When I was about thirteen my parents decided to have a pond dug on our property--3/4 of an acre, and deep as the contractors could haul it without getting the equipment stuck in the grade. Deep, of course, meant that the contractors had to displace a lot of dirt.
Normally backfill dirt is pushed around the area surrounding a pond, so that the dirt not only looks like it's part of the grand design (after some grass grows on it, that is) but so the pond appears deeper. But my mother would have none of that--she loved to travel, and her intention was to have her own mountain. Now, anyone who has seen that movie with Hugh Grant or has lived with in the mountainous parts of the world knows how high a mountain actually is, and we tried to correct the semantics on this one for Mom. In fact, the running joke was that this was not only not a mountain but it probably couldn't even be considered a hill--more like a "mosquito bite." But my mother stood fast--"Don't make fun of my mountain."
I don't anymore.
I climb a "mountain," too.
*****
It's no secret that I love the San Francisco Giants--in case you've forgotten, you can refresh your memory here. One of my favorite players on the team drifts back and forth along the infielder positions, and his name is Pablo Sandoval. In 2009 Pablo looked like the next Barry Bonds--making every pitch into a hit or a homer, with one exception...Pablo was happier than Bonds. You couldn't miss it--it was all over his face.
Pablo was happy ALL THE TIME. He was happy batting, happy in the dugout, happy blowing a big pink bubblegum bubble just as he caught and threw a fielded out. They started calling him the Kung Fu Panda, just like the cartoon, or Panda for short.
Last year, in 2010, something changed. Panda spent the season losing his batting average and adding pounds, and became quiet. It was hard to watch Panda benched. He looked benched in the body and the face. All that happy, gone.
My coworkers laughed at him, blaming food and food only, and Pablo's lack of willpower with food. I thought at first something was injured, somewhere, but he wasn't on the DL. You don't go on the DL for a broken heart.
I hesitate to give away too many details of Pablo's story from 2010, because a good measure of it could be rumor. But the rumors, what I heard after the season in December, made sense. Pablo was going through some personal life experiences last year that would make some tough guys cringe, but what was worse was that he was trying not to let the camera see these problems. In covering up the problem, he created a new one--get out of shape and sad (and worse, useless at what he loved) in front of the camera. When I found out what created all of this, I found myself to be a little rankled at all of the jokesters.
When you get what you want but not what you need, writes and sings Coldplay, and I got the feeling someone saw that need in Pablo on a level of friendship. Pablo knew he was out of a job if he couldn't start hitting, and he couldn't hit with the extra physical and emotional garbage hanging on him. So he worked with a trainer. They took him to hills, hot and sandy, in Arizona, and told him to run up those hills.
I'm sure to him, at the bottom both literally and figuratively, those hills looked like a mountains.
Lost souls, creating what they can't find but desperately need. My mother created a mountain out of a hill, and my happy hero leveled mountains. Today Number 48 for the San Francisco Giants brings a higher batting average than weight scale reading, which was not the case in 2010. Does he look any different? From the chin down, a little. Pablo has genetics and frame working against him to even think of being mistaken for Nyjer Morgan. But that face...oh, it breaks the heart. He's beautiful. He's that kind of unabashedly happy that I haven't seen in eleven years, that happy that takes the observer by surprise with its innocence and complete lack of agenda, the happy my mother used to have.
Have mountain. Will travel.
*****
There is a hill six blocks from my apartment, formally called "Grand View Park" because, once climbed, it gives you a view of almost the entire City, as well as Daly City to the south, the Golden Gate Bridge to the north, and the ocean to the west. To many locals in the neighborhood it is called Moraga Hill, named for the street that the hill severs between 15th and 16th Avenues.
Moraga Hill is steep--like many hills in the City--and there are sets of stairs on the east and west sides. The stairs on the west side are a zigzag set of wooden steps, like a vertical boardwalk. Those on the east side--my approach--are concrete, half drifted with sand, sometimes slippery with fog or rain. Each flight on the east side has a small landing. Sometimes, depending on my body, I have to stop one of the landings to catch my breath. I'm hoping that won't always be the case, and little by little I get to a higher and higher landing before I have to stop.
There are seven flights of stairs up the hill.
Do I want to climb the steps when I get up in the morning? Hell, no. It's work. Sometimes the fog is so thick that there's no view. (I call those my treehouse days--the fog closes in walls in the sky.) Regardless of the day I come down from the hill sweating and steaming like a Budweiser Clydesdale.
Do I need to climb the mountain? Hell, yes. I like my writing so much better when I get back to the apartment and scribble a few notes, fresh from the air, streaming sea spray and perspiration. Dogs meet me on the walk back and I offer my hand, knuckles first and slow, and they sniff and lick the salt deposit with absolute...unabashed...joy.
Onward, dear reader.
P.S. - This song is where the inspiration for today's post of Life for Rent comes from. Marvin is so dreamy... :)
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