Remembering The Death Of A Dear Friend

 

The Sunshine Boys, Spring Training 1989 - Robert Brustad (right) along with this author
and the late Commissioner of Major League Baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti

By Harry Cummins

     A few years ago I lost a close friend to metastatic cancer.

     Dr. Robert Brustad, age 69, left behind a wife,Vone, and a teenage son "JJ".  Not incidentally, Bob also left behind the game of baseball.

     Baseball ultimately couldn't save my friend from an end that awaits us all, but it became a comforting companion to his well-spent life and especially to his final agonizing year of chemotherapy. Our final conversations would always leave space at the end for the saving grace and hopeful expectancy of another baseball season, another season in the sun to share. We both knew we were talking about far more than a game.

     Baseball may not be a road to God, but it can become a clear pathway to a deeply shared, collective love between persons.  One of the things that lets us know we are never traveling alone. 

     This, then, is the supreme message my friend's life left behind. The sacrificial hit that transcends seasons and sends us all "home."

     Love one another!

hcummins@aol.com

     

     

Happy Mother's Day To All!

 

An Adolescent's Affecting Story Recalled

 

"When I think about it now, it wasn't too bad, after all.

Worst things happened in 1958. In actual fact, I am a specialist when it comes to feeling compassion. I still can't forget that terrible story about Laika, the poor Eskimo dog in Sputnik 2, who was so brave while there was still some food left inside the rocket.

But what happened after that? Did she starve to death?

Just think of that!!

From My Life As A Dog

Remembering the Distinctive Voice of Paul Auster

 

From New York Trilogy-1985

"Every life is inexplicable, I keep telling myself.

No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling.

To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge .... none of that tells us very much."

Paul Auster [1947-2024] 

Reflections From The Shoreline - Bird Rock 1950

 

By Harry Cummins

     When I was 7 years old, I lived with my mother in blissful Bird Rock By-the Sea.

     My life then, the part I now choose to remember, consisted of collecting ladybugs in aerated canning jars filled with blades of grass. In the afternoons my mother and I would walk the short, steep hill cascading to the sea where she would sun herself on a smooth rock, her watchful eyes always fixed on me near the shoreline.

     In the 73 years that have passed, my mother has died. Our clapboard beach cottage was sacrificed long ago to Southern California sprawl. I, in the name of becoming settled, have wandered from one address to another.

     Reflecting on all this, from shores many times washed over, I can still trace where prevailing stability first began. Glancing back up the beach at my mother, my anchor, daydreaming on her rock, I could safely sense the rush of a wider world lapping at my tiny feet.

     In those moments, then and now, life was simply everything I saw and imagined. I guessed the same was true for my mother there on her rock of refuge.

     Bird Rock, it turned out, was a moveable fortress.

A Brief Dissertation On The Nature Of Decline

 

                                        

By Harry Cummins

         

      "So we do not lose heart; though our outer self is wasting away"    - 2 Corinthians 4:16

      "Behold, I am doing a new thing: now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it"?  -Isaiah 43:19

     My recent go-round with modern medicine has sent my mind spinning on the health of our world these days, not to mention my own well-being. What does it mean when a once-sturdy life or society suffers a measured collapse with advancing age?  Is individual illness merely a reflection of the wider unraveling proliferating in our collective culture?

      Bereft of answers to these grandiose questions, some considerations still remain.

     Not every illness we confront, personal or societal, abates or reverses itself. Therefore, we need a new set of observations to challenge our thinking about healing and what constitutes true restoration.  In this process we need each other's unique voices of experience. We need to hear them for their remarkable ability to balance self with reality, hope with acceptance, fear with affirmation. We need to hear them, especially, for their ability to establish a concomitant connection with one another.

     To reconstitute ourselves, as individuals and as a society, in the midst of illness and attack, is to help one another make the attempt to go on...is to bear our histories and infirmities with the highest of human credentials.

     Our old stories are ripe for retelling... but in transformative new ways.  We need words with the capacity to turn memories into steadfast hope in the midst of repeated, cumulative loss.  

    Given the urgency of our age, I might suggest this should be an overriding agenda as antidote to our collective affliction.

     

The 'Politics of Movement' 2024

 

  

By Harry Cummins

Nearly 40 years ago, working on a profile for Boxing Scene magazine, I sat down with the celebrated prize fighter Archie Moore in his hotel suite and asked the knockout king of all-time to peer into his crystal ball and fortell the future of the human race.

 His brief response remains one of the more prophetic utterances I have ever heard, reanimated and remembered daily after all these years.

When asked in 1986 what he viewed as the most pressing problem worldwide he responded: " I am very concerned with the plight of the homeless," replied the former Light Heavyweight Champion of the world.  

"Right now I'm working with HUD to find suitable low cost housing for the disadvantaged. Thru poverty and wars, the world has evolved into what I describe as the politics of movement. It is a problem that I fear won't go away soon."

Archie Moore died 12 years later in 1998 at the age of 84.

We all remain on this world's Jericho Road... reminded of Archie's unabated divination while still deciding who is our neighbor.