The athletics-entertainment machine, especially at the professional level, never fails to bring us a parade of behaviors that, if it were our own children acting out so, would make us want to crawl behind the nearest rock in shame and disgrace. Every game from bouncing balls to twirling on the ice to driving around in circles real fast has its Hall of Shame inductees. Go back at least to Ty Cobb<fn>At least…we have no way of knowing, but I’m willing to bet that the guys who were winning marathons in ancient Greece were probably over-indulged boobs themselves.</fn> and bring it on up to today.

It makes sense. Elite athletes are among the most pampered and cosseted class of people around. They’ve spent most of their lives being told how special they are. When they find themselves in trouble, there are often legions of protectors to make their troubles go away.<fn>As long as they continue to perform, naturally. Failure to excel means exile. It’s a helluva motivator.</fn>

It’s one part of why I really don’t follow the sports world in any detail. I’ll watch a game here and there (hockey is once again tickling my interest for an hour at a time), but I really don’t care what happens.<fn>As long as the fucking Yankees take a kick to the junk on a regular basis. Fuck the fucking Yankees.</fn>

Except for tennis. I love tennis, and this week finds us midway through the Australian Open, the first major tournament of the year. The time difference makes watching it live a little hard, but I check the results every day, even after my second favorite player ever – and perhaps the best ever, period – Roger Federer was eliminated. Watching him play has been a big piece of My Favorite World for years.<fn>Also, too…David Foster Wallace wrote a profile of Federer for the NYTimes magazine years ago, and it’s my favorite piece of writing on any sport, ever. Do yourself a favor…</fn> But even with Federer out of the tournament, there’s still plenty to love.

What really makes tennis stand out right now is that most of the top players in the men’s game consistently behave with remarkable style and grace. Don’t misunderstand. Tennis is filled with entitled schmucks, just like any other sport.<fn>The elite women have more than a fair share of prima donnas, though there are a few coming along now who threaten to upend the game with style, wit, and grace. Eugenie Bouchard and Madison Keys…I’m looking at you, ladies. Brava!</fn> Of the top five men, four always show class and sportsmanship. Federer’s speaking, like his game, is elegant and deceptively smooth. Rafael Nadal, who may be the second best player ever behind Federer, has had the good luck to have a rival in Federer who brings out his own generous and elegant nature. Novak Djokovich,who’s making his own case for joining the ‘best ever’ bracket, settled in as third wheel in this rivalry with incredible humor and a style all his own. And now, Stan Warwinka is making a run at the top tier, and as a Davis Cup teammate and countryman of Federer, he’s had a great role model for how to behave like a champion.<fn>Pro tip: it has nothing to do with stepping on an opponent lying on the ground, for example.</fn>

These guys, especially the top 3 of Federer, Nadal, and Djokovich, demonstrate great skill and ruthless intensity on the court, but it never devolves into trash talking or strutting. <fn>I deliberately do not include Andy Murray in this group. His playing is often superb. But geebus, what a whiny dick.</fn>

The piece of the Aussie Open that really hits My Favorite World this week came in an early round match between Nadal and Tim Smyczek, ranked 112th in the world, present in the Open through the grueling qualifier process, and given no realistic chance of beating the top-ranked Nadal. But he gave Rafa a hard match, and was within reach of a fifth set victory. And as Nadal was struggling to win the set up 6-5, someone in the crowd let out an intentionally distracting shriek as Nadal was in his serve motion. He shanked the serve. And Smyczek, who could have used the moment to regain the advantage, did what too many people call “unthinkable”. As the crowd was booing the noisy jerk for his rudeness, Smyczek raised two fingers to indicate that Nadal should receive a do-over on the disrupted serve.

This is about the same as offering a batter a fourth strike, or letting an opposing team have another shot at first down because something was distracting. Try to imagine any other sport where someone within a whisker of pulling off the greatest victory of his career would do such a thing.

The chair umpire was amazed. The crowd was amazed. Nadal’s team gave Smyczek a standing ovation. Even Nadal was amazed, but given a reprieve he quickly served the game out for the match. Think of it…you’re that close to beating one of the best in the history of the game, and you elect sportsmanship over cutthroat. Asked after the match why he did what he did, Smyczek replied:

I know my parents would have killed me if I didn’t. It was the right thing to do.”

We grow weary of watching people time and again twist conditions to gain advantage – because to let the opportunity to take advantage pass by has come to be adjudged ‘loser’ behavior. We are often certain that we are being lied to or manipulated by people who long ago ran out of shits to give about whether or not their parents would approve of their choices. But here, in this favorite game of mine, involving one of my favorite players, an unknown kid from the Midwest made himself one of my new favorites through a simple act of decency.

Courtesy. Decency. Style and grace. Tim Smyczek. My Favorite World.

I’ve been listening to a bunch of Jim Hall recordings lately. This one, a duet with Ron Carter from 1972, exemplifies so much of what I love about the music called jazz.

It’s all there…the playfulness, the attentive listening. More than anything, the sense of two people having a real conversation while never saying a word.

Jim Hall died at the end of 2013 at the age of 83. Along the way, he wrote a few of the definitive chapters on what’s possible with a guitar. He played smooth, he played cool, he played hot. He could play inside with great taste and economy, as in this Cole Porter classic with the Paul Desmond Quartet. (1959)

But Hall was also an adventurer, and he was one of few the cool guitar guys to embrace the heat and risk the expanded harmonic challenges necessary to keep up with someone like Sonny Rollins. Here’s some terrific footage from that era (1962).

Jim Hall was widely praised as a generous teacher, as well, and spent time with Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, and Julian Lage, helping these guys find their own voice and navigate the dark trench of the music industry. The following link is a full set of Hall’s trio with Lage at Newport, recorded just a few months before Hall died in 2013. It might be the best hour you spend this week.

Jim Hall Trio w Julian Lage, Live at Newport Jazz (via NPR)

Nothing new in any of this…unless this is the first you’ve heard of Jim Hall. He kept playing well into his 83rd year, and every step of the way he was listening closely and responding with taste and honesty. His work, his legacy…a big part of My Favorite World.

I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie

The astute follower of this blog<fn>The use if the definite article is pessimistically intentional.</fn> will have noticed that your Narrator loves books. Almost daily I add three or four titles to my “must read” list. It’s great to look at the list in anticipation of great reads to come. It is also to despair: so many books, so little time. We do what we can.

One of my favorite places of any kind is a good bookstore. When we lived on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, the nearest bookstore was a Barnes and Nobles about 35 miles away. The family would sojourn there for a Friday night’s outing, and as soon as we opened the door, the smell of paper and glue and coffee would turn me into a ravenous book beast. Everybody went their separate way, and we would meet back at the cafe about 30 minutes later. Because the store was so far from home, I would turn up with an armload of books, because who knew how long it might be before I returned. Better safe than stuck without a book.

Occasionally we would travel and find ourselves in a town with a great, independent bookstore. In Asheville there was Malaprops, a truly magical place. Here, my frenzy was even more pronounced. Because who knew how long it would be until I found myself in a great, indie bookstore? Two armloads, minimum. Beach trips to the Forgotten Coast always begin with a trip to Sundog Books where everybody picks out their reads for the vacation.

You get the idea.

When we moved to our current humble burg, no indie local store of this sort existed.<fn>Purely used book vendors are a different breed, and awesome on their own terms, but not what I’m talking about here.</fn> Sure, there was a Borders (now gone) and a B&N and a Books-A-Million.<fn>In my snark, renamed Books a Dozen and a bunch of other crap.</fn> But these are not especially appealing places for the book browser.<fn>B&N was at one time a terrific chain for book lovers, but the tchotchke-to-book ratio has taken a decided turn for the worse in recent years.</fn> For the book lover, the best option is the local library.

Our library is one of the things that makes this My Favorite World. The selection is terrific, the online reserving system easy and efficient. The place is well-laid out and well lighted. The staff, many of them volunteers, is helpful and cheerful. And if they don’t have what you want, they will move mountains to find it through another library system. I’ve had books borrowed from libraries as far away as Miami and Houston, University of Chicago and Chapel Hill. Seriously, our library rocks.

But I miss the bookstore experience. I miss the feeling of finishing a book and placing it on my shelf – maybe to be read again, maybe not – and the conundrum of where to put a particular book. Did I like it so much it might displace a cherished hero volume? Does this belong in the philosophy section or science? Burning questions that fall to the wayside, because now when I finish a book I dump it, unceremoniously, into a slot in the wall at the library.

So while books, and the pursuit of books, and the dogged determination that I will read every book in the world worth reading before I die,<fn>Hubris is never pretty.</fn> are a major element of MFW, I find myself in recent days wondering:

Why doesn’t our community have a great local bookstore?

Does our community really need one? Is it supportable?

Who has the stones/insanity/vision to create such a place? A place where people linger over the printed word and exchange ideas about what makes a book great; argue passionately about whether Oprah picks have ruined reading or saved it; quibble over whether the Booker Prize has gone soft by considering non-Brits; &c. Even more, a place that serves as a fulcrum for a vital community that values the inspirational and aspirational cocktail that comes from that luxe mixture of books and magazines and music and really excellent coffee.

Whoever that person is, s/he will be creating a vital component of My Favorite World. I’ll be waiting.

V:What’ll we do?

E:If he came yesterday and we weren’t here you may be sure he won’t come again today.

V:But you say we were here yesterday.

E:I may be mistaken. (Pause.) Let’s stop talking for a minute, do you mind?

MFW.

Some weeks I have to puzzle over which piece of My Favorite World to play with in this sandbox. Not so today. Nothing has ever been easier.

That picture at the top is my good pal Kati. She looks pretty damned giddy, right? That’s because today, in this strange cracker box of a state that is Florida, marriage between gay men and between gay women is now legal, the law of the land, no longer taboo, absolutely fine, mighty damned skippy, and just plain right on.

Put it another way: Got a license? In love? No problem. Get married. How has it ever not been that way?

Kati is a duly licensed Notary, and today, the first day in Florida on which ALL human beings in love were allowed to wed despite other busybodies’ biblical panty bunching, Kati wielded her mighty stamp of Notary and officiated for several couples — there were hundreds statewide — who wanted to mark today as their Wedding Day. (And thanks to Kati for permission to use her gorgeousness to attract people to my bloggy little vineyard.)

Scores of people in love, committing to one another in the eyes of friends, family, society, and if applicable, their God. This is so absolutely fabulous that I feel like Kati looks in that photo. My Favorite World, made all the better because one more arbitrary barrier to equal participation in My Favorite World is just dust now.

MFW!

I’m an aging, straight, white Southern man, squarely in the tea party demographic, raised during the years when the word ‘gay’ first began to mean what it means now, a time when so-called minorities began to push back against the imposed normatives that had defined our culture for generations. It was a time when my predecessors – the white, straight men of my father’s generation – began to lose their firm grip of control, and the anxieties that they visited upon their sons and daughters in response were insidious and damaging in ways both subtle and not so. I grew up in a time when such thinking was normal. I had to learn to oppose these blind prejudices within myself. I was lucky. I’ve had a life full of wonderful friends, teachers, guides. I’m sure I was something of a project.

But today, we live in a world that is a far sight better than it was just yesterday. All because people in love get to celebrate that wondrous, awe-inspiring gift. And the fact that my kids get to grow up breathing the air of a more tolerant world – a place where people in love face just that much less of an obstacle to fully participating in their/our lives – makes me very, very happy.

Forget your June wedding traditions. January 6, people, that’s the day of mass hitching, overwhelming loving, and long-overdue ecstasy and embrace. Next time J and I get married again (I think it’s three so far, but one loses track), I want a January wedding.

My Favorite World!