This morning, while you poor bastards were all in your offices, busy with whatever it is you poor bastards do in those places, I was drinking bourbon in a dugout down at the empty Little League diamond, working hard not to buy a newspaper

or to care if the earth forgot its path and fell into the sun. Then, from somewhere deep in right field, a voice said, "Hold on now. I think it might just rain soon." And at the very moment I heard this voice, an old man rode up to the backstop

on a rusty ten-speed. Watching me there, he took the lollipop from his mouth and shook it at me like a purple scepter. "Young man," he said, "I am not afraid of your flatulent gods or their pretty earthquakes. I am here to say this: My tongue

is a flaming serpent of the truth, and with its twin fangs I will melt the tar of mourning out of all your blackened souls. Woe to him who tries to prevent it!" With that, he was gone, and when, a few minutes later, the storm blew up, I walked

out and sat down in the batter's box on the third base side. For an hour, or more, I didn't move, understanding (somehow) that on such a morning, in such weather, with such voices in his ears, in the mud at home plate was precisely where

a good man ought to be. And though, in all that time, not one of you bastards ever looked out your window to watch me there, drinking in the rain, still, I know that, once the melting starts, we will, each of us - somewhere - be forgiven.