What Was That Unforgettable Line?: Remembrances from the Rubbleheap

"When I was a kid. What an awful way to begin. When I was a kid I used to announce ballgames to myself. Whole games, out loud. I was the announcer, the players, the crowd, the listening audience. I was the radio. It was the pure game of making up. And I still do batting orders in my head. And it's completely puzzling to me how memory takes a name, some obscure player who batted eighth on a mediocre team—how memory takes a name and makes it glow, gives it a stab of prayerful light. Or not so obscure. DiMaggio stands in, familiar number five, spread stance, wagging the lumber, folks, as rainclouds build beyond the left field fence. Joe D. in the roomy flannels of those somber years. Wagging the lumber. Living the life. What an awful thing to say but there hasn't been a moment since those days, what a terrible thing to say, when I've felt nearly so alive."

The preceding monologue arrived by fax from Don DeLillo at the home of my colleague Jody McAuliffe, who had invited me to codirect the premiere of her stage adaptation of DeLillo's novel Mao II at Duke University. Jody had asked Don to write something for the protagonist Bill Gray to deliver in the opening scene, something that would give the audience a palpable sense of the "innocence" toward which the reclusive and now dissolute novelist continually says he is trying to "write his way back."

I was struck that the childhood activity described by Bill mirrors precisely my own childhood obsession. Substitute the cursed Red Sox for the blessed Yankees as the mythic home team, and fast forward three decades to the era of Carl Yastrzemski, Reggie Jackson, and Pete Rose, and there you find me, as the announcer, the players, the crowd, the listening audience. By the age of five, I had even created an imaginary collaborator, Buzzy Beezer, who, in a nasal voice vaguely reminiscent of Howard Cosell, provided the color analysis to my play-by-play. Generally I was fiercely attentive to realism and verisimilitude, except for the fact that Buzzy and I were magically able to travel from Fenway Park to Dodger Stadium and back to Wrigley Field all on the same day. Like Bill Gray, I still do batting orders in my head, and I find that the names of obscure utility infielders from the 1970s stay with me far more reliably as mental remnants of my childhood than those of any of my "real" playmates.

As the award-winning author and retired kindergarten teacher Vivian Gussin Paley has dramatized over several decades of beautiful and wise ethnographies of storytelling and theatrical play in her kindergarten classroom, children intuitively use the liminal space of imaginary play (and in her case "plays") to iterate and reiterate, to channel, to transform, to make both sense and often deceptively meaningful nonsense out of the events and relationships that matter in their lives. They are unabashed little artists, unsusceptible to writer's block and innocent of art's will to contemplate and to be contemplated.

Sports fantasies are, of course, not uncommon in boys, though frankly the degree and intensity of my obsession always seemed well beyond that of my peers. I remember 1978 as the year that my parents were separated and that, on a sunny afternoon in early October, I bolted school early to see light-hitting shortstop Bucky Dent become the newest in a long line of villains to crush the hearts of the Fenway faithful.

At that time, I was eight years old and I had amassed more than one hundred thousand baseball cards. I cannot say exactly how it was that I acquired so many. It was less a product of a large allowance to spend on them than of pure will. I sniffed out estate sales, memorabilia conventions, and resale shops that...