J. R. & More
RIP Houston Astros standout pitcher J. R. Richard, 71, whom family members say succumbed to complications from Covid. He was in the midst of a possible Hall of Fame career when he suffered a stroke at 30 in the middle of the 1980 season. At the the time he was 10–4, ERA 1.90. Just prior to the attack, he was troubled by a dead arm and other ailments. Doctors failed to find the cause. Who would have expected what happened to a man of that age? In ten seasons he was was 107–71, 3.16 ERA. He was an All-Star (1980), the NL ERA leader, 2.79 (1979), and two-time NL strikeout leader (1978, 1979). His bad luck continued after baseball. By 1994 he was homeless and destitute. He then found solace in a local church and eventually became a minister. He was the subject of a film: Resurrection: The J. R. Richard Story (2005). In 2018 he became a member of the “Hall of Game” of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. In 2019 he was inducted into the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals, an organization which honors individuals, from the obscure to the well known, who have altered the baseball world in ways that supersede statistics. For an unfortunate few, life is unfair. J. R. Richard deserved better. (Facts from Wiki).
Headline from foxnews.com: “Over 800 unaccompanied migrant kids apprehended at the border in a single day as numbers surge.” Gee, think there may be a link between open borders and rising Covid infections?
It would have been a banner day for the floating book shop if not for the woman who left her shopping bags with me to go to an ATM for cash for the books she’d selected, and hadn’t returned more than two hours later. She’d engaged several people in conversation, in English and Russian. I suspected she’d been drinking, as she had a tall can in hand. Wolf, who worked in a hospital, thought she was mentally ill. One of the items she left behind is a house plant. There are several knickknacks and three towels. I brought them home, as I’ll be at my alternate spot at least the next two days. I’m not optimistic about the plant, as any I’d ever tried to nurse died rather quickly. I’ll bring everything out to the car some time next week once I get a good parking spot, hopefully Monday. Meanwhile, my thanks to the Jewish woman born in Egypt who speaks five languages, who bought A Hitch in Twilight as well as a bunch of other titles. Here’s most of what sold: DVDs of Purple Rain (1984), To Live and Die and in L.A. (1985), What Lies Beneath (2000) and season three of The Wire; a George Michael CD; Fortune’s Rocks by Anita Shreve; The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille; a textbook on sexuality; a health guide in Hebrew; a French-English dictionary; a pictorial on Buenos Aires; The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook by Edmund J. Bourne.
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