One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  He had been nicknamed the Hawk when he was a player, for his habit of lurking around almost lazily on defense and then making a stunning strike, and he still speaks the way he played, quietly but then amazingly. When we sat on the visiting team’s bench the other day, he said some quietly amazing things, which I think you should hear:

  The reporter from the paper came by, he said. She wanted to write a story about the failure of the American dream and the collapse of the social contract, and she was just melting to use football as a metaphor for something or other, and I know she was just trying to do her job, but I kept telling her things that didn’t fit what she wanted, like that people come by and leave me cookies and sandwiches, and the kids who play lacrosse at night set up a screen so my tent won’t get peppered by stray shots, and the cops drift by at night to make sure no one’s giving me grief. Everyone gets nailed at some point, so we understand someone getting nailed and trying to get back up on his feet again. I am not a drunk, and there’s no politicians to blame. I just lost my balance. People are good to me. You try to get lined up again. I keep the field clean. Mostly it’s discarded water bottles. Lost cellphones I hang in a plastic bag by the gate. I walk the perimeter a lot. I saw some coyote pups the other day. I don’t have anything smart to say. I don’t know what things mean. Things just are what they are. I never sat on the visitors’ bench before, did you? Someone leaves coffee for me every morning by the gate. The other day a lady came by with twin infants, and she let me hold one while we talked about football. That baby weighed about half of nothing. You couldn’t believe a human being could be so tiny—and there were two of him. That reporter, she kept asking me what I had learned, what I would say to her readers if there was only one thing I could say, and I told her, What could possibly be better than standing on a football field, holding a brand-new human being the size of a coffee cup? You know what I mean? Everything else is sort of a footnote.

  The Praying Mantis Moment

  A high school kid asks me this morning, What’s the greatest sports moment you ever saw? Before my brain can rumble into gear and produce the 1986 Boston Celtics (the best basketball team I ever saw), or the 2004 Boston Red Sox (the greatest comeback in the history of baseball), or the 1969 New York Mets (for sheer shocking unbelievability, not to mention that I got to watch that whole World Series on a television in our grade school classroom—how cool was that), or the 1980 Miracle on Ice USA Olympic hockey team, or Doug Flutie’s preposterous last-second touchdown pass for Boston College against Miami, or autistic teenager Jason McElwain drilling seven long shots in four minutes when his Athena High coach put the diligent cheerful team manager into uniform for the first time at the very end of the last home game of his senior season and he went bonkers and the whole student body went bonkers and they carried him off the floor and every time I see the film again I am elevated to tears.…Before I can recall any of this, I say this instead:

  One time when my twin sons were little, maybe six years old, and they were playing soccer, in the town league in which every single kid I think proudly donned his or her blue uniform with blue socks every Saturday so that anywhere and everywhere you went in our town on Saturdays you would be surrounded by small blue grinning chirping people, not just on the fields and in parking lots but in burger joints and pizza places and the farmers market and the library and the grocery store, and it was a crisp beautiful golden October afternoon, and I was standing with the other parents along the sideline, half paying attention and half keeping an eye out for hawks, suddenly the tiny intent players on the field all formed a loose circle on the field, and play stopped.

  I remember seeing the ball roll slowly by itself into a corner of the field. I remember that the coach, one of those dads who was really into victory even though the boys and girls were three feet tall and could hardly tie their laces, was yelping and expostulating. I remember that two of the moms ran out onto the field, worried that a child was hurt. I remember that the referee, a lean long teenager who had been the most desultory and unengaged of referees up to that point, sprinted toward the circle, worried that a child was hurt.

  And then the circle devolved into a sort of procession, with all the players on both teams following a girl in front, and cupped in this girl’s hands was a praying mantis, which she and all the other players on both teams were escorting reverently off the field, because, as a child helpfully explained to me afterward, the praying mantis was on the field first, and maybe even lived there, while we were all visitors, and you’re supposed to be polite when you visit someone’s house.

  I have seen many extraordinary moments in sports—stunning achievements, stunning reversals, terrific teams, teams that, at the exact moment when their absolute best and most meshed play mattered most, played even better than they ever imagined they could. But I don’t think I ever saw a more genuine moment than the praying mantis moment. All of it was there for us to see—teamwork, decisive collective action, a leader rising to the occasion, humor, generosity, respect, surprise, narrative, drama, tension, release, grace, satisfaction, laughter, and the subtle virtue of being something you see only once in a lifetime.

  IV.

  This Blistering Perfect Terrible World

  Heartchitecture

  Let us contemplate, you and I, the bloody electric muscle. Let us consider it from every angle. Let us remove it from its bony cage, its gristly case, and hold it to the merciless light, and turn it glinting this way and that, and look at it as if we have never seen it before, because we never have seen it before, not like this. Let us think carefully about the throb of its relentless tissue. Let us ponder it as the wet engine from which comes all the music we know. Let us contemplate the thousand ways it fails and the few ways it does not fail. Let us gawk at the brooding genius of its architecture. Let us consider it as the most crucial and amazing house, with its four rooms and meticulous plumbing and protein walls and chambered music. Let us dream of blood and pulse and ebb and flow. Let us consider tide and beat and throb and hum. Let us unweave the web of artery and vein, the fluttering jetties of the valves, the coursing of ions from cell to cell, the sodium that is your soul, the potassium that is your personality, the calcium that is your character.

  Consider the astounding journey your blood embarks upon as it enters the pumping station of your heart. In a healthy heart, a heart that works as it has been designed to work over many millions of years by its creative and curious and tireless and nameless holy wild silent engineer, blood that has been plucked and shucked of its oxygen by the body straggles back into the right atrium, the capacious gleaming lobby of the heart.

  This tired blood, dusty veteran of an immense and exhausting journey, shuffles forward to and through a small circular door in the wall, a door with three symmetrical flaps: the tricuspid valve.

  This circular door opens into another big room, the right ventricle, but at the very instant this ventricle is filled to capacity with tired blood the entire ventricle contracts!, slamming in on itself, and our tired heroes are sent flying through the pulmonary valve and thence into the pulmonary artery, which immediately branches, carrying the blood to the right and left lungs, and there, in the joyous airy countries of the blood vessels of the lungs, your blood is given fresh clean joyous oxygen!, gobs and slathers of it!, o sweet and delicious air!, as much as those heroic blood cells can hoist aboard their tiny cellular ships, and now they resume their endless journey, heading into the marshlands and swamps of the lungs, the capillary beds, which open into the small streams and creeks called venules, which are tributaries of the pulmonary veins, of which there are four, the four magic pulmonary rivers carrying your necessary elixir back to the looming holy castle of the heart, which they will enter this time through the left ventricle, whose job is to disperse and assign the blood to the rest of the body, to send it on its quest and voyage and journey to the vast and mysterious wilderness that is You, and to tell that tale, of the journeys of your blood cells through the universe of You, w
ould take a billion books, each alike, each utterly different.

  But so much can go wrong. So much does go wrong. So many ways to go wrong. Aneurysm, angina, arrythmia, blockages and obstructions, ischemia and infection, pericarditis and pressure problems, strokes and syndromes, vascular and valvular failure. The ways that hearts falter and fail are endless. They clog and stutter. They sigh and stop. They skip a beat. They lose the beat. Or they beat so fast and madly that they endure electrical frenzies. One electrical frenzy is called circus movement: the electrical impulse leaves the rhythmic world of contraction-and-rest and enters a state of essentially continuous beat. A heart in circus movement may beat five hundred times a minute for as long as ninety seconds before it stops altogether and the person wrapped around that heart dies.

  Consider those ninety seconds. A minute and a half. The fastest and last minute and a half of that one life. A minute and a half tipped forward into relentless irretrievable headlong final free fall. The heart sprinting toward oblivion, unable to rest, revving into chaos; achieving, for the last ninety seconds of its working life, a state of such intense beat that it comes as close to beatlessness as it ever could while beating: until it ceases to beat.

  Or think of the heart as a music machine—not a far-fetched idea, for the heart runs on electric impulse and does so in a steady 4/4 rhythm. A musician friend of mine maintains that the 4/4 rhythm, standard in popular music, feels right, feels normal, because it is the pace of our hearts, the interior music we hear all day and all night. We are soaked in the song of the heart every hour of every year every life long.

  Fill my heart with song, sings Frank Sinatra, and is your heart filled with pain?, sings Elvis Presley, and my heart will go on, sings Celine Dion, and open your heart, sings Elton John, and open your heart, sings Lenny Kravitz, and he had a heart of glass, sings Blondie, and I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold, sings Neil Young, and don’t be blind heart of mine, rasps Bob Dylan, and why does my heart feel so bad, moans Moby, and put a little love in your heart, sings Annie Lennox, and everybody’s got a hungry heart, roars Bruce Springsteen, and my heart still beats, sings Beyoncé, and Lord with glowing heart I’d praise Thee, sang Francis Scott Key, and stop draggin’ my heart around, snarls Tom Petty, and I got them broken heart blues, moans Sonny Boy Williamson, and I canna live without the inarticulate speech of the heart, sings the genius Van Morrison, and this is the last chance for hearts of stone, sings Southside Johnny Lyon, and unchain my heart, sings Joe Cocker, and what would rock and pop and blues and gospel and jazz and soul and rap do without this most necessary musical organ? Would there even be such a thing as music if there were no hearts to break and fill and unchain and hijack?

  It weighs eleven ounces. It feeds a vascular system that comprises sixty thousand miles of veins and arteries and capillaries. It beats a hundred thousand times a day. It shoves two thousand gallons of blood through the body every day. It begins when a fetus is three weeks old and a cluster of cells begins to pulse with the cadence of that particular person, a music and rhythm and pace that will endure a whole lifetime. No one knows why the cluster of cells begins to pulse at that time or with that beat. These cells undergo what is called spontaneous depolarization. Channels inside these cells begin to leak sodium and the wash of sodium sparks the trading of potassium and calcium back and forth which inspires an electrical current which, augmented, is the beat of your heart. These cells are infectious, as it were: if you put them alongside any other type of cell in the body, they make the other cells beat to their beat.

  The heart is the first organ to form. It is smaller than a comma when it begins, and ends up bigger than a fist. Every cell in it is capable of pulsing. No one knows how that could be. The pulse begins when a baby is about twenty days old. No one knows why it happens then. The pulse then continues, on average, for about two billion pulses, and no one knows why that many, or that few. Why not one billion per creature? Why not twenty billion? Mayflies to mastodons, beetles to bison, prophets to poets, infants to infanticides, all are issued the same number of pulses to do with what they will. Tell me, asks the great quiet American poet Mary Oliver, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

  Consider the engineering of the heart. It begins life as a primitive hollow tube of tissue which bends and loops and twists and turns and envelops and overlaps and intricately creates itself as a heart, the wings and tendrils of tissue advancing and retreating, holes and spaces appearing, walls and valves constructing themselves according to a mysterious and extraordinary command and design, all this infinitesimal heartchitecture bathed in the one fluid in the ancient universe that can sustain the new wet machine: rich fresh blood from the mother, which she sends through the placenta to her developing child in oxygenated bursts to the new brain, the new heart, the rest of the new body.

  Here are some magic numbers: all mothers at all times past and present to all children developing under their hearts send 62 percent of placental blood to the new brains, 29 percent to the new body, and 9 percent to the new heart. Hitler and Ho, Gandhi and Gautama, Mohammed and Maimonides, Mao and Moses, the Madonna and her mother, the Madonna and her Child: when they were fingers of flesh floating in their mothers, new ideas clinging to uterine walls, they received blood from their mothers in exactly the same doses.

  In America these days one woman dies every minute of every day from a failed heart. More women die of failed hearts than men. Failed hearts kill more women and men than the next seven causes of death combined. The highest rate of death by failed heart is in Utah. The lowest rate is in Mississippi. More than four hundred babies are born every day with flawed hearts. One percent of all babies born all over the world are born with flawed hearts. Twenty percent of all babies born with flawed hearts will die before their first birthday.

  Our body fluids contain about one percent salt, nowadays—very likely the exact salinity of whatever ancient sea we managed to crawl out of, a sea we could leave because we had learned, first of all, to contain it; and that sea is contained and remembered most crucially now in the heart, where salt sloshes back and forth between cells, forming the first thrum of the heartbeat, first hint of the absolute and necessary note from which comes the salt song of You.

  The Greatest Nature Essay Ever

  …would begin with an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog to lie down, tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heaven’s sake, that’s why god gave you hands, and read straight through the piece, marveling that you had indeed seen or smelled or heard exactly that, but never quite articulated it that way, or seen or heard it articulated that way, and you think, man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.

  The next two paragraphs would smoothly and gently move you into a story, seemingly a small story, a light tale, easily accessed, something personal but not self-indulgent or self-absorbed on the writer’s part, just sort of a cheerful nutty everyday story maybe starring an elk or a mink or a child, but then there would suddenly be a sharp sentence where the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a skater, and you are plunged into waaay deeper water, you didn’t see it coming at all, and you actually shiver, your whole body shimmers, and much later, maybe when you are in bed with someone you love and you are trying to evade his or her icy feet, you think, my god, stories do have roaring power, stories are the most crucial and necessary food, how come we never hardly say that out loud?

  The next three paragraphs then walk inexorably toward a line of explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps. Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences. But there’s no opinion or commentary, just one line fitting into another, each one making plain inarguable sense, a goat or even a senator could easily understand the sentences and their implications, and there’s no shouting, no persuasion,
no eloquent pirouetting, no pronouncements and accusations, no sermons or homilies, just calm clean clear statements one after another, fitting together like people holding hands.

  Then an odd paragraph, this is a most unusual and peculiar essay, for right here where you would normally expect those alpine Conclusions, some Advice, some Stern Instructions and Directions, there’s only the quiet murmur of the writer tiptoeing back to the story he or she was telling you in the second and third paragraphs. The story slips back into view gently, a little shy, holding its hat, nothing melodramatic, in fact it offers a few gnomic questions without answers, and then it gently slides away off the page and off the stage, it almost evanesces or dissolves, and it’s only later after you have read the essay three times with mounting amazement that you see quite how the writer managed the stagecraft there, but that’s the stuff of another essay for another time.

  And finally the last paragraph. It turns out that the perfect nature essay is quite short, it’s a lean taut thing, an arrow and not a cannon, and here at the end there’s a flash of humor, and a hint or tone or subtext of sadness, a touch of rue, you can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s there, a dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly there’s no call to arms, no clarion brassy trumpet blast, no website to which you are directed, no hint that you, yes you, should be ashamed of how much water you use or the car you drive or the fact that you just turned the thermostat up to seventy, or that you actually have not voted in the past two elections despite what you told the kids and the goat. Nor is there a rimshot ending, a bang, a last twist of the dagger. Oddly, sweetly, the essay just ends with a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed.