My Most Excellent Year (9 page)

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GEORGE DAVIS WEAVER (also called The Ginger Kid) played for the Chicago White Sox for all 9 years of his major league career, and most people thought he was one of the greatest shortstops who ever lived. But nobody even remembers him anymore. Why? Because 3 weeks before the World Series in 1919, a bunch of gamblers talked 7 of the guys into throwing the games. They even asked Weaver if he wanted in on the scam too, but all Weaver said to them was, “Piss off, you cheeseballs” and
played his guts out. It wasn’t good enough to beat the fix, though. The White Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds anyway, even though they might have had the best team anybody ever saw. But the Reds didn’t really win either. The crooks did.

When the beans were spilled a year later and everybody found out about it, Buck was banned from baseball forever, right along with the 7 ginks who started it all. But not for throwing games. He was banned for not ratting on his team. What’s wrong with this picture? My father says that you can always be proud of yourself for listening to your heart. Buck Weaver listened to his heart too, but all he got was punished for it. And just because he’s dead doesn’t mean it’s not unfair anymore. Buck Weaver deserves to be un-banned.

Please click on the “Sign Petition” button. When we hit 20,000 names, we’ll send them to the Commissioner of Baseball and make him do something about it.

Thank you.

T.C. Keller

Dear Mama,

(One of our vocabulary words this week really gave me a hard time, so I’m supposed to practice using it in a sentence. See if you can guess which one it is.)

Whenever something really kick-ass happens to me that I didn’t expect, Pop always says “There’s your mom pulling strings for you again,” so I figure you already know about the lady from
SportsAmerica
since it was probably your idea. She called last night to ask me Buck Weaver questions, and Pop got on the other phone to fill in anything I might forget. I quoted Buck’s stats in the World Series that proved he wasn’t playing crooked and why he deserved civil rights, and Pop mentioned the bedtime stories you made up for me about Rosa Parks and Dr. King. By then I was pretty sure we could trust her with our secret plan to organize a protest rally in front of the Hall of Fame, but Pop interrupted me before I could finish. (After we hung up, he explained what “off the record” means.) So when you see Buck Weaver, please let him know that he’s making news again.
On
the record. Because if we can’t get him put back into baseball, at least a lot of people are going to want to know why, which is just as valuable. You once said that a friend is somebody who believes in you no matter what, and Buck is going to find out that he has a lot of friends. Even if that’s all he gets out of it.

Mrs. Norwood gave us our first project assignments of the year. She wants us to build a model of our favorite monument in Washington. I couldn’t decide between the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, or the White House, so Pop said we’d make a scale diorama of the whole L’Enfant Plan—which is the Mall and the Ellipse together, with all of the federal buildings around them and the Washington Monument in
the middle. The Hobby Shop on Thayer Street has white plastic replicas of all the marble landmarks, but we’re going to have to make the weird ones like the National Archives and the Smithsonian out of balsa wood. All of the buildings are going to light up in different colors and there’ll even be real water in the reflecting pool and real Astroturf on the Mall. Lori told Pop that it can’t be as high as the planetarium was, but she never said anything about how wide—so we’re thinking five feet by fifteen feet. Pop says it’s a shame we have to end it at the Potomac River because he promised her the Iwo Jima statue too, and that’s in Arlington. I’m glad he’s checking with her first this time. She acted kind of funny about the eight-foot map of Massachusetts.

But there’s definitely something spurious going on here that I’m not supposed to be able to figure out. Back in the old days (like last month), it would have gone right over my head—but ever since Cupid shot me in the butt, nothing gets by me anymore. This morning in the middle of our jog, me and Pop were sitting on the grass across the Charles River from Lowell House (from our favorite spot we can see the street corner where you let him kiss you for the first time). That’s where we usually discuss the women in our lives and tell each other what we’re doing wrong.

“Alé hates me.”

“Alé can’t stop thinking about you. Nobody tries that hard to drive a guy nuts unless she’s already fallen for him. Monica hates
me
.”

“But you were asking for it,” I repeated for the hundredth time. “She told you she was vegetarian. You shouldn’t have ordered salmon.”

“I apologized for that, didn’t I?”

“Uh-huh. And then you laughed when she told you that fish have feelings too.”

“Who knew she was
serious
?”

“
I
did! And I wasn’t even
there
!” Nehi raised his head from my lap and barked, which either means he saw a squirrel or else he agreed with what I’d just said. Then Pop squirted me with his water bottle. He always does that when I win.

Pop’s Internet dating hasn’t been going so hot. Marina was a pretty lawyer, but she had mean eyes. Natalie was a twenty-six-year-old graphic artist who thought the moon was a planet. On top of that, she was young enough to be Pop’s daughter. The dumb one. Then there was Gina. She was forty-one and blond and a personal trainer. She also had two you-know-whats that were bigger than basketballs. Pop thought they were real and I didn’t. Two reasons: (1) She wore T-shirts all the time to make sure you could see them. If she’d had them her whole life she’d be used to them by now and wouldn’t have to show them off. That meant they were new. And (2) They were
too
big. Whenever she stood up, I was afraid she was going to tip over.

So this morning by the river we went over his newest list, and that’s when I first noticed something I should have seen before. These were the girls he talked about:

It made me remember the last student/adviser conference I had with Lori and the things
she
talked about:

Pop scored three Loris and Lori scored four Pops.

And now a lot of other things are starting to make sense too. For instance, on our way home from Family Nights at school, Pop is usually so preoccupied that we sometimes wind up in places like Lechmere or Quincy before he realizes he made a wrong turn ten miles ago. Meanwhile Lori wears sexy dresses for the next two days like she’s under some kind of a spell, and she doesn’t go back to pants until it wears off. (I
knew
there had to be a reason.) Mama, how come adults are so dense? Augie’s a third their age and he already figured out he’s in love with Andy Wexler, even if he won’t tell anybody yet. Does getting old mean getting stupid too?

I think you’d like Lori, though. She started at Laurents the year after you left us, and when she found out I didn’t have a mother
anymore, she’d take me on special adventures after school, like buying floppy disks for the computer room or napkins for the faculty lounge or
Ivanhoe
for the out-of-luck kids who had to read it. So she kind of feels like family already. But she and Pop are going to need help getting their act together, so maybe you could pull some strings for them too. Meanwhile I’ll start working the fix from this end. Doesn’t it feel like we’re a team again?

I love you,

T.C.

P.S. It was “spurious.”

S
TUDENT
/A
DVISER
C
ONFERENCE

Lori Mahoney/Anthony C. Keller

Dear Mama,

After “Casey at the Bat” rehearsals, Andy Wexler asked me to go to The Word Shop Café with him for lemon loaf cake and cappuccinos made out of hot chocolate so that we could practice some more. “I’m not very good at this yet” were the words he used to throw me off the scent—but Andy had a whole other agenda that he really needs to work into conversations a little more casually so that it doesn’t stick out like a swollen thumb that just got hammered with a snow shovel. I said, “‘The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day,’” and Andy answered with, “How did you and Augie get to be brothers?” I said, “‘The score stood four to two with just one inning more to play,’” and Andy said, “Was Augie always so funny even when he was six?” I said, “‘And so when Cooney died at
first and Barrows did the same,’” and Andy said, “Augie wears the coolest shirts. Where does he get them?” See what I mean?

But that was only the first inning, because right after “‘But Flynn let drive a single to the wonderment of all’”/“Augie doesn’t have a girlfriend, does he?” who walked in but Alejandra and Funny Cool-Shirted Augie. They were there for a production meeting and it would have been weird not to move over and let them sit with us, so we did. But all that happened after that was different combinations of hardly-talking people who were afraid to look at each other. What we really needed was for Puck to sprinkle some of his magic dust on each one of us, even though he probably would have screwed it up again so that I fell in love with Andy while Augie and Alé were getting married. Like my life isn’t fire-wired enough already.

If I thought that Alé could at least tolerate me, I might have a shot. But I talked Lee Meyerhoff into showing me the minutes of last week’s Young Democrats Club meeting at school, and it didn’t exactly score points for my confidence. Like when I said that the National Recovery Act was the only one of FDR’s programs that didn’t work and Alé said that the National Recovery Act was the only one of FDR’s programs that
did
work and that the rest could have been used for landfill. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure she’s yanking my chain on purpose.
Everyone
knows that the National Recovery Act was bogus from the start, especially me and Alé. Does she really hate me that much??

I’ve got a plan. And Alé won’t even know what hit her. . . .

I love you,

T.C.