Essays

"Dirty Hands"

I love getting my hands dirty. In real life and in my writing too.

My career proves it, though that may not be obvious at first. Over the past decade I've written about baseball (including my newest book, Grand Old Game: 365 Days of Baseball), science and invention (THE LIGHTBULB), and natural history (A GATHERING OF WONDERS: Behind the Scenes at the American Museum of Natural History). Add a picture book for children (BIG AND NOISY SIMON) and a series of hardboiled stories first published here on my website (THE HAUNTED JOHN AND OTHER STORIES) and you have a good case that, even in my forties, I haven't yet figured out what to do when I grow up.

Despite all the evidence, though, all my writing grants me the same joyful reward: the ability to explore, to delve, to learn about new worlds. To get my hands dirty.

In my baseball books (which also include THE BASEBALL ANTHOLOGY and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BASEBALL), the reward is the chance to pore through old letters, journals, newspaper articles and magazine pieces as I hunt for fresh, fascinating new details about the game and its stars. I love the smell of century-old books and newspapers, love the feel of old paper under my fingers. And I love the treasure-hunt itself, the moment when I realize that I've discovered something no one else has seen for decades.

The same satisfaction also surrounds my research into science and natural history, but with an added thrill: the chance to talk with brilliant scientists, to visit new worlds with them as my expert guides. The stories I've written for this website all reflect my love of travel, of adventure, of exciting (and sometimes dangerous) destinations. Even Simon, the hero of my children's book, takes a journey-and manages to learn something about himself in the process, just as I do while researching and writing each of my books.Though I have some ideas simmering, I don't know what project I'm going to be working on next. (You'll hear about it here first.) It may turn to be something that, on first glance, bears no relationship to what I've done before. Just take a look at my hands, though, and you'll see I haven't changed a bit.

"Never Forget"

As The September 11th attacks pass into history-and they will, every atrocity always does-I sometimes feel the need to remind myself of the anger and sorrow I felt in the weeks that followed the attacks. To do that, I visit a small storefront on Sixth Avenue just north of 42nd Street, a block from the library where I'm researching my new book.

That storefront was recently taken over by a group calling itself "Here Is New York." What the group does is collect photos of September 11th and its aftermath and hang the prints on the walls...rows and rows, hundreds of images familiar and new.

The experience is overwhelming, and the place (always filled with people) is usally silent as a cathedral, except for those who feel the need to tell their stories of survival and grief to strangers who are now not really strangers.

A new image caught my attention when I stopped by yesterday. It was of the wound in the first tower, just after it was hit. The fires had not yet burned out of control, so there were no billows of smoke, just a huge gouge in which you could see the ghostlike afterimage of the airplane's shape as it went in. Shattered windows, twisted metal, pieces of desks-all these were discernable. And more.

I stepped close to the print and peered at it. There, in the middle of the wound, stood a young woman. The figure was too small for me to make out the expression on her face, not that I needed to, but it was clear that she was uninjured. Somehow, amazingly, the impact and explosion had spared her. Her white blouse and gray slacks were clean.

She stood, holding onto what had once been an outside supporting beam of the tower, staring out into space. At her feet lay the body, two bare legs and a fragment of skirt visible, of someone who had been killed.

I looked at this image for a few minutes, engraving it into my skull. There was the tragedy of September 11th, in the shock and horror and disbelief that must have filled that young woman's mind. In her knowing that she too was doomed, and would have some time to think about it. In seeing, before she died, things none of us should ever have to see.

The attacks have come to mean many things, but at least for those of us living close to New York City, they continue to affect us on the most elemental personal level. I didn't know that woman, but someone did. Many people did. Those people are still in mourning, and the rest of us here, on some level, still are as well.

We all know someone who died...in our neighborhood, our town, our school system. Even in a place as big as New York, there is a web of relationships, a vast web that remains invisible until so many strands get snapped. Even though life feels normal much of the time now, we're all still feeling the tug, the rupture, six months later. I intend never to forget this feeling.