“Morrow got ‘porched,’” said David Cone in the YES studio.

Now in the fifth, Cano was up again. Two men were out, a runner on first. Toronto’s catcher J.P. Arencibia walked to the mound to talk with Morrow, who’d thrown 56 pitches so far. They arrived at their plan, Arencibia returned behind the plate and set up outside, away from Cano.

Morrow hit Arencibia’s glove with the first pitch a fastball low and outside. It was called a ball. The next pitch was another fastball but this one drifted further outside, 2-0. Arencibia set up outside again, but Morrow’s third fastball was middle-middle. Fortunately for him, Cano swung late. He hit the ball hard but the drive stayed foul down the left field line.

“He’s off just a little bit,” said Paul O’Neill on the YES broadcast, “just behind it, just ahead of the [home run] he hit out of here.”

Next came a beautiful, tight slider. It started straight down the middle and then ducked down and in. Cano sung over it and the count was even, 2-2. Morrow made a mistake on the following pitch and hung a slider. Again he was fortunate as Cano missed it, then rolled his head, looking up at the heavens, grinded his teeth and took the long walk around the back of the plate, Manny Ramirez-style.

Cano got another slider, 89 mph, this one outside. He was ahead of it and the ball hit off the end of his bat. It made a weak sound, good for a broken bat and a foul ball.

Cano walked casually to the dugout where the bat boy handed him a new bat. Cano leaned down and shaved down the handle and Vernon Wells, waiting on the on-deck circle, passed him the rosin bag which Cano tapped on the bat, little puffs of smoke rising in the air. Cano walked back to the plate, spit on his hands, rubbed them together and adjusted his batting gloves. He got to the plate and bent over and stretched his legs. Got in the box, weight on his back leg, waved his bat with his right hand twice and waited for the pitch.

Morrow came back with with the slider. This one was rotten, too, and Cano didn’t miss it.

The ball landed over the bullpen in right center field. Another two-run home run. The only Yankee fan who was disappointed was the guy in the first row who had the ball into and out of his hands.

Travis Hafner added a two-run home run in the eighth, David Phelps minus his good stuff, survived trouble, and the Yanks cruised to a 7-2 win.

No complaints here.

Oh, and Reid Brignac is the newest Yankee.

I e-mailed with a friend yesterday about James Agee so I went to my bookshelf this morning and picked out an old paperback copy of Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. The pages are yellow and brittle–I think I got it in high school–and I haven’t looked at it in a long time. I read through the book on my subway ride to work. After about twenty minutes I noticed something lodged in between the pages–a personalized bookmark that my father had made for me when I was a little kid. It features a drawing by my uncle Fred.

Dad had stickers with his name that he put in all of his books and he was proud to make stickers for my brother, sister, and me. I remember having a stack of them, held together with a rubber band, like they were baseball cards. I loved peeling off the back and sticking them on things, not just books, and I quickly depleted my stock.

I have no idea how one of them–an original, with the backing still attached–found its way into the Agee book, but it was like finding a tiny, intimate treasure.

In the early nineties, I went to the Museum of Broadcasting with a friend to watch Dennis Potter’s final TV interview with Melyn Bragg. Potter was dying and during the interview, he drank liquid morphine to numb the pain. There was no telling if he’d be able to remain lucid but he did and he was beautiful. This is what I remember most:

We all, we’re the one animal that knows that we’re going to die, and yet we carry on paying our mortgages, doing our jobs, moving about, behaving as though there’s eternity in a sense. And we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is is, and it is now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can’t. It’s in us, but we can’t actually; it’s not there in front of us. However predictable tomorrow is, and unfortunately for most people, most of the time, it’s too predictable, they’re locked into whatever situation they’re locked into … Even so, no matter how predictable it is, there’s the element of the unpredictable, of the you don’t know. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.

Below my window in Ross, when I’m working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people – bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

[Photo Via: Blue Pueblo]

In 1974, when I was three years old, my grandparents returned from a trip to Florida with a gift for my mother and my aunt. They carried it in a box, a few small branches of an orange tree. My aunt planted hers and it died immediately but mom, who has a way with plants and flowers, potted the branch and it  grew into a small bush. For years, it didn’t produce any fruit. Then, a few, small yellowish oranges appeared, too sour to eat.

Still, mom brought the orange tree with us when we left Manhattan and it survived a divorce, a new marriage, and five homes.

In a recent e-mail, she explained:

I had close-to-death encounters with this one: once going on vacation and finding it all dried up, I put a plastic tent over it and misted it to bring it back to life. Another time one of the cats peed in the dirt and nearly killed it. I had to wash the roots and repot the tree. I kept my fingers crossed on that one, I can tell you. Before we left Croton, a bug infestation, the tree got covered with scales. I hand picked the bugs and spay each leave on the top and on the bottom…

The tree survived and then flourished once mom moved up to Vermont two years ago.

I never knew you could eat the fruits. Then in a catalog recently, I read that a calamondin is a cross between a clementine and a kumquat.

This fall, as by conspiracy, the tree was covered with the biggest fruits ever. (The Vermont air and the Vermont compost…) So I decided to try to make marmalade. I added an orange to brake down the tartness of the calamondin, and bingo. Delicious, tart but nor sour, clementine-parfumed marmalade. The natural pectin in the fruit worked like a charm. All I needed was sugar and cute little pots.

She needed more than that. Patience, devotion, love. Mom’s got it. Got it in spades. It took close to forty years but she never gave up on her little plant, and I can’t wait to taste the marmalade.