It's Waiting for You, Just Go Find It!

I’ve been a stranger to TV for decades simply because there was too much else to do and I love my work and also the TV got complicated when streaming replaced the three networks and the channel knob disappeared and the remote control came in and the on-screen menu and to operate them you must read an instruction manual and I despise instruction manuals because they’re written by guys who got A-plus in calculus for other guys who got at least B-minus.

So TV disappeared from my life and so did baseball — too busy to spend three hours going to the ballpark –– until last Wednesday night when — hold on, I’m going to brag on myself now — all by myself, home in New York, my wife being back in Minnesota at her sister’s, I figured out by sheer trial and error how to tune in the World Series from L.A. and was swept away by the beauty of the game on our big-screen TV.

I’ve glanced at big-screen TVs in bars and cafés and what I saw was that they make dumb things even dumber but I was stunned by the Dodger-Blue Jays game, the camerawork especially, which makes you feel you’re on the field and part of the game. The old three-camera setup is gone and there seem to be thirty or forty cameras plus a Zoom feature that gives you three or four intimate views of close plays — a runner called out trying to steal second, a shortstop diving for a grounder, a pitcher throwing a slider and the batter swinging and missing by a couple inches — and you see the game as never before.

I don’t care who wins; what stuns me is the intense focus and discipline of the players — there are no wasted motions when the right-fielder runs in and picks up a single and throws to the cutoff man, when the left-fielder dashes out for the long fly and times himself to grab the carom off the wall and turn and throw to third to prevent the triple. A homer is a homer, no big deal, over the wall it goes, but what is clearer than ever on the big screen is the beauty of the double play — shortstop to second to first — a matter of inches and the opposition’s rally is extinguished.

And what the close camerawork makes clear is that, for all the pressure and the precision, the players are enjoying their own performance. They’re cool, they don’t jump up and down, but you plainly see their pleasure, and for me, an old amateur softballer with clear memories of errors, this is transformative: it’s fun to be really good at something.

The game Wednesday night fits in with my philosophy at the age of 83, which is simply: every day is a new day and there is something utterly beautiful waiting for you if you only take the time and have the patience to see it. I often find this at church on Sunday morning. I find it walking down into the subway and seeing the intense pleasure of a child hanging onto his mother’s pant leg as the train rolls in and the doors open. Most often I find it at home, living with a graceful and humorous woman.

James Wright was my teacher at the University of Minnesota in 1962 and I remember his 8 a.m. class in a smoke-filled classroom when he seemed hungover and depressed but it was around that time that he wrote his famous poem “A Blessing” that countless people dearly love and that will still be loved hundreds of years from now, the poem that begins:

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth in the grass
And the eyes of the two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.

The beauty of its perfection is similar to that of the fielder venturing into foul territory and reaching into the stands as the fans shrink back and one-handing the pop-up for the out.

It’s an ugly time in America, unlike any other time in my lifetime. Bullies and braggarts are in power and outright cruelty is tolerated, even admired, in high places.

This makes the ball game even more important. And the kid on the subway platform. The two dogs on leashes greeting each other, touching noses. You could, and you should, walk across the Park to the Met and visit the Matisses and Monets. And I await the return of my beloved.

Garrison Keillor © 11.03.25