Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Week 3 Travel Tone

I walked down through the campus. There was a large tent in the middle of the grass, but it did not look like anywhere the baseball team would be at.

Our team was going to have a table somewhere on the campus during "harvest day", (Such a misnomer, nothing gets harvested), and all of the players were supposed to get there at some time, and stand at the table. But of course, I had neglected to ask the coach where we were going to have the table, so I was left wandering the campus looking for it.

I went into Katahdin Hall, as he had said that everyone would have to go right by us to get food. But no one was there either. I decided that I could go up to the library, and check my email to see if the coach had remembered that he had not told anyone where the table was going to be, and realized that that would make it rather difficult for anyone to find it.

I went up the stairs, getting some Purell from the wall dispenser as I passed by. I went into the computer area in the library, and it looked like a couple of weeks after the semester had ended. There were only four people there, and one of them was wearing a blue hat with a yellow brim, precisely like mine. I went over and took the computer next to my teammate.

"Oh, hey," he said. He was apparently typing a paper for a class.

"Hey Doug," I responded.

I figured that I would give it a minute before asking him if he knew where the table would be. But he turned to me instead.

"Do you know where that table is?"

"No, I don't," I replied. "I've been looking for it."

"I have too, and I haven't seen anything. People will probably be there at noon though."

"They said that they would be here at ten."

Doug picked up his cell phone. "I'll text him."

He texted the coach, and continued typing his paper, while I proceeded to look busy by opening and closing various things such as my email, Blackboard, and Myemcc.

"The coach says it's in the gym, they're still getting set up."

"I should have thought of that," I said.

"I'll probably be down there at noon," he said.

"Okay, see you there."

I walked around the campus to the gym, and I went inside. Inside, there were large inflatable things, but no yellow and blue hats that I could see. I turned, and in the information window just inside the door was my coach, talking with the coach of the basketball team. He called me over eventually to show the basketball coach our new EMCC baseball shirts, and then I waited, while a bunch of people were walking about. There were a few too many people for me, and the coach did not seem like he was needing help with a table, and would have said something if they had had one, I was pretty sure. And they were still setting up stuff, so I decided that I would come back at noon, when I knew that Doug at least would be there.

I travelled across the campus back to the library, and met Doug coming out.

"Are you heading over there now?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"There's no one there yet. I saw the coach, but there isn't a single other person there."

"Do they have a table set up yet?" Doug asked.

"No, they don't seem to have anything set up yet."

"It's only 11:30," Doug said, "Yeah, I think I'll wait 'til noon."

"I probably will as well," I said. "See you."

I went into the library, still a little overwhelmed by too many people, and I went to the corner and read part of Stephen King's "On Writing" book, as I had nothing else to do. I turned on a computer to check the time. It was noon. I went back to the gym, and now there were a ton of people trying to get in. The line for the information window with my coach in it extended out the doors of the gym and outside.

I slipped past it, and saw that my coach was busy giving out harvest day shirts to people. I figured that we must have a table somewhere, but I was having difficulty thinking because they were playing very loud music, intolerably loud.

"Hi Tomas!"

"Oh, hi."

It was one of the softball players. Our baseball team had ridden down on the bus with the softball team for our first games a couple of weeks ago.

"Are you looking for something?" she asked.

"I'm looking for the baseball team. I have no idea where they are."

"I don't either," she said.

It was almost impossible to hear anyone, and I had an awful headache. I always have a headache to some degree, but the loud music and heat was killing me.

I decided that I should just ask my coach where our table was, but the line of people extending back into the parking lot discouraged me from it. I finally just hurried outside, and escaped from all of it.

I was on the point of just giving up and just waiting in the library until my mother returned when the assistant coach drove up and honked his horn at me.

"Where is the table we're having for the harvest day?" he asked from his truck.

"It's supposed to be in the gym," I said, "But I can't find it anywhere."

He drove on, and I followed, walking. I figured that if I followed the coach, that I couldn't be missing my duty of being at a table. Once inside, he turned to me.

"Have you seen anyone else here?"

"The coach was in the window, and I know someone else was coming at noon."

But the coach was no longer at the window, so the assistant coach just wandered about, looking for a table. The speakers for the music were right on the floor, under the basketball hoop. And standing remotely near them, it was the loudest sound I have ever heard in my life. It was not even music, just a crushing cacophony of sound ripping through my head. I could only stand it if I were at the other end of the gym. Nicki Minaj, Owl City, Taio Cruz, Sean Paul, and Michael Jackson- at that volume- all sounded exactly the same.

I made sure not to be too close to the coach though, or to let him out of my sight. Putting a tail on a coach is what I am really good at. Tolerating ridiculously loud club music- not so much.

"I thought we were supposed to have a table," I said to the coach at one point.

"I thought we were too, I don't know," the assistant coach responded.

Eventually, after we had wandered for several minutes, the head coach returned to the window, and the assistant coach met him there. After they talked for a minute, the head coach motioned me to come over, and gave me a harvest day shirt.

"You never got one of these, why not?" he asked.

Considering that for a while through all of this I had been near the point of collapse, my head that had heard too much ear crushing Nicki Minaj, could not come up with any sort of response.

I went back away from the window with the assistant coach.

"So there's no table?" I asked.

"No, no table. And there's no requirement to stay," he said.

So I walked out with the shirt. Which, with everything else going on, was the last thing on my mind- but close to my permanent loss of hearing.

2 comments:

  1. "But the coach was no longer at the window, so the assistant coach just wandered about, looking for a table."

    At first I was intrigued by a campus tour, then amused at the deadly dreariness and mindlessness, then piqued by the relentless confusion, and finally I let myself go at the quotation above and laughed out loud, allowing myself chuckles the rest of the way along.

    Humor is tough, as you have heard me say before, but I think you have a fine line in deadpan humor generally and here particularly, as well as a good sense of how to guy yourself a little and to use your persona in a disciplined way in the writing.

    You maintain throughout a tone of innocent apprehension, topped off finally by inevitable decibel insanity....

    FWIW, when I used to go to Harvest Day and Tech Day, I found them as confusing, loud, stressful, and pointless as you apparently did too.

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  2. The Search is a classic organizing principle in literature. The Holy Grail, the Beloved, the object of vengeance, the buried treasure, etc.

    Rarely has so much effort been put into a search for such an evasive object, The Table.

    'Droll' is the word I use to describe TG at his peak....

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