Tomorrow

Tomorrow is my forty-first birthday. It is also MLB’s Opening Day, and so my celebration will be homemade cheesesteaks and maybe a meringue roulade and hoping that the Philadelphia Phillies can start their season on the front foot.

Baseball’s Opening Day is most often for me an occasion of sheer optimistic whimsy: anything is possible on the eve of a new season. Back in 2016, when I was a guest on the Effectively Wild podcast to talk about the Phillies’ chances for the upcoming season, I think I made some kind of absolutely ludicrous prediction that they might win 85 games. That would have been at least sniffing the playoff hunt that year. Instead, they went 71-91, finishing fourth in the NL East. (In my defense, I firmly owned up to these considerations as being made only in my heart.)

This year’s Phillies are rather a different bunch than the 2016 team, beginning their 2023 foray on the heels of a 2022 National League Championship instead of 2015’s excruciating 99 losses, and though Rhys Hoskins’s torn ACL on a routine stumble late last week has dampened my spirits a bit, I’m willing myself toward as much magical thinking as I can muster. It’s a little sleight-of-feeling against another heartbreaking week of gun violence and book banning and attempts to legislate hate against trans people: when I really need that glinting coin of hope and escape I find in sports, I’ll pluck it from behind my own ear. Maybe I can even teach myself to apply it to dreams beyond the diamond or the rink. On my birthday is a good day to do it, right?

Because this is going to be an important year. It doesn’t quite feel like it yet, still on the far side of preorder links and cover reveals as I am, but before the calendar rolls over the next time, before I’m in my “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” year, I’ll have a book out1. If I am lucky, it could even be a big year.

And because writing isn’t like being a professional athlete, I can imagine myself a better writer in the future than in the past; I am certainly a better one in this season of my life than in the previous. Maybe this is why the Hoskins injury jars me so; every athlete who misses a season on such a terrible bit of bad luck—amateur or professional—knows they’re on a different kind of borrowed time. For the majority of athletes, the years in which one gets better are fewer than the years in which one gets worse. These are the limits of the human body, wonderful and fragile as it is. But one doesn’t have to have the fastest reflexes, the keenest sight, the most well-behaved cartilage in the knees to learn more about story structure, to find and consider more ways of approaching the sentence, to be open and listening for those character voices that surprise and delight. That’s a relief. Something to look forward to, something to strive for because it doesn’t have to be about hope, which I tend to reserve for things outside of my control. I have to hope that the Phillies rotation will be functional past the third starter; I have to hope all those things I can’t specifically change (like people liking my book). But I can choose to attend to my craft, can choose what I read, can choose to want to keep doing it, and that’s not nothing.

Thank you for reading Loomings. This post is public so feel free to share it.

What I’m making:

A little while ago, I backed a Kickstarter for the EEW Nano 2.0, a very small, affordable e-spinner. It’s been a treat of a thing to use, especially for spinning various bits of fiber from the HipStrings Base 12 set. The fawn batt here, Beige Mastic, contains 5% flax, and though that’s a very small percentage, it changes the feeling of the whole thing. It’s my first time spinning bast fibers. The shine and crispness is very intriguing. (The blue-green is a blend of Merino and Shetland wool, plus tussah and sari silk.)

What I’m reading: I just started Matthew Salesses The Sense of Wonder and the sharpness of the prose is so good.

What I’m writing: Just finished up my essay on Jeannie Marshall’s All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel. Look for that in the not-too-distant future at the Ploughshares blog!

Since tomorrow is my birthday: if you feel so moved, please consider making a donation to my Bike Rally fundraising efforts. In August, I’ll cycle from Toronto to Montreal (600 km!) & every dollar raised goes to supporting people living with HIV/AIDS. Or help the Annville Free Library—my local public library, on whose board I serve—write its next chapter and complete a much-needed expansion and renovation project.