Cooperstown at the Edge of Winter We drive from New York City to get here. We take I-87 North to Albany, then I-90 West, exit Binghamton and again at Duanesburg, take Route 20 West to Route 80 South. We cross so many bridges and toll roads that after we stop for lunch we’re broke. Just credit cards left. The whole family searches between seat cushions for loose change. The country is quiet. That’s the first thing. Everything, so far apart. Everything green. It’s James Fennimore Cooper country, land of the Last of the Mohicans. I read this in the material: Fennimore Cooper was 13 when he entered Yale, and 16 went he joined the Navy. He was in a great hurry it seems, and on reflection, I’ve not hurried enough. Travelers come here searching for the Holy Grail of baseball and to find an antidote, an anatomical opposite to their lives lived between streets and avenues, on cul-de-sacs. They find it in Cooperstown, at Lake Otsego, and many consider moving here. Geographically, Cooperstown sits between the shoulders of the Adirondacks to the north and the Catskills to the south. The place, like America, is full of churches. “Most major denominations are represented in Cooperstown” says the town Web site. “The places of worship are worthy of a tour of their own.” There’s talk of Tiffany and the Presbyterians, stained-glass Catholics, Episcopalian architecture. We do not see a single church when we go there. The backdrop, the scenery, is movie-set picturesque: rolling pine hills, maples and oaks at water’s edge, the dark glassy lake, the “glimmer glass” lake as Fennimore Cooper called it and now we do, too. It’s the perfect location for a summer camp, for a movie about a summer camp full of wild teenagers. Summer camp movies are not filmed in summer camps. I know this because I’m from California. They are filmed in Burbank on a back lot. That’s the point of movie magic, the fooling us. This is a real trip, by the way, with an itinerary and road map. We leave NYC at dawn and work to get here by early afternoon, get to the two-room cabin we’ve rented for the weekend at the edge of Lake Otsego and open it up. We watch the leaves change at 85 miles an hour out the car window. We plan on a lot of things: taking photographs of the boys in nature to send to friends in California, picking through the Hall of Fame, standing on Doubleday Field, towing the children out of the gift shop when we, again, get down to credit cards. The boys plan on buying several personalized miniature bats as souvenirs for friends, and bags and bags of caramel corn. It’s a plan that in large part we stick to. Statistics matter here; they’re the backbone of baseball, the skeletal structure. An accurate database is all that separates the baseball fanatic from the poser, from someone who just reads box scores out of newspapers. Over 300,000 people visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame each year. The high season runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day. There’s a Hall of Fame Weekend in July when the place is packed. The place is overrun, really. There are no rooms anywhere. There are so many people staying on the shores of Lake Otsego that septic tanks rupture. Local ecologists armed with statistics of their own point fingers and remind people about runoff and Phosphorous in the water. Phosphorous in the water is their greatest concern. We go to Cooperstown during the off-season, just before the great snows settle over everything. There’s rain now, the turning of the last leaves, the remains of summer: silent piers, beached canoes, sun-bleached sail boats folded up. If you do as I did on my first morning here, you’ll leave your cabin sleeping and walk down to the lake alone. You’ll hear only water rubbing against the edge of the beach, a muffled motor on the other shore. You’ll hear silence, which turns out to be an unrelenting high-picked ringing in your ears. The ringing will alarm you and may consider a visit to the doctor. You should also know that by the time we get to Cooperstown we’ve been living in New York for four months and are exhausted by it. So, this is a vacation in every sense of the word. Being on vacation and being from California we’re obsessed with real estate, interested in buying-in early, visiting weekend open houses. We find old farm houses with acreage going cheap in the papers, lake front property cheaper than eastern New Jersey. My wife and I discuss moving here when the boys are down for a nap, only because winter has not arrived yet. It’s winter, finally, that drives us out of New York all together, out of the Catskills, off the Atlantic. Its winter and crazy people with whom we work. The museum, the Hall of Fame, is full of men dressed in their favorite team’s jersey, in matching caps, with sons in tow if they have them. Men linger here the longest. Men leave small groups of widows with their arms folded waiting by the bookstore, or out walking the streets of the Village. We start our Hall of Fame tour like we’re supposed to. We watch The Baseball Experience in the Grandstand Theater on the second floor. We spill out the doors and crowd into the exhibits. There are three floors in all. There is plenty to keep you busy. There’s the early history of baseball in sepia tones, yellowing papers behind glass. There’s modern history in color. Modern history is what interests the boys because it seems like ancient history to them already. I want them to linger in “Scribes & Mikemen,” to stop and read the exhibits about the journalists, the radio men. They aren’t so interested, though. They are interested in standing on Doubleday Field. We leave the museum after three hours and make our way to Doubleday Field, the birthplace of baseball, the very piece of soil. We find a game going on, something official between dueling sets of early teenagers. The wooden stands are modern, but look historic. You get the feeling you’re seeing baseball for the first time, which seems to be the point of the place: the museum, the town, the lake, all of nature. After the game, my boys go down on the field and run the bases. They can’t believe their luck. They ask to go next door to the arcade with the batting cages and we agree. Afterwards, we head back to the lake tired and full. The next morning, in essence, we start home. We leave Cooperstown first, then later the Catskills and New York, DC, the East. We return home to California and decide to stay put. We decide California is the place we are from and that we will never call another place home. Later, the next year, Noah hits junior high and falls in love with the Red Sox. He argues that this happened sooner, that he has for years harbored a silent passion for the defeat-able. However, this turns out to be the year the Red Sox “reverse the curse” (a term he despises) and beat the Yankees, then the Cardinals. The year they win everything. After the Red Sox win everything, though, Noah mopes around the house and does not talk of baseball at all. It’s as if he’s realized that victory has no good purpose, that its pleasure is short lived and leaves you no where to go. In algebra Noah meets a teacher whose husband runs statistics for Major League Baseball. Because he can, Noah creates his own crude statistical models. Noah tells me he’s come up with a model that illustrates the probability of a batter bringing a runner home from second base. Noah explains it to me in simple terms on a piece of lined, hole-punched notebook paper. Noah explains so that even I can understand. I tell him he’s done a good thing. I tell him everyone wants to know the probability of bringing a man home. He smiles and laughs and for a moment feels good about everything.	The Biography of the Old Beggar Woman I am a little historian, a small scholar. This is a piece of my criticism, a critique of a short-short story one paragraph long. The Old Beggar Woman is all present tense, all Brothers Grimm, all about what happens now with no back-story. Before we meet the old woman in her rags, before she knocks at the door of the rogue child and bad things occur, I wonder what leads her here. I wonder about her peculiar predicament. The old beggar woman, like me, grows up at the edge of a great dark forest, in the shade of an ancient spruce. Like me, she is the last born. She is of average intelligence, a baby-come-late in a marriage already strained by deferred hopes and tight finances. Still, she goes to school, makes friends with the forest animals: the snakes and rats and rabbits. She eats plenty of groceries. Her eldest brother, like my own, is a veteran of a foreign war, then a hippie who makes jewelry out of gold wire and milky opals and sells them on Market Street. He’s a street seller. He’s the black sheep of the family until history proves he is normal and average. And then he isn’t. The middle child of the old beggar woman’s family, like my own middle brother, is very popular in school. He is a star athlete and well-liked by girls. He has girlfriends with names like Hope and Faith who crochet him afghans in every shade of green. He marries early and then divorces. Still, he manages to be friendly with his ex-wife and together they raise two astonishing children. His children have children, and so on. The middle brother, like my brother, now cobbles together hand-made cowboy boots that cost thousands of US dollars and can be purchased over the Internet. (A side note: less than 5% of all shoes sold in the U.S. are actually made here.) Somehow, though, even with this fine start and many riches of mind and manner, the girl grows up soft and helpless, an old beggar woman. A sense of entitlement hangs heavy from her neck like a rope of Quartz and does her no good. Soon, it’s God’s pleasure to ruin her life. God lets her mother and father fall ill and die after eating a rabbit stew that she herself had prepared. It takes just two sentences to ruin a life. Is it a situation of her own making, or not? This is a good question. For a time she lives in her parent’s house. She does not know how to keep it, though, and it soon fills with garbage. The roof leaks whenever there’s the slightest rain. The forest animals sleep on her counters and in her cupboards. With no means of supporting herself and no get-rich-quick schemes in her simple head, she takes off one day with just the clothes on her back and the smallest sense of wonder needed to propel her story forward. The girl wanders from house to hamlet for over 70 years, still wearing the old dress she donned the day she abandoned her life. She lives off the kindness of strangers, which we learn is fickle. It rises and falls with the forest economy. Though it’s her nature to keep to herself, when her growing hunger makes her dizzy, she stops at the first house she comes to and knocks upon the door. It is here, worn down by happenstance and possessing a weak character at the age of 83, that we meet the old beggar woman knocking upon the door of the friendly-seeming rogue boy. The boy opens his cottage door dressed in a red velvet pant suit. He is not even 10 years old, she imagines, and yet he tells her he lives there alone. He smiles and his teeth look like broken pickets. He invites her in to warm herself and to have bread and butter. The old beggar woman is mesmerized by how well the boy keeps himself, by his slicked-back black hair. His oiliness should be a warning. The boy is all smiles and broken fences. He tilts his head to the right when he speaks and his eyes sparkle, unnaturally. The old beggar woman enters the house to warm herself while the boy prepares her meal. She bows her head and offers the boy thanks, “May God reward you,” she says. While the boy is busy in the kitchen the old woman moves close to the fire, her back begging to be warmed. When the boy finally arrives back with the woman’s bread and the butter in hand, he finds the old woman ablaze, her ragged dress a cape of fire. The old woman does not notice and so does not move. What happens next is translated directly from the German, from the Brothers Grimm,“…but she was not aware of it. The boy stood and saw that, but he ought to have put the flames out. And if he could not find any water, then he should have wept all the water in his body out of his eyes, and that would have supplied two fine streams with which to extinguish them.” But, the boy does not cry two fine streams. The boy does not say a word. The old beggar woman dissolves into the flames. The end. With the beggar woman gone, we are left to worry over the boy. What to make of him? Certainly, he was disappointed to find himself a secondary character in a minor tale, not part of a marquee fable like Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood. We could blame his actions on his upbringing, I suppose. He did come from a nervous mother and an inattentive father. His father was a butcher and so he ruined animals for a living. Maybe this is why the boy grew up crooked as an elm tree. Maybe this is why he chopped the heads off sunflowers as an infant, before he could speak. Maybe this is why he dropped small farm animals from the top of the barn. It was not that the boy fell into the wrong crowd because he had no companions at all. So, maybe that’s it, without friend or foe the boy was ruined, like the cabbages he murdered and the yellow squash and the buckets of red apples. Or, perhaps alone and adrift the boy just searched for some pleasure that was not pain like the rest of us. Perhaps that’s the lesson itself.