would play songs in every language except for Yiddish. Yiddish was the language of Jewish families, a private code for them to speak in when they were not working or socializing with non-Jews. Sophie's family preferred to have visitors to their house rather than to go beyond it -- so the house resonated with Yiddish and the other languages were counterpoints to its music.

Nevertheless, Sophie envied the people who danced and cheered in the yearly town parade. Every one of them seemed, for that moment, fearless. The town band, too, was quite excellent, and it played wonderful marches which Sophie and her brothers and sisters tapped their feet to as they looked down upon it.

At the head of the parade was Sophie's favorite person -- The Bread Man. He stood about seven feet tall and was as thin as a string. He moved like a jumping bean, left and right and he could do summersaults -- or, at least, fall in such a way to make it look like he had meant to turn himself into a ball. No one knew the man's real name, but, when he wasn't at the parade, he worked in the town bakery, and he swore that he ate nothing but sweets and bread. He held a long, twisted loaf of bread in his hand almost all the time, and he ate it crudely, by chomping at it with his teeth. No one ever saw him use a knife and fork or a napkin.

But, The Bread Man never really seemed to mind when people laughed at him and the crumbs all over his shirt and even his shoes. Even from her balcony, Sophie could see the trail he left as he roamed up and down the street, completely out of sync with the music the band played.

The parade faded into the streets below, into the music and into the crumbs on The Bread Man's shoes, but he sat down at the street at the base of Sophie's house. Sophie waved to him and he looked up at her, but did not wave back. He looked at her enviously and reached upward all the way to her balcony, his hands growing as long as his body. Sophie shrank back, but then she realized what he wanted. She sifted through her box of chocolates and pulled out the last one. She placed it gently in his hand and, as the long, stalk-like fingers pulled back the treasure, she moved closer to the edge of the balcony. There she saw The Bread Man take a bite of the chocolate and then, of course, a bite of his loaf of bread. His next bite was smaller, and he seemed to enjoy this combination for hours--chocolate, bread, bread, chocolate, chocolate, bread, etc.

The town became a peaceful dark, lit only by starlight. Sophie and The Bread Man finished their chocolates, smiled and finally fell asleep -- she in the soft chair on the balcony and he inside of his bakery. At dawn, he would get back to work and she would go back to school. But they dreamed of nothing but their favorite things...bread, chocolate, chocolate, bread, bread, chocolate...

Boycott Jeff Suppan

As you may be aware, Jeff Suppan, of the St. Louis Cardinals, made an ad AGAINST stem cell research. Suppan's ad was meant as a direct attack on an ad by Michael J. Fox for this research. Fox has been suffering from Parkinson's Disease for ten years.

So many people of all ages could be assisted in having better lives because of this research. Those who argue that using embryonic stem cells is immoral because those cells come from aborted fetuses are using the same rationale as those who refused to fund in-vitro fertilization. The argument then was that, as the procedure often requires using more embryos than one -- the first one may not take, it inherently ends a potential life in order to create others. This argument was not only overturned by the foolishness of it, but by the vision of the children who were created in the process. It's one thing to talk about the potentially alive, another to look a live baby straight in the eye.

Similarly, I am sure that once the first person to be cured of Parkinson's Disease through this research is seen on television, opposition will largely end. The vision, of perhaps, a handsome actor in the prime of his life, transformed from pain and the ravages of disease back into his strongest self, will be one to behold. The longer this takes, however, the longer that we should remember how Fox looks, shaking directly into the camera. How much longer must he have to wait? Why should he, or the many children, young adults, etc. who are suffering from this, from diabetes and other ravaging illnesses, have to forfeit their opportunity because our vanity gives us the distance to cherish an abstraction rather than embrace and sympathize with the people in front of us.

Until then, those of us who love baseball should send a message to Jeff Suppan and others who would stand in the way of science. After all, what if Dave Duncan, his pitching coach, had said, "I can get a young, healthy arm to work with, why try to rehabilitate a struggling, aging pitcher?" But, it was precisely Duncan's love for the game and the artistry of it that caused him to invest in the experiment that Suppan was when he came to the Cardinals. How many young pitching prospects are now waiting because his career was given another chance? Of course, he should have been. Duncan knows that, pitchers, like all of us, are worth saving because their god-given talents are not to be taken for granted, but cherished. Every human being deserves that second chance.

Or maybe the Cardinals should let Suppan go and, say, spend their money on a younger arm?

Winning teams, as both the Cardinals and Tigers know, invest in the science necessary to help their players do better. Kenny Rogers, Jeff Suppan and Chris Carpenter are not young by baseball standards. All required work. All three have won in the post-season.

Why shouldn't everyone get a chance to "win in the post-season"?

Another underdog continues to make good

Kenny Rogers. "He's capable of that" said Joe Torre, when he shut down the Yankees. How much worse off would we have been to have kept him, knowing his potential. Then again, we might not have given him the help he needed to do what he was capable of -- and what does that say about us. Sounds a little like the story of another favorite underdog, Jeff Weaver. Both had good games in Game One of the World Series. I wish they hadn't had to pitch against each other.

Leave My Child Alone!

Did you know that all schools receiving federal funding are REQUIRED to give the names and addresses of their students over to THE PENTAGON who is creating a database on 16-25 year olds for WHAT REASON THEY DO NOT SAY?

To get your child OUT OF THIS DATABASE, go to this link:
http://tools.leavemychildalone.org/index.cfm?event=showContent&contentid=63

GOOD

(This was written in response to Sunday Scribblings, http://www.sundayscribblings.blogspot.com/)

When a human or cat closes his/her eyes softly, for a moment after having enjoyed something…taking it in. See Henry, settling into his blanket, above.

You can see also Henry doing this in the second picture on this blog. He's the white cat leaning toward you, in the arms of his smiling and also blinking brother Larry. Look in the sidebar under "Who lives with this shoe?"

(P.S. Thanks to all who liked the film provided by the Virtual March Against Global Warming. It's great, but it plays very loudly, so I replaced it with a banner for the walk -- and I hope everyone will click on it and sign up!)

CORY LIDLE

Thurmon Munson welcomes you to the great MLB of the skies.

Teterboro is a horrible airport. When my friend Karen called in that she was having engine trouble, they did nothing to help her either. They didn't even have emergency services down at the ground to save her. Emergency vehicles saw sparks far off and decided to investigate.
Why didn't someone help Cory dump that plane in the East River and bale onto a trampoline or land that plane in Central Park....Stranger things have been done.

Besides, his plane was equipped with a feature which would turn it into a parachute? Did it malfunction?

And, what was he doing flying directly over NY space -- I thought small planes were restricted. Wasn't anybody watching?

Say hi to Karen for me. You did as good a job as most of the Yankees in the playoffs. Glad we had you around. It just wasn't our year, and I wish, especially for you, that it had been. But, you made some great early pitches. No one had their game that day, or most of the other days.

Save me some ice cream, okay?

One real underdog makes good: DreamWeaver

A few years ago I became very interested in baseball. A close friend was having a severe depressive episode and all she would respond to were discussions about the sport, so I started paying attention. It filled a major gap for me as well, as before Air America and my awareness of alternative networks like the Head On Radio Network, I would come home from my evening teaching job to the silence of an old-fashioned Brooklyn neighborhood and my cats. In came the world of AM Sports Talk Radio, with overnight debates between self-proclaimed "Die-hards" for one team or another. Just the passion in their voices was enough to get my attention. And my first cat, god rest his soul, Fred became a devotee of WFAN radio. If I switched the dial to turn on National Public Radio, he gave me a look that indicated he might become instantly ill. Sports Talk and Opera were Fred's favorite things, and it is not hard to see why as both involve arias of pain and exultation. And, I became equally fanatic, even risking ongoing arguments with Karen over the role of baseball as a kind of opiate of the masses in order to catch a glimpse of the game. No matter how much she deplored the idea, she subscribed to the Yankees' YES network so that I might indulge what she saw as my churlish passivity.


I've become particularly aware over the years of various underdog figures in baseball, as well. I do not mean teams like the Cubs or the Mets. Those are teams with seemingly historical curses, which in reality, are the results of poor planning, choices and coaching. A team that hires Dusty Baker after his mismanagement of the San Francisco Giants deserves what it gets. The same thing for a team which consistently attacks some of its steadiest players and which trades off one player for one of equal of lesser value. I love Outfielder Carlos Beltran, but look over at the Oakland Athletics and you will find ex-Met Jay Payton with similar numbers and less of the hype. I know, I know, Carlos Beltran sells a lot of T-Shirts. There is something about a Mets fan that loves some players and hates others without real regard to the overall consistency of a player. Anyway, I'm happy the Mets are in the playoffs and they deserve to be. Omar Minaya, the General Manager, made good choices and Willie Randolph is a good manager. Plus, that is probably the best hitting, and most in-sync team in baseball. I hope they win the World Series, or at least give my team, the Yankees, a good fight.

To me, an underdog is someone who consistently goes unrewarded for good work. Or someone whose potential keeps being mismanaged. Such was the case of Jeff Weaver. The Detroit Tigers loved him, but traded him to the Yankees which at the time, seemed to be the logical next step of his career. Our pitching coaches didn't know what to do with him: he was too unpolished to just need the tweaking and coaxing that the mostly veteran staff required. We traded him to the Dodgers where he had more room to develop. Finally, he was traded to St. Louis, a team with a careful--almost too careful coaching staff and patience. And alas, Jeff Weaver finally connected, pitching five shut out innings in his first playoff win. For years, I wore his shirt and people chided me for extolling the virtues of potential over product. What sport, or world can live without nurturing those with potential? Go, DreamWeaver! You proved yourself, at last.

Who are some other underdogs in my book:
Endy Chavez, NY Mets: If he took Beltran's place, would you notice? Meanwhile, he makes much less money and is always coming up with amazing catches and hits in the clutch.
Steve Trachsel, NY Mets: Steady Steve. For years now, the Mets have been able to rely on him for around 15 wins. Yet, every year, they second-guess him. The rub, of course is, he does best when his routine goes uninterrupted. So, the second-guessing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- move his scheduled pitching day over a day or two and you throw him off. A lot of great pitchers are THIS methodical. Mike Mussina and Randy Johnson, two fantastic pitchers, come to mind. So, if he doesn't do well after 12 days rest, don't blame him. We all know that MORE THAN USUAL anything for Steve is not necessarily a good thing.
Aaron Guiel, NY Yankees-- Need a hit? Call him off the bench. Try that with Andy Phillips who is just lucky enough to be younger, and you won't be as lucky as often.
Brian Roberts, Baltimore Orioles--An all-star who no one ever brings up in conversations. It's not his fault he's on a mismanaged team. Every time he comes up to bat in a game against the Yankees he's trouble.
David Eckstein, St. Louis Cardnals--Well, he's finally getting his deserved notice, but for a long time he just happened to be key in almost every win. Another good pick-up for the Cardinals.
Frank Catalanotto, Toronto Blue Jays -- Someone get him out of Toronto, already! He's consistently excellent and he has also terrorized the Yankees for years.
Shawn Chacon--He's not a pretty pitcher, but he manages the risks he takes. He WAS stupid to try to pitch with a torn ACL in his knee and NOT TELL ANYONE. I look forward to watching him when he heals. Prediction: He'll pitch well next season and the Pirates will trade him to a better team.
Aaron Small -- We used you and then we sent you down to the minors. You deserved better. I hope you come back.
Aaron Heilman -- Nearly flawless a lot of the time, but if he makes a mistake the Mets seem to lose total faith. Can we (the Yankees) have him? He can close, he can relieve and he can probably start. I'll give you Kyle Farnsworth for him, anyday.
Esteban Loiza -- He does great for the Yankees in the playoffs and we trade him. Who's sorry now? For more on him and good writing on baseball go to www.outofthebullpen.mlblogs.com


Underdogs outside of Baseball
Sam Seder -- The gruffest voice in radio that you'll ever love.
Al Gore-- I could just use him as the definition of underdog.
Cherry Jones -- As great an actress as we see in every year in NY on or Off - Broadway. The rest of the country deserves to see her.
Christa Kirby--A fantastic actress who deserves a career beyond Off-Broadway.
Cynthia McKinney-- Proved that honesty in politics is sometimes career- ending.
The late Ed Stancyk -- One of few true fighters against corruption.
Mark Green -- A caustic, but hard-working NY politician who seems to have missed his time. In the 2001 election for Mayor, he was literally double-crossed by Fernando Ferrer. Ferrer ran as an Independent and then shortly before the election, through his support and votes to the Republican Mike Bloomberg. Then Ferrer had the nerve to run again for the Democratic nomination for Mayor. I wish NY'ers had better memories. Ferrer doesn't deserve to run for office again. I'll never forget that he ate breakfast with Bloomberg on the day of the election. His constituency of under-represented minorities and the poor and working class of the Bronx were given no promises by and Bloomberg has kept his word and delivered nothing to them.
Mike Malloy -- tons of on-air personalities copy his aggressive radio style, few posess his honesty. And he remains without a radio station after Air America foolishly let him go.
Elizabeth Holtzman -- a brilliant woman cheated by the 1981 election for Senator in NY.



Add your own underdogs, if you like. I'm always looking to support someone whose talent is unrecognized with, at least, a nod of recognition.