21 Days to Opening Day

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 21 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is Devices and Desires by P.D. James. This is an Adam Dalgliesh mystery.

No one appeared as he drew up and, before lifting his hand to the bell, he paused to read the words of a stone plaque embedded in the flints to the right of the door.

In a cottage on this site lived Agnes Poley, Protestant martyr, burned at Ipswich, 15^th August, 1557, aged 32 years. Ecclesiastes Chapter 3, Verse 15.

The plaque was unadorned, the letters deeply carved in an elegant script reminiscent of Eric Gill, and Dalgliesh remembered his aunt telling him that it had been placed there by previous owners in the late 1920s when the cottage was originally extended. One of the advantages of a religious education is the ability to identify at least the better-known texts of scripture, and this was one which it needed no effort of memory to recall. As a delinquent nine-year-old at his prep school, he had once been required by the headmaster to write out in his best handwriting the whole of the third chapter Ecclesiastes, old Gumboil, economical in this as in all matters, believing that writing lines should combine punishment with literary and religious education. The words, in that round childish script, had remained with him. It was, he thought, an interesting choice of text.

That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.