Having a hard time bearing down today, after knocking out the conclusion to my BNTS paper on ‘John, Jesus, and Jolene: Popular Music Explains an Exegetical Problem’. It’s been a long time since I’ve given a paper at a conference; I had forgotten how short a time 20–25 minutes is.
My morning run felt fine, though when I arrived home I was surprised to see that it fell at the slow end of my average (still improved my five-day average, as it knocked out another slower day). Coffee and fruit, cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer, then home for coffee and toast, and a wodge of emailing. I finished the Ty Cobb biography I’ve been reading, and one passage in particular really touched me.
‘On another occasion about ten years later, when [Ty Cobb and Grantland Rice were] passing through Greenville, South Carolina, Cobb said to Rice, “I’ve got an old friend in this town. Let’s find him.”
They proceeded to a small liquor store….
“Waiting his turn,” Rice wrote, “Cobb stepped up, looked the old boy in the eye and said, ‘How’s business?”
‘Just fine, sir,’ replied [Joe] Jackson, turning his back to rearrange a shelf.
‘Don’t you know me, you old buzzard?’ said Cobb.
“Jackson wheeled around. ‘Christ, yes I know you!’ grinned Joe. ‘I just didn’t know whether you knew me after all these years. I didn’t want to embarrass you or nothin’.…”
“I’ll tell you how well I remember you, Joe,” [Cobb] said. “Whenever I got the idea that I was a good hitter I’d stop and take a good look at you. Then I knew I could stand some improvement.”
Charles Leerhsen, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, ch. 30 (Simon & Schuster, 2015)
As I may have written before, I have a very sensitive spot for betrayal; the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring when Bilbo asks to have the ring back, just for a moment — and Frodo sees the glint of possession in his elder cousin’s eye and knows that Bilbo must never be allowed to touch the ring again — just tears me up. By the same token, in an opposite way, being true touches me as well. The idea of Ty Cobb stopping off to see his old rival and pal Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Jackson not wanting to embarrass him (either of them, really) by letting on that he knew Cobb when Cobb didn’t immediately greet him, goes straight to my heart.