Creative History

“They were merely walking skeletons without clothes to cover their nakedness...covered with lice and vermin from head to foot.” --Captain Alexander Coffin prisoner aboard HMS Jersey 1781 As day breaks you can see it rising like a flat-topped hill in the distance.  The gutted hulk sitting there motionless and sunk in the mudflats of Wallabout Bay that you’ve heard about in rumors, the most infamous of rumors, among men in the army.  Your heart rate quickens as your footsteps take you closer. While you’re still over two hundred yards away from it, already, you can smell it.  The stench of the combined filth and decay of over 1,000 starving and dying men being lifted to your nostrils as it’s borne aloft by the early morning breeze. Your knees tremble.  You feel faint and think of running away.  But one glance to the right and left and you see the Redcoats standing guard over you and you realize that any attempt at escape will end either with a British bayonet thrust between yo

Nearly 100 years ago in his Postmodern poetic masterpiece The Wasteland T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month”.  Little did he know how prophetic his words would become for all of us less than a full century later. We face an April, as baseball fans, during which the baseball season has been indefinitely put on hold for the safety of the nation.  We, as Americans, face an April without our national game being played professionally for the first time since 1883.  We face the possibility of a long hot summer, a chilly darkening fall, and a barren stark and freezing winter all without baseball. But take solace baseball fans because it could be worse. I’m not talking about worse in the sense that a thermonuclear war, living through the Black Death of the 14th century or a War of the Worlds type extraterrestrial invasion could all be worse than the current Covid-19 pandemic that we are going through at present because, sadly, it remains to be seen how truly calamitou