Last night I was at a thing and fell into conversation with a fellow Mets fan. We talked about this and that, with indifferent optimism, and then he asked, “But Reyes is running?”
He wasn’t really asking; he knew. It was more that he was looking for confirmation. And all of a sudden I found myself smiling.
“Reyes is running,” I said. “I mean, he had to get away from the Mets to heal and who knows what’s going to happen and ….”
That was all wrong. I stopped and tried again.
“Reyes is running,” I said. And then I was smiling again.
Close your eyes and you can see him. His head is down and his arms are churning. In another second his helmet will fail to keep pace with the rest of him and fly off for retrieval later, and another second after that he’ll be popping up out of the dust with that huge ear-to-ear grin, slightly pop-eyed, his spiky hair sticking up like a startled cat. If it’s a particularly big moment he’ll smash his hands together a few times in a way that looks like it hurts. He’ll look slightly winded, but mostly he’ll look like you like to imagine you’d look if you could only do what he does. He’ll look like that was an enormous amount of fun and he can’t wait to do it again.
You know what? It’s been a while. Close your eyes and let yourself see that again.
Somewhere, perhaps, Mets front office people are doing something ill-advised.
Somewhere, it’s entirely possible, Mets business people are being cheap and short-sighted.
Somewhere, it may be, Jerry Manuel is chortling when he ought to be listening to someone who’s crunched numbers.
Somewhere, if we’re not lucky, Kelvin Escobar is wincing, Carlos Beltran is limping, or both.
Of late too many of these somewheres have been located too close to home for us to feel at ease. But sometimes somewhere is a good place to find yourself.
Somewhere Jose Reyes is running. Think of that and be not afraid.