Call Me Abram

Call me Abram. Happy New Year! Welcome to the BAR Concentration, my experiential discipline designed to synthesize Barry Codell’s Baseball, Aging and Religion insights, as I apprehended them during interaction with Barry at my beloved California Home over the past quarter century. My sole goal during that time has been to pass the BAR, which only now am I finally doing. So I hope this result will be beneficial to both of you, Constant and Inconstant Reader. (Now, thanks to Barry, I do not rede or right myself.)

To pass the BAR, of course, I had to know the law. This was of the cardinal college: "to know ledge of knowledge," to "unlearn the secular, to extinguish for the sake of sacred English." I had to become statistician, maieutician, and hermeneutician, to find not only the Truth I sought, but as Barry barely (as always, being the infinitesimalist he is) suggested, if I ever did "then find the Ruth within it!" Indeed, in deed I have found the true Babe of Baseball, the remorseful compassion of Aging, the believing Ruth of Religion, inspired by his work with me, and my work with the others here.

For in my lack of travels, I have met so many at the Home, those "forgetters" who I will in all ways always remember, and most especially one I today shall describe. He called himself Shalom Goodwill and I called him my "adopted father." Shalom passed away on December 25, 2008. He died of natural causes, following the annual Men’s Club celebration of Ricky Henderson’s birthday, killing himself at the unripe age of 107. "Shalom Aloha," as both his friends and enemies called him, claimed to be the "unrecognizable son" of Albert Goodwill Spalding, a legendary founder of both major league baseball and the sporting good industry. Shalom was born in 1901, the first year of our two-league system, "conceived (‘a seminal conception’) in Honolulu, born ("at a very early age") in Hollywood, and blown into Chicago!"

Let me remark, if I must say so, remarkably: In studying Codell’s life (and, in retrospect, perhaps too closely), the Hawaii, Los Angeles, Chicago adventure of Shalom duplicates Codell’s early journey. And is it just just coincidence that the years addressed (1901-2008) in Barry’s Batting Encyclopedia unveiled this past Christmas, coincide with the lifespan of "Mister Shalom?" I believe so, but I digress….

As I, as a self-licensed self-maieutician, brought forth true tales of Shalom’s Life that I, by most graceful God’s grace, will share (how he could, even at the height of his dotage, elucidate the differences between the theosophies of Spalding and Abner Doubleday that he learned in his youth at his beloved California Home, in Lomaland, and how he would regale me with anecdotes of his more famous 106-year-old Cub fan "friend and main competitor," the late Milton Altman, yet always closing his stories with Milton’s sad admonition, "Look homeward angel, and melt with ruth!"), I thought of my first meetings with Barry Codell, when he began to distill my "latent thoughts and memories" (end of that life sentence!). Our very first meeting? Unforgettable: "Call me Bar," Barry said. "Call me Abram!" replied I. He was the activity director of the Home, directing, he told me "the activity of consciousness." And though I did not belong to his "new generation of nonagenarians," I became one of "Barry’s kids."

Twenty-five years ago, through a miraculous combination of podiatry and psychiatry, I began to learn about "the empathy unsympathetic," walking and talking with Barry himself, joining him as an "official Peripatetic." I felt his equal ("Pupil, peer! Illuminator! Ruminator!"). I kept and keep one large picture frame in my one room: it holds a diamond shaped collage of Mr. Codell, gleaned from magazine and newspaper, picturing first the first base—him seated with calculators at his desk, identified simply as "Barry Codell, Father of the BOP." In second base position, a picture of Barry receiving the Governor’s Award for Innovation in Gerontology, for his "maiuetics program which brings forth ‘latent thoughts and memories.’" The third photo, going counterclockwise (in tribute to both baseball and the circumambulation around the Kaaba), advertises an upcoming lecture by Codell in the Bet Hamidrash of Ner Tamid Synagogue—"Entrance to the Utterance" (Readings from the Book of Second Jacob: A Translation)," saying, "Well known Chicago lecturer Barry Codell’s poetic rendition of a gnostic Jewish text brings this fascinating mystery to a discussion of our own history and beliefs, revealing a gnosticism of agnosticism!" God, I would have given anything to hear that one! (My favorite Codell lecture ever heard was his last "Kingdom of Poetry" radio program where, in dedicated deference to Plato, he overthrew the whole Kingdom!")

Standing at home plate in my collage is a photo of Barry and I, Abraham Abramson, smiling through the camera, arms around each other, trying to look like one another. It is my most prized possession.

Now, I do not see Barry. My long and unanswered phone message to him, eventually reduced to "Call me, Abram," were never returned. This is foregone, far gone. The truth lies between dream and dawn. This may be fractional, factional, frictional, anything but fictional. But I regress. That is another story, for another year.

As I rove through Barry’s trove, I unexpurgate Charles Darwin: "I need not enrich myself any further, I am a complete millionaire in odd and curious facts and fictions." Here at my "Maieutic Shop," it is nearly closing time for today. I realize I just have to overcome the mere enormity of my task (as well as the brevity of longevity). "What, if nothing, has my pain meant? Do not enter lightly this entertainment! O, sigh of silence, is this violins or violence? Should I, like Barry, sing? Is this music of muse sick, or just thinking of thin king? Be/set, secrete thy secret! Anoint anon us anonymous, full of fire, full of fuss! To the wind let sail this cautionary tale—a demon’s demonstration of pure defenestration….

Till now,
Abram