Wednesday, May 16, 2018

forty years


by corinne delmonico




billy and betty brown were married for forty years and they were baseball fans.

billy was a sales representative for a drug company. in the early years of their marriage betty had a job in a real estate office, but after being laid off during a “recession” she never went back to work and they both lived comfortably on what billy made in salary and commissions and yearly bonuses.

they never had any children, they were not burdened by the care of elderly parents, and neither had any brothers or sisters or other relatives that they kept in touch with.

they did not have any close friends that they saw on a regular basis.


what they had was baseball. they had season tickets to the games of their home town team, the hometowners, and actually attended about seventy games a year (out of a possible eighty or eighty-one). and all the games they did not attend in person, and the hometowners’ road games, they watched on television.

and they had a cable tv package which allowed them to watch every major league game, and to tape them. this was especially useful in keeping track of the progress of the hometowners’ hated rivals, the outoftowners.

but all this was only scratching the surface. billy and betty had a bottomless fund of statistics at their command. billy could rattle off, as easy as the alphabet, the names of all the american and national batting champions back to 1876, and the batting averages they won with. betty could not quite match this, but could do a lot better than me or you.


and then there were the new twenty-first century statistics, which opened up a whole new universe of fascinating facts. but one tinged with melancholy as they could only be projected back so far. how billy would have loved to know the average exit velocities of balls hit by babe ruth and joe dimaggio!

besides statistics, they had an endless supply of little facts and anecdotes about the game filed away in their brains.

such as that when the only fatality in a major league game occurred, in a game between cleveland and the yankees in 1920, babe ruth was on the field, playing right field.


or that when mickey mantle broke his leg stepping in a hole in the ground in the world series in 1951, he was chasing a fly ball hit by willie mays.

or that when the baltimore orioles returned to the major leagues in 1954, the starting pitcher in their first game was don larsen, who later gained fame for pitching a perfect game in the world series.

billy and betty knew hundreds of such facts, as surely as they knew that custer died at little big horn, or that jfk was shot in dallas.


billy died. few people came to the funeral.

after the funeral, betty was approached by a man she had never seen before, who introduced himself as jim witherspoon and said he had known billy in high school.

so, jim witherspoon addressed betty, you and billy were married for forty years, eh?

yes, betty replied, just like moses wandered in the desert for forty years.

um, jim witherspoon replied, you are a big baseball fan, huh?


not really, said betty. i hate baseball and always have.

i see, said jim witherspoon. i guess… i mean…

you never really know about people, do you? betty asked.

no, you do not. take me for example.

what about you?

i look like a pretty respectable guy. but do you know what i have always dreamed of being?

what?


being a serial killer. traveling around the country, free as a bird, just killing people. whether they deserved it or not. maybe with a partner.

betty did not answer.

ha ha, just kidding, jim witherspoon assured her. my sense of humor gets me in trouble sometimes.

after a few more awkwardnesses, jim witherspoon left, as did the other attendees of the brief funeral service.

betty was left alone with her thoughts.


forty years, she thought, forty years. great god almighty, i’m free at last, after forty years.

money was not a problem, as she and billy had invested successfully through the years.

but free to do what? i should have made some kind of plans, she thought, but i never did.

surely, she could think of something.

but she didn’t have much time.



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