This Sporting Life

I still dream of being a sportswriter, and the dreams are always bad. Most often they’re deadline dreams where I can’t find my computer or I’ve lost my game notes. Where I show up for a game long after it’s over. Where someone is yelling at me over the telephone and I hang up and quit. Trust me, they’re awful. It’s been twenty-two years since I wrote my last newspaper story and I still have the dreams.

Most of my dreams have one foot in reality. Contrary to popular belief, being a sportswriter is hard work. You work late and get up early. You work on holidays and weekends and spend a lot of time on airplanes or waiting for one. (A friend of mine joked that she knew it was time to retire when she went to a friend’s house for dinner and reached for her seatbelt). Also, you don’t get to turn off the TV when the game gets ridiculous. You have to sit around long after the carnage is over and figure out how to frame a compelling narrative for an awful game.

I can’t speak to how the profession is now, but it used to be a lot harder for women. There was the locker room thing, of course. The doors opened grudgingly, often as a result of legal challenges, and once inside, I learned to follow a code of etiquette in order to survive. I learned to look up, never down, at a gigantic naked man. After skidding off a piece of wet tape and nearly falling, I learned never to wear heels. I learned, as poor Lisa Olson evidently did not, never, ever to sit and be idle, lest I be accused of peeping. And I learned from a Now-Famous Veteran Reporter how to deal with a gigantic naked man who insisted on flashing me whenever I came within whiffing distance. “Tell him you’ve seen better burritos on a Chihuahua,” NFVR counseled me.

I started thinking about all this after reading the “Fifth Down Blog, ”a regular interactive feature in the online edition of the New York Times. In this particular blog, readers posed questions for Judy Battista, the paper’s beat reporter for the Jets. “K in MD,” for example, wondered whether clock management “is a quarterback issue or a coaching issue? I ask this after watching Chad Pennington’s problems in the last two minutes last week.” Ian, meanwhile, asked Ms. Battista’s opinion of rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez, whether he can replicate “the success of Joe Flacco and Matt Ryan in their rookie season.”

Not surprisingly, her answers were comprehensive and thorough. The real surprise for me was the implicit level of respect accorded to her by her questioners. And yeah, okay, I realize the blog is refereed by NYT editors to circumvent the occasional nutball who might believe a woman’s place is in the home, not the press box. But I wager to say that if blogs had existed a quarter century ago when I covered sports, there would have been a lot more “It’s back to the kitchen for you, girlie,” instead of a mutually respectful dialogue between reporter and reader.

Evolution?

Novel Issues. . . .

Unstuck again. Full speed ahead.

A Good Yarn, Part II

A Diet High in Fiber

One of the best things about living up here on

the North Coast of the United State is our proximity to diverse landscapes. Go north a few miles and you'll hit the south shore of Lake Ontario. Go west and you'll enter the Niagara Escarpment. Go south and east and you'll more than likely come across one of the eleven Finger Lakes. If you look at a map, you'll see the lakes resemble the thin fingers of an invisible hand spread across Western New York. But I like to imagine the lakes were created when a giant's hand came down out of the sky and raked his fingers through the earth.

In addition to being the second-largest wine region in the United States, the lakes are also home to a number of fiber artists, many of whom took part in last weekend's Finger Lakes Fiber Arts Festival in Hemlock. My sister Penny and I drove down on Sunday and spent

a couple of hours fondling the most beautiful yarn I'd ever seen or felt, most of it hand-dyed and spun. We also petted a couple of alpacas (they have very soft necks) and held a huge white angora bunny. We dropped in on a sheep herding demonstration, where (as my sister pointed out) it seemed like the dog was having a lot more fun than the sheep. In fact, the sheep reminded me a little of my students at the end of a long semester ("What? This shit again?"). They were hilarious, but my favorite animal, hands-down, was the goat in the picture above, who seemed fascinated by a toddler in a stroller. I think he looks like Jeff Spicoli, the Sean Penn character from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." What do you think?

I bought two skeins of sale yarn. But I could have spent a fortune.

The Tangled Skein

Writing last week was crappy. Really. For four days straight, I showed up and banged away at the keys only to end up deleting most of what I wrote. Nothing is more frustrating. I compare it to knitting where you realize you made a REALLY OBVIOUS mistake on an intricate cable pattern three inches ago and so, in order to live with yourself and start sleeping at night again, you just have to rip it out.

But there's another analogy between writing and knitting that I call "the tanged skein." If it sits around long enough, yarn has a mysterious way of getting tangled up. Before you can start knitting again, you have to sit down and untangle the skein. It's tedious and takes patience, but if you stick with it, you get to a place where the yarn seems to smooth itself out and fall away from the skein the way it's supposed to.

I think writing is like that, too. Often you have to go back to where the knot is--the line in the poem that doesn't work, or the character action in a story that feels out of character or forced-- and undo the tangle. In writing, this means delete, move stuff around, start again: whatever works. Eventually you write yourself right.

If all else fails, you can knit.

A Good Yarn

My Name is Sarah and I'm a Knitter . . . .

I posted a picture of my cats on Facebook a couple weeks ago and got some interesting comments. Some sharp-eyed readers honed in on the plastic bins the cats were sitting on, more specifically, what was in those bins.

Yes, it's yarn. Yes, I knit.

God, I feel so much

better now that that's out.

Actually, I've been knitting on and off for most of my life, but I took it up more consistently in 1984. That was the year I quit smoking (cigarettes) and needed something to do with my hands that wasn't lighting and/or stubbing out Newports. So knitting it was. I knit sweaters for myself, my sisters, my mother, and my friends. I knit mittens and gloves and hats and scarves and when I wasn't knitting, I was chewing on my knitting needles because I so badly wanted to smoke a cigarette. Eventually that addiction faded away, but I've kept knitting, especially in the fall. How else can I excuse my addiction to NFL on CBS or the baseball playoffs?

Last year I knit my three sisters and five of my friends fingerless gloves in all colors of the spectrum. This year, in an effort to be kind to the environment and to my bank account, I'm going to knit a multi-colored blanket using scrap yarn in my bins, donations from friends, and recycled wool from thrift shop sweaters. I plan to knit until the end of the year and will blog my progress at various times, with pictures.

The Other Yarn

Revision on the novel is progressing nicely. I finished the Section I on Thursday and will begin to tackle Section 2, the part I wrote this summer, tomorrow.

I've been revising poems as well. Such fun . . .