On baseball, probability, and the Big Papi in the sky

I had a near-religious experience at the ballpark today.

This may come as a shock to those who know me well, especially those who have met me in the past five years. Atheist; agnostic; Humanitarian; Pastafarian; choose whatever word you’re comfortable with for not believing in a personal god. There’s not a word in there I like to describe myself, for the same reason that people who don’t like tennis don’t use a word to describe themselves.

It’s a beautiful Memorial Day afternoon at Turner Field. The Braves have a 6-1 lead over the world champions from Boston. Clay Buchholz doesn’t have it. He can’t throw a strike, and the reeling Red Sox needed him today. They’ve lost 10 straight, and the bottom of the AL East is an ugly place for the proud, usually-swaggering Sox.

We “nones” don’t think we have it all figured out, you know. But we come by it honestly. We just see a set of beliefs and we say, “you know, I don’t think this is right.” And that’s where I’ll leave the word “we” behind and speak for only myself.

It’s the top of the fifth, and a hot, sunny day is turning breezy. Braves pitcher Ervin Santana has kept Boston in check and knows he’s got to make it through one more inning. He’s due to lead off the bottom of the fifth, when he will almost certainly be lifted for a pinch hitter. He has to deal only with the bottom of the Boston order.

I would love to believe that when my loved ones die, they go to a happier place, but I don’t think they do. Why should it be hard to accept that they just cease to be? They didn’t exist before their lives; why should it be hard to accept that they don’t exist afterward? Miracles, too -- they’re so fun to think about. It’s so enriching, for some reason, to believe that the entire universe bent perfectly, obligingly, miraculously just to show something to ME. I sometimes wish I could accept that, unreservedly. Most of the time, I don’t. I think things happen for reasons, and if we understand the reasons, we understand the event.

Mendoza induces a groundout from Grady Sizemore. He’s maybe moving a little more slowly, but he’s still rolling. The ballpark is full of disappointed Red Sox fans.

I will tell you that most of the moments of transcendent awareness in my life have come at a ballpark. That clean line where the brown dirt meets the emerald grass. The color in the eighth inning of an indigo sky struggling to hang on to its last bit of daylight. The ballpark has been my church; my place to dream and uncover truths, and to try to understand this life.

For the Sox fans, skies are turning dark both figuratively and literally. There may be a storm coming. With storms popping up right over Atlanta, it could rain for three minutes or three hours. If Santana closes out the inning, the ballgame will have reached the 4 ½ innings it needs to be considered official. If it decides to rain the rest of the night, the game will be called a Braves victory. Santana strikes out Jackie Bradley, Jr. and needs one more out to get there.

I want to assure you that I’m not about to tell you I witnessed a miracle at the ballpark today. I didn’t. I’ve seen a lot of improbable events at the ballpark, and you know, as many times as this game has been played over the years, it still has the ability to show you something that you have never seen, and that NO ONE has ever seen. Fun as it might be to think about, I don’t think a miracle has ever happened on a baseball field. To put a finer point on it, I don’t want to believe in a higher power that allows unspeakable acts of cruelty and evil to happen every day yet concerns itself with the outcome of baseball games.

Santana seems to be feeling some pressure, and he commits the sin of walking the ninth-place batter, pinch hitter Daniel Nava.

Many years ago, in my youth, I used to think of life as a series of tests put before me by god. Good events were blessings; bad events were curses. I would be rewarded for passing tests and punished for failing. In short, things happened to me. And although I know that I’m more comfortable now believing that I make things happen, I know there’s a loss of innocence. I gave up my childish, romantic way of thinking, exchanging it for a deeper, more accurate understanding.

Leadoff man Brock Holt smacks a line drive to right field and legs out a double. It’s just the Sox’s second extra-base hit against Santana, and the Boston faithful finally see a chink in the armor. If they can get just two more men on base, they can get to David Ortiz. And that guy is clutch. Everyone knows that.

There’s a certain romance shared by baseball fans. We cherish The Game as something bigger than ourselves, which connects us to our fathers and grandfathers and all of the players of The Game who have come before. We cherish its cathedrals. The game looks like a graceful ballet, with outcomes determined by mysterious but powerful forces. There’s beauty in the way an outfielder glides to the ball. There’s grace in the way he removes it from his glove and smoothness in the way he throws it back. And everyone knows that the game was won by the big slugger because “he’s clutch.”

Ortiz is the guy that always comes through when the situation is tough. He won last year’s championship for Boston pretty much singlehandedly. For the love of god, he’s the man who, in 2004, ended The Curse of the Bambino!

My loss of that innocence came slowly. To begin with, the game is not a ballet. It’s played by men -- sweaty, strong, dirty men who train their entire lives to make the incredibly athletic look incredibly easy. The outfielder who glides to the ball is putting into motion the incredibly refined skill to judge the future position of a ball based on a shockingly fleeting fraction-of-a-second look at its velocity, direction and spin.

Twenty-two-year-old Aruban shortstop Xander Bogaerts works a veteran at bat. He makes Santana throw more pitches than he wants to and takes a walk. The first drops of rain strike the filled seats of Turner Field.

The next thing to clear my misty eyes was the realization that those finely tuned athletes… though they may care about the game, they don’t care, in the same sense that I do, about The Game. For them, it’s a job, and a hard one. They play it hard so that we may wax poetic about how their sweat connects us to our fathers and all the players from decades ago; but I promise, they have never heard of Cap Anson nor do they care about how he played The Game.

Next, the more baseball games you watch, the more you realize that the things which influence the outcomes of games are amazingly random. The game-winning hit was only so because it was out of the reach of the third baseman by two inches. Those two inches translate, on a spherical ball and a cylindrical bat, to a couple of microns, which determines the trajectory of the ball. It’s not an overstatement to say that a couple of grains of dirt on the bat’s barrel could determine the difference between a hit and an out. And while that’s a neat thought, it’s enough to tell you that larger, mysterious forces are not at play. It’s chaos and randomness; so many variables that they can’t adequately be accounted for. But there is no Great Mind that controls the game.

Dustin Pedroia, the best second baseman in the game, hits a line drive just inches in front of the point in left field where Justin Upton could have caught it with a dive. Upton fields it on a hop instead and two runs score. With two on and two out, Ortiz is due at the plate.

Hold on to the idea of “No Great Mind,” please, as I tell you about the final step to my loss of innocence about baseball. It’s called sabermetrics.

Sabermetrics aren’t pushing an agenda. The name is taken from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). It’s a catch-all name for a new and deeper level of statistics and probabilities. The practitioners of sabermetrics weren’t necessarily looking to replace the public’s understanding of the game by evolving the traditional metrics of the game. But the deeper they probed, that’s exactly what they did. A set of probabilities could be laid out for everything, and though they may not control for every variable, it’s possible to begin to think about baseball as not a game played by human beings but chaos determined only by a series of probabilities.

They call Ortiz “Big Papi,” a nickname that reflects at once the Dominican’s stature physically, his position of respect as a teammate, and his accomplishments as a player. Statisticians list Papi as 6-foot-4, 230 pounds. He probably hasn’t been 230 pounds since seventh grade. He has some of the biggest hits of the last 15 years in all of baseball.

There is a stat called BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play). It is a simple equation: it simply measures a batter’s batting average when he hits a fair ball. It can also be used for pitchers, to determine the batting average they allow when their opponents hit a fair ball. The day I officially had my mind blown was the day that I learned this: every pitcher allows pretty much the same BABIP. Allow that to sink in for a moment and consider what it means. It means that all a pitcher can really do is prevent you from putting the ball in play (i.e., strike you out). If the ball is in play, essentially every pitcher is as good as every other. It means that the trajectory of the ball, and whether it will create a hit or an out, is essentially random, with a defined hit probability of about 30%. The day I learned that is the day I went beyond the pale. I began to feel as if a baseball game is nothing but a game of Strat-O-Matic, but with a few more rolls of the dice.

It doesn’t stop there. By careful analysis of the numbers, we can pretty much determine that hit streaks happen randomly. “Hot” and “cold” streaks happen randomly. In fact, ALL outcomes happen randomly, and when an observer says “he’s hot at the plate,” it’s a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). A “hot streak” is just a label we assign retroactively to the point in the dataset where the random distribution of hits was high. Ugh.

Baseball players themselves, by the way, are masters of post hoc thinking. Their hot streaks and cold streaks are forever owing to the socks they pulled up, or didn’t; the beard they shaved, or didn’t. And they do it for a reason. “If you believe you're playing well because you're getting laid, or because you're not getting laid, or because you wear women's underwear, then you ARE!” screamed Crash Davis in one of the poigniant moments of Bull Durham. “And you should know that!”

But is Big Papi actually good in the clutch, in any sense that can be proven? Show me the evidence! Well, even last season, when he batted .309, he batted just .315 with runners in scoring position. He was 86 points BETTER with no outs than with two outs. In situations defined as close and late, he batted just .204. The numbers are similar throughout his career. The numbers are clear.

Follow that post hoc thinking one more step, and you find that there is no such thing as “the clutch.” It can’t be shown that any player is so good in pressure situations that his abilities are out of the range of probability. His abilities in what we define as “the clutch” are just as good as always, and we can expect him to perform reasonably close to the same. A player who we determine to be good in pressure situations (or “be clutch,” as the vernacular goes) is just a retroactive way of saying that the player’s success in those defined situations has been slightly above his normal averages, though even THAT happens randomly. Sometimes a player will be above his averages, sometimes below.

Not only is Big Papi not “clutch,” but there IS NO SUCH THING as clutch.

Still, there’s something about Papi’s lumbering bearing and easy smile. I can’t see it from the stands, but I know it’s there. (Or did I make it up?) Ervin Santana knows it’s there too. (Or did he also make it up?) He’s in charge of this situation and he can tie this game. Everyone in the stands recognizes this as a clutch situation. The inning has gone on too long for Santana, who can get a win if he gets one more out. But no stat sheet identifies this as a clutch situation. Not in the fifth inning.

The idea that there is no clutch flies directly in the face of traditional baseball wisdom. Of course there is such thing as the clutch, and of course there are players who thrive in it. Take away the numbers, and we KNOW this to be true. Right? RIGHT?!?!?!

How could we possibly know this if there’s no evidence to support it? Did we make it all up? All of it? Oh my god, please tell me that this game, AND BY EXTENSION THIS LIFE is not all just cold probabilities just because there’s no evidence of anything else. Maybe we’re just not looking in the right place for the evidence?

BANG. David Ortiz hits a majestic long drive that sizzles over center field and slices just left of center as it clears the fence. It’s a home run. Of course. Tie game.

Why did it happen? Who gives a shit, it’s gone.

That Papi is so clutch.

Looooooooong Gone, Never Forgotten: My Eulogy for Ernie Harwell

I spent part of the evening Tuesday night sitting under a magnolia tree.

This particular tree is one of impressive stateliness and venerability, and I sat and rested against the sturdy old trunk for several minutes. I hadn’t stopped there for rest, for this particular tree is just a short walk from my new home in Midtown Atlanta. I hadn’t stopped there for shade, for it was a cool evening, lit by half a moon and the street lights of a major city. I hadn’t even stopped to appreciate an idyllic setting, for this tree sits only yards away from Ponce De Leon Blvd., a major thoroughfare through Midtown, with all of its noise. And it sits in the back of a parking lot, behind Borders Books, leaving a view of only dumpsters.

But I had gone there for a reason. I’d gone to commune with just a little bit of what that tree had seen, and to hear in my head the voice of many summers gone by.

I remember the first time I really got turned on to the game of baseball. It was 1984, and the Detroit Tigers were in the summer months of a season in which they were never out of first place. My dad had grown up in Detroit, rooting for Al Kaline and Denny McLain. And wherever we went that summer – including an Indian Guides camping trip, as I recall – the radio went with us. The dial scarcely budged from 760 WJR, and the voice on the radio was Ernie Harwell’s.

I first met Ernie in 1999, after idolizing him for years. I was fresh out of college and working for the Charleston RiverDogs of the South Atlantic League. I was making $200 a month there as a broadcasting intern, and I had the temerity to call the Hall of Famer in his hotel room in Houston. We talked about everything from Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard ‘Round the World to what it’d be like to open Comerica Park the following year. He gave me a 30-minute interview on a gameday, and it was the highlight of my year.

Afterward, he told me that I’d done a great interview and how I had big things in my future.

By 2002, I was a broadcaster for the Toronto Blue Jays’ Single-A team, and I used my connections to get on the field at Skydome during the last weekend of the season. I’d come, with my father, to track down Ernie during his last weekend as a major league broadcaster. My dad had been listening to Ernie for 40 years and had never met him. How proud my dad was when Ernie remembered me by name and told him what a good interview I’d conducted three years prior. This man who’d once played cards on the team bus with Jackie Robinson made it his custom to greet you, no matter who you were, as if you were a longtime friend.

The following season, I got a job as the broadcaster for the Lansing Lugnuts, in Tiger Country. I hoped I’d see Ernie in his first year of retirement, and late in the summer, I did. He came to my radio booth to broadcast a game with me. He told me off the air that he always knew I’d get there and further. He told me on the air that the people of Lansing were lucky to have me. I’d imagine he said the same thing to every usher, bat boy, and elevator operator he met at Oldsmobile Park that day. And I’d imagine, too, that just like it was for me, it was one of the proudest moments of their lives.

Much is being written about Ernie Harwell right now. Many writers mention his greatness as a broadcaster but focus on his greatness as a man. Every word of it is true.

He was married to his wife Lulu for more than 60 years. He wrote piano music during the offseason. And every time he went on the air – heck, every time he walked through the ballpark – he had thousands of friends. Even if those people didn’t know it.

Mitch Albom once said that “if baseball could talk, it would sound like Ernie Harwell.” Maybe he didn’t speak as baseball, but he did speak for baseball. (If you haven’t read his Hall of Fame induction speech, read the text HERE, starting halfway down with the words “Baseball is.”)

One of his signature calls was saying that a batter who had struck out looking had “stood there like a house by the side of the road and watched that one go by.” When a foul ball went into the stands, he’d call out the city that the fan was from; always a suburb of Detroit within his listening radius. And of course, his best known signature call was to say “loooooong gone!” after home runs.

I was listening to a recording of it last night, and I asked him back in that 1999 interview what he wanted people to say when he was “long gone.” This was his humble reply:

“I’d like to be remembered as somebody who showed up for most every game,” he said. “I’ve missed only two in my 52 years — and somebody who tried to do the job and appreciated the fact that people embraced him with some warmth and loyalty and support over the years.”

I’ll remember him as much more than that. So will anyone else who felt the warmth of his radiance from the very beginning of his 60-year career.

That career started in the South. Before he debuted in the major leagues (he was traded to the bigs for a minor league catcher!) he broadcast ballgames for the minor league Atlanta Crackers, at a place called Ponce De Leon Park. This was an unusual park, in that it had a very spacious center field.

And in the depths of center, just yards from what is now Ponce De Leon Blvd. and behind what is now Borders Books, stood a stately and venerable magnolia tree.

How much it has seen and heard.

I’ll miss you, Ernie. My father and his father, and thousands more of us — we stood there like a house by the side of the road and watched you go by, and the world is impoverished without your presence.

Watching the Wheels

The lyrics to John Lennon's "Watching the Wheels" (1981). No explanation necessary.

People say I'm crazy doing what I'm doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin
When I say that I'm o.k. well they look at me kind of strange
Surely you're not happy now you no longer play the game

People say I'm lazy dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall
Don't you miss the big time boy you're no longer on the ball

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go

Ah, people asking questions lost in confusion
Well I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I've lost my mind
I tell them there's no hurry
I'm just sitting here doing time

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go

STORY SUNDAY: Paradise Lost: The Tale of Nauru

(My apologies for such a looong blog post. I just thought this was a fascinating subject, and I was compelled to write about it. And once you start digging on this subject, well, go ahead and read, if you've got the time. -- Jim)



Tell me a Tale of Nauru

Somewhere in the seas of the South Pacific, amid a deep blue paradise in a corner of the world you’ll probably never see, lies a tiny tragedy.

Isolated from the nearest scrap of land by 250 miles of ocean and separated from the nearest continent by nearly 2,000 miles, there exists an anthropologically distinct group of people. There are few sights there apart from coral pinnacles and miles of open ocean. But one sight those people wish they had never seen is the first mast of a European ship on the horizon. For since then, this tiny secluded ocean paradise would never be the same. It would be wracked by corruption, disease, obesity, poverty, fraud, thievery, spectacularly bad investments, and even deeper tragedies.

This is the land of the people constantly making deals with the devil. Once the richest people in the world, they are now among the poorest, least employed and least healthy. A people who have lost nearly everything by selling the very island from right underneath their feet.

No one knows how the inhabitants got here. And, partly because of their poor decisions, bad deals and bad luck, no one knows how long they’ll be able to stay.

Welcome to Nauru

If you should depart Los Angeles heading West-Southwest into the largest ocean in the world, and maintain that bearing for a little over 2,500 miles, you’ll come to Honolulu. Stay on the exact same course for another 2,880 miles, and you’ll come, at length, to a tiny island called Nauru.

Pronounced NAIR-oo, which makes it sound a bit like a world in Star Wars, Nauru is every bit as remote as that connotation would imply. It lies 26 miles south of the equator. It is the smallest independent republic in the world (as a nation, it ranks third-tiniest, behind only Vatican City and Monaco). At just 8 sq. mi., it’s just a tad larger than 5,000 acres, 50 percent smaller than the campus of Stanford University. The circumference of the oval-shaped island, a ring of beachfront property, is just over 10 ¾ miles. A reasonably fast distance runner could run a lap around the island in an hour.

Much of the land inside that ring of beaches is uninhabited and, as we shall soon see, uninhabitable.

About 12,000 people, fewer than you’d find at your typical American arena rock concert, live on Nauru. Their ancestors have been there for thousands of years, and no one is quite sure how. To understand that, we must take a small scientific detour.

Anthropology’s accepted view is that modern human beings first sprang up in Africa and then spread out in two waves. Yet recently, human fossils have been found in Australia and the Polynesian islands that are much older than this theory supports. At no time in human history were Australia and the Polynesian Islands attached to mainland Asia. Somehow, though, people proliferated throughout the thousands of islands of the South Pacific, long before the accepted date when humans could speak or engage in the type of cooperative efforts it takes to build an ocean-worthy craft and set out toward terra incognita.

Yet for thousands of years, they have been there. From New Zealand to French Polynesia. From Christmas Island to tiny Palau. From The United States’ Marshall Islands to Fiji. Humans have been living there for thousands of years, and they’ve made quite an instructive experiment in physical, as well as cultural, evolution. Over the ages, the individual peoples and their cultures have grown quite distinct. Thus, Nauru’s language (Nauruan, natch) is completely distinct from all other languages of the South Pacific. Ninety percent of Nauruans speak Nauruan in their homes, and it is spoken nowhere else on Earth.

So this is where the story begins. On a remote, solitary island in the middle of an ocean of… well… ocean.

You’ll want to stop to think at this point what that type of isolation means. As Americans, we’re conditioned to think of isolation as relaxing; sort of a reward for succeeding in the rat race. So we think of isolation as paradise. Imagine, though, living hundreds of miles from any land and thousands of miles from anywhere where things are produced. Need a new chain for your bicycle, for instance? There’s no running out to the store to get one. In a place where Australian rules football is a popular sport, what happens if they need a new ball? There are no sporting goods stores, and no one on the island can make a leather ball, since there are no cattle raised there. Just about everything, including all fresh water, must be shipped there, in all-too-infrequent arrivals of cargo vessels.

If that thought doesn’t do it for you, simply look at some pictures from Nauru. Islanders wear Western t-shirts with a 20-year-old Nike logo on them. When you look at living conditions, well, let’s just say there’s no Home Depot around the corner.

And with that in mind, let’s rewind the tape back to 1798, when Nauru had not one of what we consider the comforts modern life, and the first English ship approached its shores.

Avarice and Bird Shit

As the 18th century gave way to the 19th, Nauru had a handful more than 1,000 inhabitants. With humans’ natural proclivity to divide and sub-divide, these people were each part of one of 12 traditional “clans.” A look at Nauru’s flag is instructive, perhaps, because it shows a star on a field of blue just below a yellow line, which indicates Nauru’s position relative to the equator. The 12-pointed star represents the traditional clans.

The people wore grass skirts and little else. There was no need for clothes in the year-round tropical climate. They lived simply but had advanced beyond hunter-gatherer status. Though there are no native mammals to trap, Nauruans caught ocean fish, acclimatized them to a freshwater lagoon, and raised them there. They caught birds as they landed on the shore. They also supped on fresh fruit, including pineapples, bananas and coconuts. There were no mosquitoes and no disease. Simply paradise. Although there can be no proof, I imagine that the people, who had lived together for thousands of years with no outside influence – and probably not even knowing what outside influence even existed – were probably content and happy.

A British captain named John Fearn, sailing a whaling boat in the South Pacific, was the first Westerner to visit the island and, as is so often the case, he named the place. In this case, he named it “Pleasant Island,” even though it already had a perfectly good name (“Naoero,” which was hard for Westerners to pronounce).

As sea travel became more widespread, whalers, beachcombers and deserters began to visit and even live on the island. And in the early 1800’s, Nauru got its first international commerce.

Nauru had not discovered alcoholic beverages, and when British sailors introduced toddy to them (a liquor made from palm sap), they gave what they had in trade.

Alcoholism is a problem in Nauru still.

Later, Nauruans eagerly traded the Western boats for firearms. Almost immediately, these firearms were used in a decade-long civil war between the clans, which killed roughly 35 percent of the people on the island, reducing the population from 1,400 to 900. What other purpose would they have for firearms? You will recall that Nauru has no native mammals for hunting.

Nauru’s acclimatizing to the modern world was not off to a propitious start. One could say, more than 200 years later, that it’s still not going so well.

Just after the brutal civil war, Nauru was annexed by Germany, a country nearly 9,000 miles away. Note that it’s difficult to get much farther away on planet Earth. The center of United States is closer to Australia and China than Nauru is to Germany.

These days, Nauru is an independent republic. And approaching Nauru from the sea, it looks like any of the tropical oases we Americans might be used to, if a bit less modern. Coconut palms and pandanus trees thrive near the sandy beaches, and green vegetation grows in the fertile ground. But this postcard view from the sea shrouds the skeleton in Nauru’s closet. Behind the veil of lush seaside vegetation is a massive scar, encompassing most of the island. On the island, it is known as topside, and it is Nauru’s great national embarrassment.

Journalist Jack Hitt told the story of the day when the only cab driver in Nauru took him for a tour around the island. Here he describes, with unimprovable vividness, the moment that the cab turned topside:

Right away the trees disappeared. I immediately saw that the palms and pandanus you see on the shore are a kind of scrim -- a curtain; hiding from sight one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.

Almost all of Nauru is missing. Picked clean. Right down to the coral skeleton supporting the island. It’s a haunting landscape of dug out stone channels, formed by limestone towers and coral outcroppings. All blindingly white, under an intense, equatorial sun.

The winding channels among these coral spires are lined with an appallingly silky dirt and old, filthy trash, too expensive to export from the island blows around this blistering desert. Shreds of plastic bags snag on bits of coral, and feral dogs hunt in the canals.

[The cabbie] told me how when he was a child, all of this was dense tropical forest.

We sat in the hissing silence for a while. There was no breeze. Just fine talc. Airborne and stagntant.

What in the world happened to most of Nauru, you ask? Well, it seems that about 100 years after the first mainlanders arrived, one of them discovered that a chunk of rock from the island proved to be the richest phosphate ore ever assayed.

Phosphate is a valuable resource, used mainly to produce fertilizer but also used in animal feed supplements and industrial chemicals. Especially before artificial fertilizers were invented, phosphate was one of the most prized resources in international commerce. It turned out that Nauru was full of phosphate, to the point where it was, in a very literal way, made of the stuff.

How did that happen? The answer is guano. Guano, for those of you who don’t recognize the word, is bird shit.

Specifically, it’s seabird bird shit. You see, Nauru has been a remote outpost for eons. And for all of those years, Nauru was, for seabirds, the prehistoric equivalent of the rest area you encounter after miles of turnpike driving. Simply pile up ages of the stuff, bake it under a blazing sun 26 miles from the equator and compost it for thousands of years under a tropical jungle, and you’ve got valuable phosphoric rock.

It took at least a million years for this to happen, but the period between the moment of discovery by an Australian chemist and the moment when an industrial consortium began mining it and hauling it away in mass quantities was a scanty six years.

As the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand hauled away the bulk of Nauru, Nauruans earned only 2 percent of the total profits.

Distinguished science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once said famously that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This being true, it would be understandable if Nauruans had little idea what was happening while the Pacific Phosphate Company commenced that hauling away of their island. Perhaps I’m fancifying and simplifying this notion a bit, but maybe all the Nauruans knew was that the strangers with the vast knowledge and the powerful machines were doing something in the center of the island with material for which the islanders had little use. And in exchange, the islanders got to enjoy a slightly elevated standard of living and be exposed to new and fascinating technologies.

But at what cost? While the world’s farms flourished on Nauru’s phosphates, bewildered islanders gave away their island, parting with their greatest asset: the very land beneath their feet.

The Vortex

Never terribly far from bad luck, it wasn’t long before Nauru again became a pawn in someone else’s game. While the mainlanders continued to happily cart away Nauru’s very island, World War I came and Australian forces seized control of the island from Germany in 1914. In the wake of the war, the League of Nations gave a trustee mandate over Nauru to Austraila, New Zealand and the UK. The three countries formed a commission to continue denuding the island of its phosphate.

Nauru continued to swirl in a vortex of outside powers completely beyond its control. In August of 1942, Japanese forces occupied the island and built an airfield. This lasted seven months, until the United States bombed the island, destroying the airfield and preventing food supplies from reaching Nauru and causing starvation. The Japanese Army deported more than 1,000 Nauruans to the Chuuk Islands to work as laborers, where 463 of them died. The island was liberated from Japanese control in 1945, and the laborers, or those remaining anyway, returned home in 1946.

Naturally, phosphate mining resumed.

Happy Days

Liberated, hopeful, and thrust into modern times, Nauru took immense strides forward in the following decades. The island became self-governing in 1966 and became independent in 1968. In June 1970, all rights to mining became locally owned, with the passage of rights to the Nauru Phosphate Corporation. Suddenly, the tiny island enjoyed terrific prosperity. By the late 1980s, the country enjoyed the highest per capita income in the world.

Let me repeat that. For a time in the late 1980s, Nauru had a higher per capita income than ALL other nations IN THE WORLD.

The Nauruans, with no preparation for the fluctuations between boom times and recession, basked in their newfound wealth. Thousands of Nauruans bought cars, including expensive Italian sports cars, even though you could go anywhere on the island with a short walk. They bought motor boats and satellite TV and imported a diet of highly processed Western food for which, we shall see, their bodies were spectacularly unprepared.

All of this was unprecedented for Nauru. As far as they knew, this was how the rest of the world lived. Signs of prosperity were everywhere. And lost in their televisions, video game systems and expensive machinery, it was easy to forget about the large portion of their island which was now missing.

They could even distract themselves with a round on Nauru’s brand new… golf course. Yes, Nauru built a nine-hole golf course in the middle of an ocean on an island of eight square miles.

After millennia of being a natural paradise, Nauru transformed itself into a Western paradise of consumerism and hedonism.

Still, like the strong coral formations that support Nauru from beneath, this new era was based on solid planning. Founding president Hammer DeRoburt had the foresight to realize that someday, all of the phosphate would be gone. So he established a trust fund, to keep the money rolling in, saying, “I feel very sure of this, the forecast of income in the time when there will me no more phosphate. It compares quite favorably with what is being received today. This is from the investment of funds which are being invested today.”

The trust fund swelled to $1.5 Billion Australian. Converted to U.S. dollars and adjusted for inflation, that comes to nearly $1.7 Billion U.S. in today’s currency.

With that money in a money market account making a safe 5 percent, the people of Nauru would be set for life. That translates to nearly $5,000 in interest alone for every islander, every year, forever. The interest alone would put Nauruans’ per capita income higher than that of almost all of their South Pacific neighbors (if they could be considered that).

But alas, unrelenting waves have been lapping at Nauru’s shores. And less than 30 years after the trust fund and Nauruan prosperity hit their zenith, the golf course is gone. So are the Lamborghinis. And so is every bit of the money.

Bad Ideas, Bad Deals and Bad Advice

Unless you are a devoted scholar of the stage or have a kind of secret schadenfreude for studying the worst stage flops of all time, you have probably never heard of Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love.

In the flimsy script, Leonardo da Vinci is portrayed as having an amorous relationship with the fiancée of Francesco Del Giocondo; she is the woman better known as the subject of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s most famous painting. After an amorous affair, Leonardo impregnates “Lisa” and is murdered by Del Giocondo.

Never mind, of course, that in real life Leonardo was very probably homosexual. This play had more problems. The script, the sets, the costumes… nothing seemed to be right. On opening night at the Strand Theatre in London on June 3, 1993, most of the audience departed before the final curtain fell. The play ran for just five weeks before closing for good as one of the most memorable flops in British theatre history.

I mention this story not in the interest of brushing up your knowledge on the history of British theatre nor to tell you a joke, though the story certainly qualifies. I mention it here because these are the types of investments into which Nauru sunk its considerable wealth.

The play had been the brainchild of Duke Minks, who also happened to be an advisor to Nauru. With his advice, Nauru backed the play and lost $5 Million.

British theatre critics were only too happy to report that the play had been financed by bird shit and, well, garbage in, garbage out, you know, old chap?

This might be the most amusing example of Nauru’s staggeringly efficient financial mismanagement, but it is certainly not the biggest.

Nauru built a high-rise office building in Melbourne called the Nauru House. The trust also built a tower and five luxury condo buildings in Honolulu and other upper-crust real estate in Australia, Fiji, Guam, the Philippines, New Zealand, the UK, Samoa and the USA.

Most of the real estate was phenomenally mismanaged. Some plots of land were sold undeveloped. Nauru took out loans to pay back its debts and then failed to pay those back, leading to the seizure of their real estate assets.

I mentioned earlier that Nauru is passionate about Australian Rules Football. That may explain why, in the mid-90s, the Nauru Phosphate Corporation floated a loan of millions to the struggling Fitzroy Football Club, which sank anyway and went into liquidation in 1996.

Everywhere, there were thieves outside the gates of Nauru, which, it must be said, was not burdened with a great deal of sophistication. Imagine a 10-year-old who had never been exposed to the Internet and who had inherited many millions of dollars (“Why yes! I will help a struggling prince liberate millions of dollars from the Bank of Nigeria in exchange for a percentage of that fortune. That seems like a sound investment!”) and you’ve got something of the sense of it.

Once, their Boeing 737, Air Nauru’s only airplane, was seized on the runway to repay debts. A new plane replaced it a year later and air travel to the island resumed thanks to financial help from Taiwan.

Corrupt politicians took care of the rest of the money. After the foresight and prudent leadership of DeRoburt’s term ended in 1976, Nauruans elected a long line of exceptionally incompetent presidents, some of whom drained the country’s cash reserves to pay for flights on the Concorde or gifts of jewelry for their wives. The situation was such that Nauru brought DeRoburt back for a second term after a failed administration (1978-86). And then a third. And then a fourth. Then Nauru went through 17 administration changes between 1999 and 2003. For the last four years of that period, two presidents, Bernard Dowiyogo and Rene Harris (a convicted felon), ruled for alternating periods following a series of no-confidence votes from the parliament. In December, 2007, Nauru elected Marcus Stephen, a former international medalist in weightlifting, to the country’s top office. He is in power still, although the government does not have enough money to perform basic acts such as provide for employment or health care.

As we will see shortly, both of those situations have become dire.

Anything for a Buck

With all the money gone, the century-long sell-off of Nauru’s only asset became a source of deep national embarrassment and shame. These days the mere subject elicits a cringe or a change of subject from any Nauruan on the island. But some of the dealings in which Nauru became involved after the money disappeared have been just as cringe-worthy.

Searching for streams of income, Nauru became a money laundering center. Anyone, worldwide, could establish an unregulated bank on Nauru for just $25,000. Although the “banks” were nothing more than a few files on a computer in an otherwise empty building, billions of dirty dollars ran through Nauru. Additionally, Nauru offered foreigners passports for a fee. Sure, it was all messy business, but at least it was much-needed income.

Another opportunity to make a buck sprang up in 2001, when a Norwegian ship carrying refugees from countries such as Afghanistan sought to dock in Australia. The Australian government refused and instead developed what it called “the Pacific Soltuion,” in which the boat would be diverted to Nauru and the refugees would be kept in a detention center there, in exchange for millions of dollars in Australian aid to the island. Willing to do anything for a buck and gainful employment for its citizens, Nauru happily agreed.

Despite objections from human rights activists worldwide, Nauru detained the refugees for years, only closing the center in 2008.

The closure of the detention center cut off aid and put 100 Nauruans out of work in an economy that could scarcely afford the blow.

Now, 90 percent of Nauru is unemployed. Ninety-five percent of those who do work are employed by the government. There are no new emerging economies. Few prospects for the future. Precious little inhabitable land.

It’s OK to cringe.

Sick and Overweight is no Way to go through Life, Son

As mentioned above, Nauru elected a former world-class weightlifter as its president. But before you accuse Nauru of taking its cues from the great state of California, you should know that weightlifting has become a Nauruan national obsession.

The people of Nauru, you see, are massive.

I don’t mean “massive” in the sense of the tall Maasai people. They are not exceptionally tall and they aren’t all particularly well muscled.

The people of Nauru are simply fat. Ninety percent have a BMI higher than the world average.

Though some fruit does still grow on the island and fish and local birds are eaten in a limited scale, their diet consists now of almost entirely Western food, processed enough to make the days-long ocean voyage to Nauruan shores.

Nauru now sports the highest level in the world of type 2 diabetes. More than 40 percent of the population is affected, and without proper medical care, people are losing limbs and dying. At one time, seriously ill patients could be treated in Australia, but after Nauru defaulted on some medical bills, the offer was rescinded.

The people also suffer from renal failure, heart disease and other ailments related directly to their diet.

Of course all of this – the obesity, the diabetes, the renal trouble – makes perfect evolutionary sense. The people of Nauru lived and bred for millennia on their tiny island. They share extremely similar DNA and they are genetically predisposed to diabetes. They were never exposed to any cereals such as wheat and rice, nor to any sugar but the natural stuff found in pineapples and bananas.

Nothing in their hundreds of generations prepared them for refined sugar or refined flour; or any wheat for that matter. The Nauruans, it seems, had survived off the land, in the middle of nowhere, living only by their wits, guile and resourcefulness. Yet nothing in their evolutionary arsenal prepared them for a simple loaf of bread.

Additionally, first-world influences helped Nauru to balloon from 1,000 people 200 years ago to 12,000 in the present day. At 1,000, the island had found its apparent population equilibrium. Only with mass-produced food being shipped in could 12,000 people be supported. And there is no chance, even with modern food-growing techniques, of producing food topside, among the craggy limestone spires.

A little over 200 years ago, Nauru was an independent, lush paradise. In the interim, the island has completely prostrated itself to the modern world. It has had much of its island carted off in big ships. It has been proven naïve in big-business financial deals. And now it depends upon lands hundreds of miles away to bring them their life-sustaining food, which makes them obese and very sick.

Of course, I’m not holding the Nauruans completely harmless; much of this they did bring upon themselves. They made a series of deals with the devil and suffered the nearly inevitable consequences.

Operation Weasel

These days, in our corner of the world, those of us in dire financial straits have come to desire a full bailout by the United States government. In fact, it’s become quite the fashion. Just this week, representatives from the pornographic industry asked the government for $5 Billion. The tiny town of Edwardsville, AL asked for $375 Million, which comes to nearly $2 Million per person for Edwardsville’s 194 residents.

So, how does this relate to our story? Did the United States government offer Nauru a total bailout?

Bingo. It did (allegedly), in another deal with the devil bizarre even by Nauruan standards.

Here’s what supposedly happened, although the United States is denying it. Uncle Sam offered to return Nauru to paradise. The government would fund schools, fisheries, desalinization plants and tourist attractions. In return, Nauru would cease their illegal banking and passport operations. The US was motivated by a fear that those passports would end up in the hands of terrorists. And America had more demands. The US asked Nauru to hold it harmless for international war crimes (a more-or-less expected provision for any international deal brokered under a Bush White House). Additionally, the CIA would use Nauru as a listening post in the South Pacific. Lastly, Nauru would be used as a midway point for North Korean scientists who wished to defect to the West.

The operation was called, quite beautifully, Operation:Weasel.

Though Nauru had grown usefully wary of deals offered by first-world powers, it finally took the deal after some delay. President Dowiyogo, in his seventh administration, made a trip to Washington and then signed the deal. Days later, he died of heart disease.

Nauru held up its end of the deal. It discontinued its banking and passport operations, two of the few remaining income streams on the island. At this point, the United States apparently said, “What deal?”

None of the aid ever came to Nauru. The republic has gotten a decision in international court in its favor, but the United States is notoriously unaffected by the rulings of such courts.

Some websites claim now that the whole operation was hatched by the CIA to stop the sale of illegal passports by whatever means necessary.

I am not condoning here the sale of illegal passports. But it is indisputable that the whole situation left Nauru two things it most assuredly is not, in any literal sense – high and dry.

What Now?

As a matter of fact, everything in Nauru is getting less high and less dry. If some scientists’ predictions hold true, sea levels will rise enough in just 50 years to leave the only inhabited parts of Nauru underwater. Only the craggy limestone pillars of topside, Nauru’s national shame, will remain.

At this point, presumably, Nauru would return to a seabird toilet for the next million years.

Australia has, apparently, offered one of its islands off the Great Barrier Reef to Nauru. How likely do you think they are to leap at the chance to leave the land where their ancestors have lived for millennia?

Something’s got to give. And until it does, there they sit, broke and racking up debts. Ninety percent unemployed, 90 percent obese, and on an island 90 percent uninhabitable.

No one is quite sure which 10 percent will vanish first.

Take a moment to remember that you are alive

What easier way to compose a blog post than to lift it, in its entirety, from another author?

I haven't blogged in three months and this is what I offer? One could only come to the conclusion that I'm as lazy as I feared, but there you are.

So here is a portion of Bill Bryson's book, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on returning to America After 20 Years Abroad. Personally transcribed from my audiobook. All rights reserved and that stuff.

Bryson has become my favorite author, and hearing him read his own words is even better. This portion of the book recounts a commencement speech he gave.

"I have a son who is about your age, who in fact will be graduating from Hanover High School in a couple of weeks. When I told him, rather proudly, that I had been asked to give the commencement address here today, he looked at me, with that special, incredulous expression young people are so good at and said, “You? Dad, you don’t even know how to turn off the back windshield wiper on the car.”

And it’s a fair point. I don’t know how to turn off the back wiper on our car. And I probably never will. There are lots of things I don’t know. I’m kind of an idiot, and there is no sense denying it.

Nonetheless, I have done one thing that neither my son, nor any of you graduating seniors have yet done. I have survived 28 years after high school. And, like anyone who has reached my time of life, I have learned a thing or two.

I’ve learned that if you touch a surface to see if it’s hot, it will be. I’ve learned that the best way to determine if a pen will leak is to stick it in the pocket of your best pants. I’ve learned that it is seldom a good idea to take clothing off over your head while riding a bicycle. And I have learned that nearly all small animals want to bite me and always will.

I have learned all these things through a long process of trial and error, and so I feel I have acquired a kind of wisdom. The kind that comes from doing foolish things over and over again until it hurts so much you stop. It’s not, perhaps, the most efficient way of acquiring knowledge, but it works, and it does, at least, give you some interesting scars to show at parties.

Now, all of this is a somewhat hesitant way of coming round to my main point, which is that I am required by long tradition to give you some advice that will inspire you to go out and lead wholesome and productive lives, which I assume you were intending to do anyway. I am very honored to have that opportunity.

With that in mind, I would like to offer 10 very small, simple observations; passing thoughts, really, which I hope will be of some use to you in the years ahead.

In no particular order, they are:

1. Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck, an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you. And for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity, you have the incomparable privilege to exist. For endless eons, there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between, you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulations. Well done. You really are special.

2. But not that special. There are 5 billion other people on this planet, every one of them just as important, just as central to the great scheme of things as you are. Don’t ever make the horrible, unworthy mistake of thinking yourself more vital and significant than anyone else. Nearly all the people you encounter in life merit your consideration. Many of them will be there to help you. To deliver your pizza, bag your groceries, clean up the motel room you’ve made such a lavish mess of. If you are not in the habit of being extremely nice to these people, then get in the habit now. Millions more people, most of whom you will never meet or even see, won’t help you. Indeed, can’t help you; may not even be able to help themselves. They deserve your compassion. We live in a sadly heartless age, when we seem to have less and less space in our consciences and our pocketbooks for the poor and lame and dispossessed. Particularly those in far off lands. I am making it your assignment to do something about it.

3. Don’t ever do anything for principle alone. If you haven’t got a better reason for doing something other than the principle of the thing, then don’t do it.

4. Whatever it is you want to do in life, do it. If you aspire to be a celebrated ballerina, or an Olympic swimmer, or to sing at Carnegie Hall, go for it. Even though everyone is tactfully pointing out that you can’t sing a note or that no one has ever won the 100-meter dash with a personal best time of 74 seconds, do it anyway. There’s nothing worse than getting to my age and saying, “I could have played second base for the Boston Red Sox, but my dad wanted me to study law.” Tell your dad to study law. You go and climb Everest.

5. Don’t ever make the extremely foolish mistake of thinking that winning is everything. If there’s one person I would really like to smack, it is the person who said, “winning is not the main thing, it’s the only thing.” That’s awful. Taking part is the main thing. Doing your best is the main thing. There is no shame in not winning. There is a shame in not trying, which is, of course, another matter altogether. Above all, be gracious in defeat. Believe me, you’ll get plenty of chances to put this into practice, so you might as well start working on it now.

6. Don’t cheat. It’s not worth it. Don’t cheat on tests, don’t cheat on your taxes, don’t cheat on your partner, don’t cheat at Monopoly. Don’t cheat at anything. It is often said that cheaters never prosper. In my experience, cheaters generally do prosper. But they also nearly always get caught in the end. Cheating is simply not worth it. It’s as simple as that.

7. Strive to be modest. It is much more becoming, believe me. People are always more impressed if they find out independently that you won the Nobel Prize than if you wear it around your neck on a ribbon.

8. Always buy my books, in hardback, as soon as they come out.

9. Be happy. It’s not that hard. You have a million things to be happy about. You are bright, and young, and enormously good looking. I can see that from here. You have your whole life ahead of you. But here’s the thing to remember: you will always have your whole life ahead of you. That never stops, and you shouldn’t forget it.

Finally, and if you remember nothing else that is said here today, remember this: if you are ever called upon to speak in public, keep you remarks brief.

Thank you very much.

And a bonus point to listeners; if you write for a living, never hesitate to recycle material."

Ease my Worried Mind

Why the ending to “Layla” is the most beautiful and interesting 3:52 ever put on tape

It’s just like me to recognize the virtues of something decades old, and something that’s garnered more or less universal acclaim from all who have experienced it. I’m never the first on my block to fall in love with a song, or a movie or a website.

(“Text messaging? How does that work?”)

More typically, I’ll not even start getting fascinated with something until long after it’s entirely run its course with most of my peers. They’ll go through the entire curve of interest, starting with a sense of light intrigue, peaking with fascination and ending with weariness. It’s about that time that I’ll ask them, “hey, have you ever seen that show The Sopranos?”

So it has been recently with the Derek and the Dominos song “Layla,” which has been intriguing, and then fascinating, and then dull to people for 38 years.

Of late, I’ve blown right by intrigue and gone straight into fascination. Not with the entire song, mind you, though much effusive praise has been heaped on the song. No, the object of my affection is the last 3 minutes and 52 seconds of the song, the anomalous and extraordinary second movement of the song commonly referred to as the piano coda.

BACKSTORY

If you’re as woefully unaware of the all-time most celebrated bits of pop culture as I am, allow me to circle back.

Eric Clapton had already been a guitar legend – even “God,” if you believed popular British graffiti – before he began Derek and the Dominos. He’d already turned out hits with The Yardbirds and Cream and been in other bands such as The Bluesbreakers, Blind Faith and Delaney and Bonnie and Friends.

By the time Derek and the Dominos began, all of the members were immersed in a troublesome fog of drugs and alcohol. As the band recorded Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in Miami, the members simply strolled down to the street outside of the studio to place their drug orders with the girl at the newsstand. All of the band members (Clapton, guitars and vocals; Duane Allman, guitars; Bobby Whitlock, keyboards and vocals; Carl Radle, bass; Jim Gordon, drums) had a soft spot for heroin, while Clapton had such a special affinity for cocaine that, well, he later sang a song about it that reached #3 on the charts.

Amid these drug-fueled sessions, no one is really even sure where the name “Derek and the Dominos” comes from, although it has been suggested that the name is a profoundly impaired band member’s mispronunciation of “Eric and the Dynamos.”

There was one drug, though, of which Clapton just couldn’t get enough. Her name was Pattie Boyd, and she was married to Clapton’s best friend.

Pattie was a former model in her mid-20s by the 1970s, and she was married to George Harrison, world-famous guitarist for the then-dissolving Beatles. Clapton fell so madly in love with Boyd that, since he couldn’t have her, he moved in with her 17-year-old sister Paula instead.

They lived together for two years, until Paula heard Layla. The song was a pained tale of unrequited lust, and Clapton had written it about her sister.

In any case, breathless reviewers will tell you that the first two minutes of Layla is a raw, emotional, perfect song of yearning for an unattainable, or at least unattained, love.

Very interesting. But the truth is, it doesn’t speak to me all that much. Though I reserve the right to get excited about the song in another, say, 20 years.

No, the part that stirs my interest is what’s referred to as the piano coda, the stirring and emotional finish to the song. Music critics will tell you that the coda’s loveliness bespeaks a blissful resolution to the yearning of the song’s first part. That the yearning is resolved musically, not lyrically.

Whatever.

First of all, Clapton merely decided to tack the coda on to the end because he liked it, nothing more. Gordon had been working on the melody for a side project, and Clapton liked it so much that he persuaded the drummer to let the band use it as part of Layla. Secondly, music means to each of us whatever we think it means, and not even the artist is allowed to interpret his own work.

MOVEMENT

Even though I spent many years playing musical instruments and became the drum major of my high school band, I had no intensive training on music. So I am far out of my depth when talking about music theory. But I think it’s interesting to note that the coda was originally played and recorded in the key of C major, which is to say that it’s played in the most common key, the one that uses all of the white keys on the piano and none of the black ones. But the tape is sped up, so the result is an odd key, somewhere between C major and C# major. The notes are microtonal, which is to say that they are somewhere between the notes of typical Western music. Perhaps this provides a slight brightening effect, and it certainly makes the piano sound unique, though it's difficult for most people to put their fingers on why.

From wailing slide guitars emerges a bright and lusty melody, sentimental and sad but sweet and satisfying.

It doesn’t sound blissful and wistful to me, it sounds deeply introspective. It speaks plaintively, not excitedly. Each musical phrase ends with a down note, helping the “voice” of the piano to sound reassuring rather than exciting.

Therefore, I picture the entirety of the coda as a powerfully sentimental transition. It’s confident about the future but it does great justice to the past. For the first few seconds of the coda, the piano plays alone. Picture it as your own internal song, played to yourself. Then picture Duane Allman’s first upward slide on the guitar as an airplane taking off, carrying you from one life situation to another. The rest of the coda represents your fond remembrances mixed with your hopes for the future. After everything, you wouldn’t change a thing.

The second time around, the rest of the band joins the chorus. It’s the reassuring voices of your past joining in on your internal song. After a while, the acoustic guitar takes the foreground and the piano plays the same notes but more quietly. I picture the piano “agreeing” with the guitar.

After some time, the guitars take over almost completely, with uplifting slides on the slide guitar. The coda ends with Allman’s slide guitar making the faint sound that mimics a chirping bird. It’s positively hopeful.

The overall effect, for me, is one of profound transition. Time passes. Circumstances change.

Martin Scorsese seemed to bring forth this aspect of the coda in the classic movie Goodfellas, in one of the great musical transitions in cinematic history. He uses the music to close one chapter of the movie and open another. It covers a particularly gruesome section of the movie, where gangsters are turning up dead all over the city. And it does so, well, positively wistfully.

THE SONG’S OWN CODA

In similar fashion to Scorsese’s transition through gruesome events, one could picture a cinematic scene with the sublime piano coda playing over the disagreeable events that have befallen the members of Derek and the Dominos in the last 38 years.

Clapton did eventually gain the affections of Pattie Boyd, and he eventually won her directly away from George Harrison. The two married in 1979.

Maybe his lust was better left unrequited.

Clapton’s drug addiction worsened. Boyd was never able to bear a child, despite attempts at in vitro fertilization. So instead, Clapton had constant affairs and two illegitimate children, one of whom fell from the window of a 53rd-floor apartment and died. Clapton and Boyd divorced in 1989.

Allman died in 1971 at age 24 in a motorcycle accident that crushed several internal organs.

Carl Radle died in 1980 of a kidney infection, the result of a life spent imbibing alcohol and narcotics.

And what of Jim Gordon, the onetime session musician who wrote the sublime piano part? It seems that in the late 1970’s, he began hearing his mother’s voice in his head.

Who hasn’t heard his mother’s voice in his head from time to time, exhorting him to do well in moments of mischief? The difference for Gordon, though, is his reaction to the voice.

In 1983, he unveiled his final solution to the vivid voices. He murdered his mother with a claw hammer and a butcher knife.

Gordon had been misdiagnosed by doctors, who had thought that the voices were a result of alcoholism and drug addiction. It was, in fact, acute schizophrenia. His lawyer was not able to convince a jury of this disorder, though, and Gordon was sentenced to 16 years to life in prison. He was later transferred to a men’s mental health facility, where he is, presumably, to spend the rest of his life. Though if he is ever released, one of the fattest royalty checks of all time will be waiting for him.

SOMETHING IN THE WAY SHE MOVES?

What was I talking about again?

Ah yes, the beautiful piano coda.

It’s amazing how much spectacular music Pattie Boyd inspired. She was the inspiration for the Beatles’ “Something,” which Frank Sinatra called the best love song in 50 years. She also inspired Harrison's “What is Life,” one of his best solo efforts. From Clapton, she brought forth the entire Layla album, plus “Bell Bottom Blues” and the extraordinary “Wonderful Tonight.”

Boyd also introduced the Beatles to Eastern mysticism and was present when they first experimented with LSD. Who knows how much music all of that inspired? For better or worse, Boyd seems like the modern definition of a muse.

ONWARD

All of this, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the wonderful piano coda.
Clapton himself has said that he feels like Layla came from a different lifetime, but he still loves it and says that “it’s extraordinary to have possession of something so powerful.”

I’m not sure about any of that. All I know is what the coda means to me and how it makes me feel. Even though I’m sure I’ve got it all wrong and I’m 38 years late.

I reserve the right, in the future, to discover some other beautiful old thing and get the meaning dead wrong. I have no doubt it will happen soon. Maybe next week I’ll extol the virtues of disco music or the Star Wars trilogy. But for now, leave me alone for 3 minutes and 52 seconds.