Recommended Reading

Baseball lovers (talkin' to you, Stick Poet Superhero) are hereby directed to read "Circus Delight" at Dr. Omed's Tent Show. This is one of the very best things I've read by the good doctor, and he's written some very fine things. At first, it seems to be a meditation on one of his summer jobs (a meme begun by Christopher Key, at the Barbaric Yawp); but it then becomes a meditation on the great diamonds that glitter on long summer nights.

Personally, I've enjoyed baseball more as a mythic fiction than a reality. You know what I'm talking about: the film version of The Natural; both Field of Dreams and Shoeless Shoe (the novel on which Field was based). League of Their Own, Bull Durham, and many, many others.

But the good doctor's essay makes me want to go out there and make a fool of my middle-aged self, and miss a few more fly balls, and strike out and scrape my knee sliding into first. Well, almost.