My Most Excellent Year Read online

  When the beans were spilled a year later and everybody found out about it, Buck was banned from baseball forever, right along with the 7 ginks who started it all. But not for throwing games. He was banned for not ratting on his team. What’s wrong with this picture? My father says that you can always be proud of yourself for listening to your heart. Buck Weaver listened to his heart too, but all he got was punished for it. And just because he’s dead doesn’t mean it’s not unfair anymore. Buck Weaver deserves to be un-banned.

  Please click on the “Sign Petition” button. When we hit 20,000 names, we’ll send them to the Commissioner of Baseball and make him do something about it.

  Thank you.

  T.C. Keller

  T.C.:

  I’m with you, dude. Weaver got screwed.

  Dear Mr. Keller,

  I’m 16 and I don’t know anything about baseball, but my brother made me watch Eight Men Out. John Cusack was so cute as Buck Weaver that I’m signing your petition anyway.

  Hey Freak.

  How did you ever get 18,731 people to sign your stupid petition? Buck Weaver was a jerk. Those guys were a disgrace. They should’ve run the whole team out of town on a rail. Go Reds!

  Dear T.C.:

  I’m a features editor at SportsAmerica magazine, and I’d like to find out whether your father would allow us to interview you for one of our upcoming issues. For eighty-two years, popular opinion has held that Buck Weaver was handed a raw deal, but this is the first grassroots movement that actually appears to be growing.

  Please contact me at your convenience.

  Colleen Wilson

  SportsAmerica

  Dear Mama,

  (One of our vocabulary words this week really gave me a hard time, so I’m supposed to practice using it in a sentence. See if you can guess which one it is.)

  Whenever something really kick-ass happens to me that I didn’t expect, Pop always says “There’s your mom pulling strings for you again,” so I figure you already know about the lady from SportsAmerica since it was probably your idea. She called last night to ask me Buck Weaver questions, and Pop got on the other phone to fill in anything I might forget. I quoted Buck’s stats in the World Series that proved he wasn’t playing crooked and why he deserved civil rights, and Pop mentioned the bedtime stories you made up for me about Rosa Parks and Dr. King. By then I was pretty sure we could trust her with our secret plan to organize a protest rally in front of the Hall of Fame, but Pop interrupted me before I could finish. (After we hung up, he explained what “off the record” means.) So when you see Buck Weaver, please let him know that he’s making news again. On the record. Because if we can’t get him put back into baseball, at least a lot of people are going to want to know why, which is just as valuable. You once said that a friend is somebody who believes in you no matter what, and Buck is going to find out that he has a lot of friends. Even if that’s all he gets out of it.

  Mrs. Norwood gave us our first project assignments of the year. She wants us to build a model of our favorite monument in Washington. I couldn’t decide between the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, or the White House, so Pop said we’d make a scale diorama of the whole L’Enfant Plan—which is the Mall and the Ellipse together, with all of the federal buildings around them and the Washington Monument in the middle. The Hobby Shop on Thayer Street has white plastic replicas of all the marble landmarks, but we’re going to have to make the weird ones like the National Archives and the Smithsonian out of balsa wood. All of the buildings are going to light up in different colors and there’ll even be real water in the reflecting pool and real Astroturf on the Mall. Lori told Pop that it can’t be as high as the planetarium was, but she never said anything about how wide—so we’re thinking five feet by fifteen feet. Pop says it’s a shame we have to end it at the Potomac River because he promised her the Iwo Jima statue too, and that’s in Arlington. I’m glad he’s checking with her first this time. She acted kind of funny about the eight-foot map of Massachusetts.

  But there’s definitely something spurious going on here that I’m not supposed to be able to figure out. Back in the old days (like last month), it would have gone right over my head—but ever since Cupid shot me in the butt, nothing gets by me anymore. This morning in the middle of our jog, me and Pop were sitting on the grass across the Charles River from Lowell House (from our favorite spot we can see the street corner where you let him kiss you for the first time). That’s where we usually discuss the women in our lives and tell each other what we’re doing wrong.

  “Alé hates me.”

  “Alé can’t stop thinking about you. Nobody tries that hard to drive a guy nuts unless she’s already fallen for him. Monica hates me.”

  “But you were asking for it,” I repeated for the hundredth time. “She told you she was vegetarian. You shouldn’t have ordered salmon.”

  “I apologized for that, didn’t I?”

  “Uh-huh. And then you laughed when she told you that fish have feelings too.”

  “Who knew she was serious?”

  “I did! And I wasn’t even there!” Nehi raised his head from my lap and barked, which either means he saw a squirrel or else he agreed with what I’d just said. Then Pop squirted me with his water bottle. He always does that when I win.

  Pop’s Internet dating hasn’t been going so hot. Marina was a pretty lawyer, but she had mean eyes. Natalie was a twenty-six-year-old graphic artist who thought the moon was a planet. On top of that, she was young enough to be Pop’s daughter. The dumb one. Then there was Gina. She was forty-one and blond and a personal trainer. She also had two you-know-whats that were bigger than basketballs. Pop thought they were real and I didn’t. Two reasons: (1) She wore T-shirts all the time to make sure you could see them. If she’d had them her whole life she’d be used to them by now and wouldn’t have to show them off. That meant they were new. And (2) They were too big. Whenever she stood up, I was afraid she was going to tip over.

  So this morning by the river we went over his newest list, and that’s when I first noticed something I should have seen before. These were the girls he talked about:

  Kimberley

  Lori

  Jodi

  Lori

  Katharine

  Melodie

  Lori

  Tara

  It made me remember the last student/adviser conference I had with Lori and the things she talked about:

  French verbs

  Pop

  Applying myself

  Pop

  The time you took me to see Aladdin and promised me a magic carpet for my birthday

  Why Carlton Fisk has nothing to do with the Bill of Rights (she’s wrong)

  Pop

  The steppes of Russia and a B+ in geography

  Pop

  Pop scored three Loris and Lori scored four Pops.

  And now a lot of other things are starting to make sense too. For instance, on our way home from Family Nights at school, Pop is usually so preoccupied that we sometimes wind up in places like Lechmere or Quincy before he realizes he made a wrong turn ten miles ago. Meanwhile Lori wears sexy dresses for the next two days like she’s under some kind of a spell, and she doesn’t go back to pants until it wears off. (I knew there had to be a reason.) Mama, how come adults are so dense? Augie’s a third their age and he already figured out he’s in love with Andy Wexler, even if he won’t tell anybody yet. Does getting old mean getting stupid too?

  I think you’d like Lori, though. She started at Laurents the year after you left us, and when she found out I didn’t have a mother anymore, she’d take me on special adventures after school, like buying floppy disks for the computer room or napkins for the faculty lounge or Ivanhoe for the out-of-luck kids who had to read it. So she kind of feels like family already. But she and Pop are going to need help getting their act together, so maybe you could pull some strings for them too. Meanwhile I’ll start working the fix from this end. Doesn’t it feel like we’re a team again? />
  I love you,

  T.C.

  P.S. It was “spurious.”

  STUDENT/ADVISER CONFERENCE

  Lori Mahoney/Anthony C. Keller

  LORI:

  A+ on an English test? You’re slipping.

  T.C.:

  That was a mistake. I should have gotten the gerund question wrong. My mind was on other things.

  LORI:

  Such as?

  T.C.:

  Alé not looking at me again and Pop’s new girlfriend.

  LORI:

  Oh. I didn’t know he was seeing anybody.

  T.C.:

  He only sort of is. Her name is Hannah. She’s not as pretty as Alé is but she’s in the same ballpark. And she’s a social worker. Pop likes her because she likes kids.

  LORI:

  Ah. That’s a good sign.

  T.C.:

  Wait ’til you see our diorama. We already finished a third of the Mall. We’re keeping it short like you told us, so it’s only seventy-five square feet.

  LORI:

  Did he ask her out again?

  T.C.:

  Who?

  LORI:

  Hannah.

  T.C.:

  Don’t remember. But I think so.

  LORI:

  Seventy-five square feet?!?!

  Dear Mama,

  After “Casey at the Bat” rehearsals, Andy Wexler asked me to go to The Word Shop Café with him for lemon loaf cake and cappuccinos made out of hot chocolate so that we could practice some more. “I’m not very good at this yet” were the words he used to throw me off the scent—but Andy had a whole other agenda that he really needs to work into conversations a little more casually so that it doesn’t stick out like a swollen thumb that just got hammered with a snow shovel. I said, “‘The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day,’” and Andy answered with, “How did you and Augie get to be brothers?” I said, “‘The score stood four to two with just one inning more to play,’” and Andy said, “Was Augie always so funny even when he was six?” I said, “‘And so when Cooney died at first and Barrows did the same,’” and Andy said, “Augie wears the coolest shirts. Where does he get them?” See what I mean?

  But that was only the first inning, because right after “‘But Flynn let drive a single to the wonderment of all’”/“Augie doesn’t have a girlfriend, does he?” who walked in but Alejandra and Funny Cool-Shirted Augie. They were there for a production meeting and it would have been weird not to move over and let them sit with us, so we did. But all that happened after that was different combinations of hardly-talking people who were afraid to look at each other. What we really needed was for Puck to sprinkle some of his magic dust on each one of us, even though he probably would have screwed it up again so that I fell in love with Andy while Augie and Alé were getting married. Like my life isn’t fire-wired enough already.

  If I thought that Alé could at least tolerate me, I might have a shot. But I talked Lee Meyerhoff into showing me the minutes of last week’s Young Democrats Club meeting at school, and it didn’t exactly score points for my confidence. Like when I said that the National Recovery Act was the only one of FDR’s programs that didn’t work and Alé said that the National Recovery Act was the only one of FDR’s programs that did work and that the rest could have been used for landfill. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure she’s yanking my chain on purpose. Everyone knows that the National Recovery Act was bogus from the start, especially me and Alé. Does she really hate me that much??

  I’ve got a plan. And Alé won’t even know what hit her. . . .

  I love you,

  T.C.

  The Word Shop

  BROOKLINE’S FAVORITE BOOKSTORE

  E-Memo From the Desk of

  Phyllis Bryant

  Anthony Keller, if either one of your fathers knew I was doing this, my big ass would be hung out to dry. So do not think it’s going to happen a second time. Reread your Constitution. This is illegal.

  In the last three weeks she’s bought Profiles in Courage, The Speeches of John F. Kennedy, JFK: The Man and the Myth, The Kennedy Wit, and—off the topic—America’s Concentration Camps: The World War II Internment of Japanese Americans. That girl is too damned smart for her own good. Whatever happened to Nancy Drew?

  You’d best end up marrying this one. I don’t intend to do jail time for anything less.

  —Phyllis

  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  Reminder. You’re my brother and we can count on each other no matter what. So when I have a crisis and only you can help, you’ll always say yes. Have I got that in the back pocket?

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  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  I hate it when you pull rank like that because I can’t handle much more today. Robin Potts broke her ankle and they won’t let us put taps on her cast so we’re minus our next-to-closing act, I still can’t find a splashy production number to bring the curtain down with, and for some reason Dad keeps trying to talk to me about this girl he had the hots for at camp who smelled like Reynolds Wrap. This is SO way too much information.

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  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  I need Robin’s spot in the talent show.

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  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  You what?! What about “Casey”?! Tick, I swear to God, if you leave me holding the bag the way Fanny Brice left Flo Ziegfeld in Baltimore—

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  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  Dude, who pissed in your Cheerios?? I’ll still be in “Casey,” but I want to do John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address too. This is life or death. Trust me.

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  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  [DRAMATIC PAUSE.] You’re joking, right?

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  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  Okay, so it won’t be a commercial success. But at least it’ll be an artistic one. And it’s got to be our secret.

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  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  Who would I want to tell??

  Dear Mama,

  Anybody who ever thought that Augie was just a lot of hot air really needs to see him in action. He sketched out a backdrop for the show that has a golden sunburst in the middle and stars and sparkles coming out of it (Pop built it for him), he climbed a ladder and aimed all of the lights in different directions and combinations of colors so that each act is lit with its own mood, he figured out the tempos for all of the music and now Mr. Disharoon is afraid to disagree with him (he’d be wrong anyway even if he did), and he designed the programs and posters by himself. All for a hundred dollars.

  The kids love him and I can understand why. He’s a natural. When he says something like, “Brucie, you can make that funnier if you say it faster” or “Don’t rush it, Ricky, we’ve got plenty of time,” he says it in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings but just makes them want to do better instead. I always knew that Augie could push the edge of any envelope whenever he wanted to—but even so, I’ve never been more proud of him in my life.

  Actually, I’m the one who’s in over my head here. President Kennedy must have really gotten off on the sound of his own voice because once he started talking, he never stopped. And didn’t anybody ever tell him about run-on sentences before? Or were those allowed in 1961?

 
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

  Eighty words and only one period!!

  Pop says it’s not enough just to memorize the speech, because anybody can do that. “Tony C, people need to think it’s really JFK on that stage, even if he’s shorter than they remember.” So first we’re going to Filene’s to find a dark blue suit with pinstripes and a light blue shirt and a red and blue tie (which Pop calls “the standard-issue JFK uniform”). After that we’ll watch the inauguration DVD and practice. Practice taking a breath where he took a breath, practice moving my hands the same way he moved his hands, practice punching the key words exactly like he punched them. Pop says to count my blessings that Alé didn’t idolize Gorbachev instead.

  I hit my first home run of the fall today, and I’m pretty sure you had something to do with it. We play at Amory Park after school and it’s just the kids from the neighborhood divided in two teams (Grid’s Grenades and T.C.’s Titans), but we still draw a pretty big crowd. My own cheering section is usually Pop (as soon as he gets off work), Phyllis or Dad (depending on which one of them is working the register at the bookstore that day), Augie (always), and Lee Meyerhoff. Lee doesn’t care about baseball all that much, but she shows up anyway just to give me a hard time and to stare at my ass. She’s been doing that since we were eight, even after it stopped making me nervous (which was originally her whole point, though only girls would understand why). Lee is also one of my most trusted operatives. Ever since she and Alé started hanging out together, I’ve been cornering her for debriefings in coatrooms, library stacks, and once in the computer closet.