San Francisco in a Catcher's Mitt

The fog settles into the catcher’s mitt—it’s safe for now, it’s not going anywhere for a while.

It’s a good day for nothing to happen, a Tuesday resplendent with its Tuesday-ness. There are no games I want to watch on tv, or any special breaking news reports I must know about.

A 73-year old hi-school classmate I don’t know has just sent me a list of dead classmates, most of whom I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with the list, as I’m not listed, and some of the ones I did know are now dead, and the dead no longer exist.

Having an identity gets old; I’m getting tired of mine; it’s stuck to me like the freckles I had as a kid. At some point an identity gets sewn on you whoever you are, whoever you’ve become, and can’t be peeled off or exchanged for another identity that belongs to someone else.

Walking in Golden Gate Park yesterday afternoon I counted the other people who were also out walking with me, not as if I was walking with them or that they were walking with me, not as just plain ordinary people but as people attached to their identities, just as attached or even more attached to their identities than I am to mine.

When I looked at other people walking this way, I could see that it’s impossible to escape identity, that having an identity is sewn into and on to your being; you might as well just relax and accept your identity, whether it’s a gift or isn’t a gift. Many identities are fortified by tattoos.

It's possible too that my identity, as affixed as it may be to my being The Brooks Roddan, is only a baseball made of fog I’ve just discovered in my catcher’s mitt. I’m finally ready to throw the ball back to the pitcher, then go to bed and get some sleep.