The New York Knights

The Knights were Roy Hobbs' team, the team of Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Roy Hobbs was possibly the great baseball player of all time. As a young man, he was waylaid on his path, and did not play in the major leagues until he was thirty-five years old, old age for most ball players.

I'll be writing more of Roy Hobbs. I have already written of him here, comparing his story to that of Noah.

I did it because we are in the Time of the Flood. I don't pretend to know the will of God. Just recently, I have read a woman writer who said that the most important characteristic of a prophet is that he or she be 100% right!
Well, that's a tall order. Even the prophets in the Old Testament don't seem to be 100% right. We seem to have gotten in the habit, as Christians using Old Testament prophecies to demonstrate the divine birth of Jesus, that everything a prophet said was true. It appears, however, that a lot of what was said was not true. Certain important things were right on the mark, some were a bit wide of the mark.
This leads us to reflect on the nature of Truth and God, but I don't want to do that here.

End of Times belief is everywhere, and prophets are a dime a dozen. My wife came in the other night to tell me that Jim Bakker was on cable, apparently prophesying that the Second Coming was nigh, or if not the actual Second Coming, something pretty bad for mankind. Jim Bakker appears to have some sort of holy manna - or refried beans - in tin cans which, if purchased by the faithful, will somehow alleviate the coming scourge.
So I asked whether he was not only talking about divine destruction, but also that we could dodge the divine wrath by buying tin cans - with a long shelf life - of his product? Like stocking a fall-out shelter with food back in the old days, when we were young, and the only thing we had to fear was Russia dropping bombs on us - surely not being beset by our fellow citizens robbing us blind, running scams on us, and destroying the economy.
But, you know, come to think of it, there was a Twilight Zone episode where there was a report of nuclear war, and one family on the block had prepared a fall-out shelter - like the provident ants of the proverb - while the rest of the neighborhood had not - like the fiddling grasshoppers they were! Well, it was neighbor against neighbor, trying to get into that fall-out shelter. I remember Claude Akins was a "grasshopper" neighbor.

We are in the Flood. There's nothing we can do, so I advise us not to pretend anymore. We who have been born for this time are many: the Boomers. Up until now, we thought they were so many of us, mainly because our forbears came back from the wars and procreated like mad. Sure. Good story, there. But, we are like the seeds of the distressed maple tree: numerous and filling the air, covering the driveways of suburbia...because the organism in distress strains to continue its life; we are many because many of us will fall away.
The Flood is coming, and we are either Noah, or his laughing neighbors, making jibes about drydocks 100 miles from the nearest puddle.

It's time to get on the train to join our team, The New York Knights, and enter the big leagues.
That's what I'm writing about in my book: where we are and what we've learned. To quote another writer about baseball, Kinsella:

"one strikeout with the bases loaded is worth ten strikeouts with two out and nobody on."

I'm sorry I haven't told you so before...but I think I have, in a way. Doesn't really matter. Like Roy Hobbs, we can't turn back the hand of time. It's time to get to the Big Leagues, and to win one for Pop.