Ramblin' with Roger

In 1999, I was engaged to Carol. As an engaged guy, I was willing to do just about anything to please my wife-to-be. Yet, when she said to me seven years ago today, “Can you come over and watch my corned beef for about five hours?” I balked briefly. I had things I wanted to get done. It wasn’t a constant task, though, and, and I could read or watch TV, so naturally, in the end, I said yes.

Carol was going shopping with two of her three bridesmaids for dresses for them. Carol had already gotten her gown. I get to her place at 1:30 pm; both Alison from Connecticut (who had already announced she had a bad reaction to corned beef) and DeeDee from Binghamton had already arrived and introduced themselves to each other. (The third, Darlene, lived in Georgia.)

For some reason, they were looking at bridal gowns in magazines, and asked me what I thought of the various dresses. Frankly, I wasn’t all that interested, but I noted that I liked this one, but didn’t like that one, something called an Empire Waist. Suddenly, the air was sucked out of the room. CLEARLY, Carol’s dress had an Empire Waist. Why were these people talking to me about this anyway?!

They said they’d be back in five hours. So, I figured it’d be six.

At 7:30, they called; they’re STILL shopping. Finally, at 9:30, they arrive back at Carol’s house, with no dresses, but with food from Burger King!

You need to know that Carol is probably ready for bed by this point, yet the four of us stay up talking, and eventually play a game that’s not unlike Tarot cards. When it came to Carol’s message, something in it made her mention that she would prefer that the bridesmaids all wear navy blue. Suddenly, Alison, DeeDee and I all instinctively heaved a sigh of relief. The dress buying had gone so poorly because Carol, not wanting to be a Bridezilla, and not wanting them to be stuck with dresses they could never wear again, had given her bridesmaids carte blanche. Somehow, that made the shopping too difficult.

So, now it’s almost 1:30. I was going to go home, but crashed in bed with Carol. This left one pull-out bed for the two women. Alison is really into spiritual things, vocalizations and whatnot. So, she was toning the bed. Toning is something like a musical chant. I couldn’t help but laugh, probably partially from exhaustion, and partly from the look on DeeDee’s face that clearly said, “Who IS this person I’m sleeping with?”

The next morning, Alison tried on a navy blue dress that DeeDee brought from a previous wedding, but that did not fit DeeDee any more. It fit Alison perfectly! Alison and DeeDee split the cost of the dress DeeDee would wear, and Darlene now knew what she would be looking for. Interestingly, the style of the three bridesmaids were all very different, but unified by color, few noticed, no one cared, and they all looked good in their dresses.

And Carol? I guess I DO like Empire Waists, at least on that particular bride.

It’s really something about the Cubs and their fans. I don’t know if it has to do with WGN, the super station that carries their games all over the country, or whether it’s just because they’re one of baseball’s oldest teams with a tradition that goes all the way back to Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. I only know I’m forever running into Cubs fans. One of the biggest Cubs fans I ever knew was Jerry Lewis. I’m not sure why he was, but we became pals when I was the manager there. I’d actually met him years earlier in Los Angeles when I was playing with the Dodgers. Lewis had always wanted to be a ballplayer, and he’d gotten to know a few guys on the team.
One year, Gil Hodges brought him to the ballpark and gave him a first baseman’s mitt and let him take infield [practice] with us. From there, he started playing in our pepper games and that’s where he took a liking to me. When I got traded over to the Cubs, Lewis showed up in their spring training camp in Mesa, Arizona, for a couple of days, and after working out with us, he’d go to the dog track with me. Everybody, of course, recognized him at the track and he’d go into his act where he’d take one hundred or so losing tickets and throw them up in the air and slap me across the cheek. One time, he just threw all the tickets in my face and everybody laughed.
Then, a few years later, a couple of friends of mine from St. Pete went to Vegas with me. We were staying at the Desert Inn, one of the few hotels that had a golf course nearby. As we were walking off the eighteenth hole, here comes Jerry, just beginning to play his round. He saw me and threw his arms around me and said: “Where are you going?” I told him we were going to hail a cab to go back to our hotel. “No way you are,” he said. “I’m driving you back.” And that’s what he did, putting off his round of golf.

Now, moving ahead another twenty years, I was managing the Cubs, and Jerry would come through Mesa every spring on his way to or from L.A. He’d spend a couple days with me at camp and, again, we’d go to the track together. One year, I gave him a Cubs jacket, which absolutely thrilled him, and all through my term as manager there, he’d write me letters, faithfully predicting the pennant every year for us. At the beginning of the 1988 season, he wrote me a letter with my picture attached in the upper right-hand corner. “I want you to know,” he wrote, I have blown this picture up to sixty by ninety and it’s hanging in my living room so when I feel depressed, I see it, and feel better!”
Soot [Zimmer’s wife] saved all the letters I got from Jerry, as well as the hundred or so others I’ve gotten through the years from celebrities.

What I haven’t been able to accept, however, is the government being an obstructionist to the access of information by requiring Freedom of Information Law requests to stall their response. The law that was designed to open government has been used to obfuscate.

And what incredibly sensitive material have I been looking for? Things like the number of a particular brand of automobile registered in a certain county.

Here’s my working theory, at least at the state level: as more and more information has been placed online by government agencies, which may have led to a reduction of staff that used to be necessary to retrieve such information, the agencies have decided that any questions that are not on their public websites can fall under the FOIL law; they’ll give it to you, but it’ll cost you. Indeed, the FOIL allows for cost-recovery, so ANYTHING asked that’s out of the ordinary becomes FOILable.

I have filed one FOIL request, to the NYS Department of State. While DBAs (certificates of people “Doing Business As”), are processed on the county level, the numbers are supposed to be collected at the state level. I was told that I had to file a FOIL request. So I went down and did so. I’m still waiting. Almost two years. For the number of businesses registered by county? Ah, FOILed again.

But the favorite thing that I got was not really a present. I had misplaced my passport some three or four (or more) months ago. I wasn’t really worried about it, since I was confident that it was buried in the bedroom SOMEWHERE.

So, I was surprised to get an envelope in the mail last week that included:

The envelope was from the main branch of the Albany Public Library, with “Security” written on it. No note. It was great to get these items back, but where had they been? I was worried about identity theft, primarily.

I talked to the security guy. There was no recent log of these items being found. Most likely, the items were found late last year, stuck in a drawer for a few months, and then just mailed out.

1. My earliest recollection is being three years old in a plastic pumpkin at the Catskill Game Farm in upstate New York.

2. When I was three, I fell down a flight of stairs between my grandparents’ apartment and ours. There’s some kind of bump in the area below my lower lip and above my chin to this day. As a result, I cannot grow facial hair there.

3. When I was five and a half, I had a nasty nosebleed that my parents could not stop. I ended up in the hospital, and even my 66-month-old self’s preconceived notions were blown away when I found that I had a female doctor. I think I also had a male nurse, although that may have been an orderly. But definitely a female doctor.

4. The only vegetables I would eat as a child were corn, peas, beans (reluctantly) and spinach. The latter was clearly the influence of Popeye the Sailor man.

5. As a small child, I ate peanut butter incessantly. I must have ODed on it, because now even the smell of peanut butter makes me slightly nauseous.

6. One time, in kindergarten, I woke up from a nap at 11:45, and everyone had gone to lunch, including the teacher. It was very disorienting.

7. In second grade, there were four couples who danced to the “Minuet in G.” About a year later, I accidentally pelted my dance partner with an ice ball.

8. I was a Cub Scout for about a year. I took piano lessons for about the same length of time. I quit both because I was not very good at mechanical stuff. I once took the lock off our front door, because I was curious how it worked, but was unable to put it back together. In 7th grade shop, I blew up three or four pieces trying to make an ashtray. I couldn’t tie my shoes until I was nine or ride a bicycle until I was 13.

9. I was also lousy at gym. Classic right fielder. Could never climb the rope.

10. But I was a pretty good bowler. My mom bowled. I joined a league for a couple years. I once bowled a 186 when I was 10, still my fourth highest score.

11. I was pretty good academically. Through 11th grade, I never got less than a 90 on a math final – 97 in algebra, 98 in trig- except for the 86 I got in geometry, and only because I thought it was stupid to memorize proofs. I tried to just bluff my answer, but the test contained the very first proof in the book, I used tools that came later in the semester, I lost 6 points on that one 10-point question. I spelled well, and I was good in what they used to call social studies.

12. The scariest part of “The Wizard of Oz” for me were those talking trees. There was this gnarled tree outside of my bedroom when I was a kid, and I always thought it might attack.

13. Binghamton was/is a cloudy city, and car drivers were always leaving their lights on. I made it a point as a kid to turn them off. One day, when I was in high school, I turned off 22 sets of lights on my way home, no exaggeration. These days, the lights usually are turned off automatically, AND the car is usually locked. In fact, the last time I tried to do that, I was 24, living in Queens, and someone thought I was trying to steal his car.