35. Minimalist life: LA Dodgers sign Leigh

My life is one of a minimalist nature. Even though I attempt excess there is always one woman, one job one house for me – I do not seem to have an abundance of choices. What I am given is what I experience – to the fullest. For example, now in New York City, I tried for a year to find a job teaching here. I tried universities and many high schools as well as middle and primary schools. I have specific requirements as I do not have a teaching degree, and just about the only topic I can teach is with computers. I therefore can only teach in private schools.  I was unemployed for many months then got a call from a school who was one of a hundred I had sent my resume to who wanted to know if I could do a few weeks relief as a tutor. They had my resume for a couple of months already when they needed someone to take the place of someone who was ill. I went to the school and they did not think I was suited as a tutor for kids with special needs but they saw on my resume that I had been teaching computer courses at the Albany Academy for Girls the year before. They currently did not have a computer program and the English teachers were teaching a bit of technology along with the regular courses. After a couple of months they gave me a contract for next year as a full time computer teacher.  I just point this out as one of every example that has ever happened to me – I really never know where anything is going to lead. Knowing the way my life goes I will probably eventually meet someone in some unexpected way who will know someone who can publish this drivel that I am writing. I wrote that years ago now everything is e-book so I will throw it up to iTunes and Amazon and Kindle in about three-months, on my birthday, August 10, just for laughs in hopes that someone someday will pay 99-cents. My goal is to have sold a dozen copies before I die.

Through some electronic cosmic twists we agreed to meet. We met, had dinner, and decided to get together the next night for New Year’s Eve in Glenelg. As the fireworks lit up the beach we were pocketed in our small zipped up world – surrounded by youth drinking who knows what, smoking marijuana and passing around pills – who would not venture to look at a couple of aging singles from off of the Internet groping one another we began a journey that we had no idea would last more than the moment we were in. Not having my own car I had collected Narda with the government car I had for the weekend – the one I was supposed to be using to take some poor adolescent soul out for the day. We parked a few blocks from the beach and after the fireworks stopped we went back to the government car – which by the way was but a few weeks old – and began our relationship in the back seat like any newly met couple would on New Year’s Eve. We spent New Year’s Day at her house and that was it. Today, Thursday, July 26, 2007 we are sitting in a hotel in Melbourne waiting for Sacha to collect us to go out to dinner. On the way to tonight we have had quite a life. Just in the past five weeks we have gone from New York City to a drive around Scotland, a few days in Utrecht, The Netherlands where Narda was born, days in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai Thailand and Phnom Penh and Seam Reap Cambodia on the way to Adelaide. When I met Narda I had never owned a home, though I had the disastrous part of a tofu factory somewhere in my history. Now Narda and I have two houses in upstate New York and we bought a house-land package in Adelaide last week in some yuppie green estate. In two weeks I turn sixty and when we go back to New York in four weeks I will begin my first full-time job since 1980 – twenty-seven years ago.

PP Dance

I danced with you in my dream last night not sure the shore but it was distant a song you had written played on your saxophone lightly far away though surprisingly near at the same instant like in an ancient jungle passion our movement's swaying embrace  there was no fireworks though a shooting star left a glow through the night sky and I saw it reflected in your eyes no earthquakes though your lips barely touched mine a moist feathered caress that shook my body to its core  we held each other so gentle swaying like flowers in a flirting breeze  I danced with you was the dream real or the future to unfold? Wednesday, 17 January 2001 10:34:57 Magill

February 1, 2001 6.30 PM Leigh signed with Dodgers

February 1, 2001 6.30 PM Leigh signed with Dodgers. This was the whole universe coming together in my little world. For more than a decade we had been throwing balls, hitting balls, catching balls, reading and living baseball. It had been over-consuming. I could not remember a time when we were not involved with baseball.  Sacha had quit years earlier. He just got sick of it. Every day after school we were out hitting and throwing and after six or seven years he walked off the Victor Harbor High School tennis courts that we would practice before dinner on. I was upset for a little while. What would he do? Was there another life besides baseball? Leigh and I just kept at it. Sacha picked up some tins of spray paint and went out to leave his mark. Leigh was hitting the ball over fences and losing balls on rooftops. Here we were all those years after signing a professional baseball contract.

Leigh ’s stats

I was on a bus, the 109, to my office at the University of South Australia. The Magill bus. Standing toward the back when I received the call on my cell phone from Pat Kelly who was a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers had agreed to sign Leigh for one hundred thousand US (about $140000 Australian). There is nothing like being on a single-parent pension, riding on a crowded bus in Adelaide with college age students and speaking on the phone to LA about more money than we had ever seen. Of course it was Leigh’s money and he had earned it. I wanted everyone on the bus to know but of course why would students in South Australia care about someone signing to play a non-Australian sport in the States? It was impossible for me to concentrate at Uni – not that I did a lot of concentration in my little office anyway. I spent most of my time making webpages.

I was excited about the offer but knew most players signed for a lot more, many signed for millions but it was a start. Australian players use to sign for a lot but after one player who signed for more than $700,000 had gone crazy a couple of years earlier – in the middle of a game he stopped pitching and laid down on the pitching mound or some such caper and ended in a psychiatric hospital. Apparently he tried to get back into baseball years later but no one would have him. Then there was another player who signed for some $500,000 then got homesick and quit going back to Australia to play football. I had heard of all the Australians who had stuffed up but Leigh and I both knew there was no way he would quit baseball. The contract was the largest paid to an Australian in the past few years so it was far from as good as it used to be but better than it was. Pat Kelly as a shortstop for the Yankees made a good wack of cash for a decade earlier so we knew Leigh would surpass all that soon enough. 

1992     New York Yankees       $147,500
1993     New York Yankees       $160,000
1994     New York Yankees       $810,000
1995     New York Yankees       $1,085,000
1996     New York Yankees       $900,000
1997     New York Yankees       $1,100,000
1998     St. Louis Cardinals        $325,000
Career (may be incomplete)       $4,527,500

Copyright © 2000-2007 Sports Reference, Inc. viewed Sunday, December 9, 2007 http://www.baseball-reference.com/k/kellypa03.shtml

2001 was going to be different than my usual upheavals. A couple of months after Narda and I had met I decided to go to the doctors for my post-fifties, thousand mile check-up and discovered I had a bit of an inflamed liver. That seemed normal, as I had drunk a lot of alcohol over the years. Surely it would not make any changes in my life except to have a couple of less drinks and maybe get back into the old meditative state I had forgone some time ago.

Such a weird thing bodies are. Life is weird too. So are gravity, thoughts, hope, dreams, creation and beliefs. I have had such an array of beliefs from the traditional Bible stuff to thoughts in other life-times create our current bodies, relationships and lives of now to pure evolution (we are evolution’s fodder – just here for the next generation, which by the way is my current belief structure) to too many shades in between. When the doctor told me my liver was a bit stressed – “in flamed” was his word – I thought a few extra positive thoughts would take care of it. I continued with subliminal tapes on being positive and creating wealth (well that was one that never did anything except create wealth for the ones selling it) and bought a few more tapes on health and radiant youth and stupid shit like that. No worries.

So, the next time I go to the doctor he says I have hepatitis C. Just like that. He was not even too sure what it meant – said I would probably die from it soon and that I probably got it from sex. This was a doctor in the local surgery (doctor’s office) in Christies Beach in 2001. He did not have a clue. I was devastated. I looked on the Internet and discovered it was not usually the result of sex, especially if a person had few partners and I had only been with Kris for the past seven years, then Narda. That it was usually the result of intravenous drugs. Well I had not done anything like that since the end of the 1960s – more than thirty years earlier. Reading on I found that Hepatitis C took a long time to be noted, like perhaps thirty plus years. Within a few moments I knew more than my doctor and my life had seemed to come to some crashing finish. I had escaped all the drug overdoses one can attain whilst trying various chemicals in the 1960s. I did not have AIDS or much of anything else to be concerned with.
I rang Narda in my devastated state and told her that I had hep C and I probably would die from it. She made the one-hour drive to my house in half an hour and then I rang a friend of mine who I use to shoot speed with in the 1960s. He just laughed and said he too had Hep C and there was really nothing to worry about. Narda was very supportive and did not break up with me as I would have expected anyone else to have done. Over the next few weeks we did a lot of research, found a support group and started going to the Clinic. Toward the end of 2001 I began a combination therapy (pegylated interferon mashed with ribavirin) to help ward off hepatitis C and her tendency to cause chronic liver.

“Combination therapy leads to rapid improvements in serum ALT levels and disappearance of detectable HCV RNA in up to 70 percent of patients. However, long-term improvement in hepatitis C occurs only if HCV RNA disappears during therapy and stays undetectable once therapy is stopped. Among patients who become HCV RNA negative during treatment, some will relapse when therapy is stopped. The relapse rate is lower in patients treated with combination therapy compared with monotherapy. Thus, a 48-week course of combination therapy using peginterferon and ribavirin yields a sustained response rate of about 55 percent. A similar course of peginterferon monotherapy yields a sustained response rate of only 35 percent. A response is considered “sustained” if HCV RNA remains undetectable for 6 months or more after stopping therapy…”

Downloaded from the Internet Sunday, December 2, 2007. The National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse (NDDIC) is a service of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/chronichepc/ this publication is not copyrighted. The Clearinghouse encourages users of this publication to duplicate and distribute as many copies as desired.

There was a class of cultures for Narda and I to navigate and we spent most of the year negotiating our lives before it looked like there would be some long-term sustainability happening. When we met Narda was completing her master’s degree in counselling at the University of South Australia the same school as me though she was at the city campus and I was at Magill about half an hour away.

I spent several days cleaning my house before she came to visit for the first time. I thought I had a very normal home; OK raising a couple of kids with Leigh home off and on in between baseball tournaments I was going to always be a bit untidy. I also have a tendency to hoard – never throw anything away – anything and everything. I also printed a lot. Having a printer in my office at uni was convenient and I had printed off thousands and thousands of page that I always was going to read some day. Most of what I printed was astrological charts, emails, essays that I thought would be useful to be aware of for my thesis and just so much more. I also scanned heaps. Narda was a bit in shock as she has said over the years at my home and how much stuff I had. There were boxes of papers, toys, thousands of picture poems, and trinkets that I had dragged around with me even as far back as the States and the 1960s. Not to worry. Now fifteen years later I still have most of it all and of course fifteen years of added wonders. I am sure at some point in time the planet will tip or tilt slightly more due to my adding belongs. Fortunately memories do not take up space or add weight though they can slow us down as we filter through eons of thoughts to get to a current thought.

I did take a de-clutter course with Narda when we were living in Clifton Park in 2005 but that has not slowed me down. After 12 years of travel and living between New York, China and Adelaide I finally have my own room where I can be surrounded by my own crap. I suppose my room is a bit like my whole house was when we met. We have a very large shed now; half of which I am making into a video production studio and at least third of it is full of boxes of my belonging that have been shipped here from the States and from my twenty years living in Australia. There is a little area in the shed for Narda to do stuff in – I think she wants to use hammers and saws and bang around but this is a story about me so we won’t divert here.

We had some personality things to work through too. Narda thought I talked a lot. I have found this throughout my life with even a neighbor back in Clifton Park in the early 1960s making the comment to my father, ‘does that boy ever stop talking?’ apparently this stuck in my father’s mind and he use to tell this story to Narda when we would visit him when he was in his 90s.

Our belief systems were really quite different. Narda was still going to church or believing in church stuff. Of her three sons two were becoming ministers. One is currently a lead-pastor in a mega church in the States. She had not come in contact with astrology and all the ‘new-age’ things that I seemed to be tossing to and forward with. We were both single parents with her marriage of 25-years recently ending. She owned a house and a car. I was driving a government car and living in a housing trust dwelling. Narda had worked full-time for decades and I did not have a full-time job until I turned 60 when we were living in New

York. I was getting a single-parent pension and Narda was supporting herself. I did have my handful of hours working for Family and Community Services and I did get some money for teaching an information technology course at uni but I was quite poor. Narda was organized and I was chaos in motion.

I have often seen my life as I did my picture poems with colours running all over without any definite pattern but at a distance OK to look at.

excuse me for a moment

Over the past twelve years we have both shifted and merged and now we have both of our traits as a composite person and it is rare that we are not side by side. We even taught in China in rooms next to one another for three years and back in Albany, New York we shared an office for two years. She was music I was IT.

Narda was finishing her degree. She had this great suggestion that we could graduate at the same time. I just need to work a bit harder and complete my degree. After all I had been ‘working’ on my PhD for almost four years; spending almost all day in my office. Surely, I was almost done. It took me several months to be able to tell her that I was a bit stuck and going quite slow and that I was still writing my literature review. I had been spending many hours a day all week for years working in my office on my webpages and learning multimedia for my own ends – like my picture poems.

Narda is a real-life shaper and it was obvious that my life needed shaping. Over that first year together she helped me get a handle on my PhD and started to talk about us going to live in the States. I could see my father and she could get a chance to live overseas. When I pointed out that I had few skills that made money she got me into thinking about being a teacher. I was teaching a class at uni as part of my PhD and it was interesting and even fun. I realized the students for the most part were smarter than me and less than half my age, about thirty-years younger than me. It did not matter. I was teaching at a university and that seemed really cool to me, a high school dropout. I taught a class in information technology. We started using chatrooms which was something I was a bit of an expert on at the time because I had spent so much time in them and now I was doing a PhD on ‘Conversational Analysis of Chatroom Talk’. Somehow my classes became centred on me but no one complained, and I made it through a few years of teaching.

36.