New Moon by Richard Grossinger

applauded wildly, other kids joining in like the 1939 crowd. It seemed strange that, when he spoke those happy words to a full house at Yankee Stadium five years before we were born, Gehrig was dying of a fatal disease—strange too that we replicated them so lightly, taking on the role of the doomed hero. Yet as I performed them, I felt a sense of honor and reverence—a chill down my spine. More than Abraham Lincoln’s “Fourscore and seven years ago …,” it was the most important speech in the universe or at least the most important that I knew.

3
U NCLE P AUL
    I arrived at Miss Hazel’s second grade still behind. I could read, but I couldn’t make all the letters in script and didn’t know how to carry over columns in addition and subtraction. I left puddles on the floor, so the teacher sat me apart with newspapers under my desk. I plucked Landmark books off nearby shelves and read them while others worked: the Louisiana purchase, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Wright Brothers, the Panama Canal, the Winter at Valley Forge, Pocahontas and John Smith. These myths became my alternate education as well as my basic map of America to which all later ones had to conform. It is still my phenomenological America, sealed by the Pony Express and a last golden spike joining transcontinental railroad lines from the east and west in Utah Territory.
    On the day of the seventh game of the 1952 World Series I felt dizzy, so I was taken to the nurse’s office and sent home. Bridey helped me change into PJs. As cartoon figures danced with oversized letters in my brain, I dozed in and out of sleep.
    I awoke with a start in the seventh inning. The Yankees were up 4-2, but the bases were loaded with Dodgers. Bob Kuzava was coming in from the bullpen in relief of Vic Raschi. Eddie Lopat and Allie Reynolds had preceded him: the Yankees’ three main starters all used. I took out Kuzava’s card and reviewed his career. The whole season was on the line, and a journeyman southpaw was about to face mighty Duke Snider and Jackie Robinson.
    Then Billy Martin, racing out of nowhere as the other infieldersstood paralyzed, made a lunging catch of Robinson’s infield fly near the mound, a second pop-up in a row induced by the unlikely hero. I cheered out loud. “A great hunch by Casey,” Mel Allen declared. “I was sure it would backfire.”
    “Home sick, are you?” laughed Bridey. Ramon, the elevator man, had told her I was playing “World Series hookey.” (He spelled his name R-a-m-o-n, but it was pronounced “Ramone.”)
    But if I wasn’t sick, why did I fall into such a whirligig trance and miss most of the game?
    One afternoon the principal of P.S. 6 called Mommy in for a conference. He said that I was either brain-damaged or mentally ill. He required a medical affidavit if I was to continue.
    What I remember is a day of no school and a trip downtown in a taxi, sportive but ominous. My mother took my arm as we turned the street corner into a hospital-like structure. There a doctor led me down a hall, but, to my relief, he didn’t ask me to take off my clothes or even have an examining table. Instead we sat on opposite sides of a counter where he set before me a series of mazes and puzzles. When I finished solving these he reached into his drawer for a box and, one by one, put down large cards with pictures that I had to interpret for him. I looked at drawings of people peeking around doors, of weird cloud-like houses and groups of men and women doing unexplained things and, as requested, made up stories for them. I viewed rows of faces of strange characters, some with large warts, moustaches, or eyeglasses, and said which ones I’d go out with or wouldn’t. Then he pulled out a page of twisted shapes and asked me to sort them.
    Finally I studied a necklace of different colors and shapes of beads, memorized their positions and restrung them. “Perfect,” the doctor acclaimed.