On most Major League Baseball Opening Days, I play hooky and watch the Cubs. But on this Opening Day, there is no game to watch and nothing to play hooky from.

Opening Day’s significance lies in the sense of hope it provides. After all, it is the one day that the Cubs are guaranteed to be tied for first place.

More broadly, in terms of hope, Opening Day symbolizes springtime, rescue and renewal from the depths of winter, reward for the faith that hope engenders. Opening Day is another expression of the metaphor contained within Easter and Passover.

On most other Opening Days, we congregate at Clark and Addison, pressed body on body, inching our way toward the gates. Then we enter to the familiar, the sound of the same program hawker forever, the smells of popcorn and beer.

As we rise, walking the steps and ramps, we catch a glimpse of the field and our hearts race. Then, emerging from the tunnel that leads to our aisle, we see a sea of green.

Each shade is different, the ancient scoreboard pale and washed out compared with the rich outfield grass and the deep forest tint of the seats. All those greens mean hope. Even the missing green, the not-yet-grown-in ivy, signals hope because we know those leaves will return soon.

Even with so much hope wrapped up in Opening Day, the loss of today’s occasion to the Coronavirus crisis is no cause for despair. Coming of age and becoming a Cubs fan in the last years of Ernie Banks’ career, I was inspired by his famous, “Let’s play two.”

Enduring some of the worst seasons in baseball history, Mr. Cub still wanting to play two was a clear call to look on the bright side. Cubs fans are optimists. Although Opening Day won’t happen today, it will someday.

Next post in this series: Wolf Pack Ninjas Campaign

Series starts at Coronavirus Diary: Introduction

The last few days at my running hill at Seal Point Park, I have seen an amazing display of athleticism. After my regular 20-minute HIIT run on Sunday, stretching on the turf at the foot of the hill, I noticed a young woman balancing on one foot, her other leg stretched parallel to the ground, a perfect 90-degree angle. You can see that in most yoga classes, but while in that pose, she was doing resistance band work that surely should have toppled her.

I’d never seen that before, so I watched for a while and soon could not look away, because when she released the pose, she shook and shimmied like one of those undulating tube man balloons in front of an auto dealership, but with no break in the fluidity, and then she flowed into a regimen that showed unwavering strength and precise form – board-straight push-ups on one fist or both, sometimes with a leg lifted – mixed with yoga, dance, runway model struts, stretches, splits, knees-past-her-nose karate kicks, and Cirque du Soleil-caliber contortionism.

It was sheer joy of motion embodied. Her routine seemed at once both spontaneous and choreographed. That impossibility illustrates how the bending body can bend the mind.

Today, answering my request from the prescribed six-foot distance, Lucy gave me permission to shoot video. In these Coronavirus days, this experience is the closest I get to watching live sports and provides new understanding of why that activity is so valuable.

One reason is that in much of the rest of daily life, you pretty much know what you’re going to see. Although some facets of sports are predictable, our games are set up to deliver surprises. Even if the scoreboard doesn’t deliver on that count, the individual instances of improbable reactions and responses of able bodies and minds can still shock and awe.

Another reason to value watching live sports is the admiration, the aesthetic appreciation, of feats we cannot manage but can imagine performing. Even before Sunday, I had tried every single move in Lucy’s repertoire and completed exactly none of them.

You may feel the same about painting or playing guitar or auto repair or wealth accumulation. I’ve never given any of those an earnest try. But when you know how hard it is to do the thing you’re seeing someone else do, and when you think of what must have gone into getting them there, you can’t help but have hope that whatever you put your most into will happen.

Next post in this series: Coronavirus Diary: Opening Day

Series starts at Coronavirus Diary: Introduction

Monday, March 16, the Bay Area counties issued their shelter-in-place order to start the next day. Unsure of the restrictions, we ran all the errands we could think of that we might not be able to run the next day. Or for the duration of the order.

Client emails arrived, revising project priorities and timing. Most essentially said, “Stand down.” I submitted an article to Saint Thomas Academy, a revised poetry curriculum to Citizen Schools on the off chance that middle-school students would return to McKinley Institute of Technology this school year, and a draft email for Fit Kids to send as an update to its community whenever the time was right.

Our local Safeway looked Soviet. Lengthy lines wound around mostly bare shelves. I took one look and left, because by then it was clear that the shelter-in-place order set for Tuesday would exempt grocery shopping. On Tuesday, the store was empty enough to quickly shop for the few necessities in stock, but it wasn’t until Thursday morning that I found a package of toilet paper, the last one left.

Fortunately, the shelter order also exempted outdoor exercise. I did my normal HIIT run on the hill at Seal Point Park every day, followed by the stretches prescribed by my clients at Ferox Yoga. This routine seemed more critical than ever to keep depression from creeping up and over me during the Coronavirus crisis.

Fighting depression won’t be easy, knowing how many people the Coronavirus afflicts and bracing for the day that number includes people I love. It will be a challenge to balance watching enough media to stay informed but not enough to be overwhelmed.  It will help when that media consumption offers posts like this from one of my Wolf Pack Ninja clients, Travis Brewer.

Next post in this series: Coronavirus Diary: New Live Sports

Series starts at Coronavirus Diary: Introduction