A Season to Smile

Sunshine, warmth and the Zen of the golf range

Spring is not my season of choice, because too often spring is all hat and no cattle. It’s a poseur, the tease of seasons, eagerly showing its blooms one day and its dour grayness the next. Unlike summer and winter, spring doesn’t know who it wants to be. It takes advantage of our longings.

Ah, but then there are days like yesterday and today. For the briefest of whiles, Cincinnati is San Diego without the beach, which is overrated anyway. (Give me the mountains.) Days like Tuesday, though. . . they make us forgive all the other, tease-filled days.

It’s good to be retired on days like Tuesday. I worked in the yard, I filled the bird feeders, I read a book on the back porch, left eye on its pages, right eye on the finches sparring the chickadees for thistle.

Then I went to the golf course and hit balls. I enjoy practicing golf, maybe more than playing. Hitting balls is a Zen thing, owing less to conscious effort than to meditative study. Solid contact is as much about feeling as skill.

I’m feeling sleepy relaxed as I take hold of the 46-degree Callaway wedge. Every sport has its imperatives, fast and true ways of doing things properly. Every sport also leans on feel, too. You know what it feels like when the bat squares up a pitch. When your fly snags a trout, you know the perfection in a sublimely timed flick of the wrist.

Golf’s no different. There’s a satisfyingly concussive sound to a well-struck wedge or iron. You don’t have to look up after you hit one. You just know.

I was good with the wedge Tuesday. Stance slightly open, right elbow tight to my side. Low, slow takeaway. On the backswing, clubhead lightly skimming the new grass, knees a little flexed, lower body unwavering, left arm straight.

Left eye on the ball, right eye watching my left arm as my elbow eases past my gaze. Three-quarter backswing, which helps me make a fuller turn on the downswing.

Thwack. Concussive success. Small rectangle of scalped turf flies, the ball floats, 75 yards and straight.

The best stuff is almost always the small stuff. Springtime sun warming the back of the neck, the peace of a golf course, the time available for doing nothing so important as swinging a club.

Thwack.

The seasons dictate my mood to an unhealthy degree. I need the outdoors. I’ve been known to stick a folding chair in the snowy backyard, intending nothing so much as a free breath. You could say the weather’s moodiness reflects my own.

The worst thing about fall is you know what’s next. Fall is like the soldier in the WWII movie, showing his buddy a picture of his fiance. You know what’s gonna happen to that guy. Fall’s beauty is foreboding. Spring is just the opposite. Good times are coming, buddy. Just hang on.

I like the emergent spring sun, yawning and stretching after four months of snooze. Winter works best as a concept. The idea of solitude and contemplation in the thin January light is much better than the real thing. When the sun takes off every day at 5, all I feel is bummed.

Cleanin’ the sh——r

Winter’s only purpose is to make us grateful when it’s not around. It’s the Cousin Eddie of seasons. (Movie reference, kids. Lookitup.) Fall, meanwhile, is for failed poets and those who choose melancholia as a lifestyle. Who admires a season in which death is the theme?

Spring might be a flirt. But it’s a good-looking flirt. It’s Marilyn Monroe, atop the subway grate, her dress awaiting the train’s whoosh.

And so here I am, on glorious summer’s doorstep, wedge in hand, waiting to be invited in to share in summer’s promise. Spring sends us days such as this. I never take them for granted.

Now, then. . .

Cowboy up

BUILDING A BULLPEN ON THE CHEAP is one of the easiest things to do in MLB, which makes the Reds bullpen calamities so hard to swallow. The sad stats:

All 5 Reds Ls have come when the team was leading or tied after 6 innings.

The Reds ‘pen leads the NL in Ls and is 2nd in blown saves. Its ERA is 5.18.

Tuesday night, Derek Law needed one pitch to wrap up the L in Atlanta. That was the pitch Sean Murphy sent over the CF wall in the 10th. It was the 2nd game-winning bomb Law has allowed in less than a week.

A quick perusal of baseball-reference.com and Cot’s Contracts easily shows that the major leagues’ best bullpens are filled with blue-light specials. Tampa, Milwaukee and Atlanta’s three top set-up men are making, respectively, $6.1 mil, $2.4 mil and $2.8 mil, combined. Even factoring in closer deluxe Emanuel Clase, Cleveland’s top three relievers earn a combined $3.75 million.

That’s $15 million total, to stock the bullpens of four good teams. That’s nothing.

The trick is to have an eye for cheap talent. Tampa has it seemingly every year. The Guardians are very good at it. So are the Brewers. It’s a talent the Reds have not mastered. A TML post a few weeks ago noted the (lack of) pedigrees in the Reds bullpen.

Middle relief is vital, if only because it can shed light on an organization’s ability to win on a budget. Identifying gems in the dirt is what winning on a budget is all about.

STICK TO SPORTS. . . Six die one day, four die the next. No country kills its own citizens better than we do. U-S-A! U-S-A! We’re #1.

Thoughts and prayers to the families of all the dead Americans. Our hearts go out to them. Make sure the flag in the schoolyard flies at half mast. Now, what’s next on our agenda? The state legislature has work to do.

No one should be in the mood today to entertain talk of better mental health programs being the answer to gun murders. We don’t need to hear the statistics about suicide being the prime cause of gun deaths or that we should begin arming teachers nationwide. We don’t want to live in Fortress America.

Anyone busting out the trite slogans about guns killing people and the tortured thinking that the 2nd Amendment allows us to murder one another should be sentenced to digging graves for 9-year-olds. It shouldn’t be hard. Nine-year-olds aren’t very big.

You don’t have a Constitutional right to kill me. You don’t have a sporting need for an assault weapon. Funding more and better mental health programs and banning the sale of assault weapons are not mutually exclusive solutions. We can and should do both.

This isn’t some “liberal’’ rant. It’s majority opinion across the country and it’s growing. We have to stop murdering our children. It’s ghastly-amazing I even have to type a sentence like that.

I’m to the point where I don’t care about your “right’’ to own assault-style firearms. It matters not at all to me that you think your 2nd Amendment rights are being violated. You’re killing us. Beyond a fair trial, what rights do murderers enjoy?

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Are murderers part of a “well-regulated militia’’? Is our national security enhanced when murderers own assault rifles?

The 2nd Amendment was made in an era when we actually needed to fight to protect our homes and homeland from foreign invaders. That’s hardly the case now. Now, we need guns to protect us from us. From our fellow Americans. Possibly, that’s not what the framers had in mind.

Stop being politicians and cowards. Care more for your fellow human beings than you care about dirty gun money and votes. Ban assault weapons. Make it illegal to own one. Punish the gun makers who make them. Punish the businesses who sell them.

Call out the cowards in Congress and in state assemblies who reject the banning of assault weapons. Expose them for who they are. Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan voted against such a ban last July.

Ted Cruz suggests every school have “armed police officers’’ at every school doorway and that schools have fewer doors. He was serious.

All I know is this: When a 9-year-old is murdered, he will always be dead.

Fix this, America.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Gun madness isn’t new. It’s just worse.

Everybody look what’s goin’ down. . .