Hank Aaron (epilogue)

His lifelong and childhood friend Robert Driscoll said that he remembered him always the same way throughout his entire life, and one can almost hear Sam Cooke’s, “If I had a Hammer” or Leadbelly’s, “Take This Hammer” as Driscoll describes his friend Henry Aaron, how when they were real young and first started playing baseball in league games they were put on a schedule to play on Saturdays and Aaron would be late every time, as Saturdays—just like Sunday was a day for the Lord—was the day of work and a day for weekly chores, and after a few innings, after Aaron hustled to finish his labors and bolted toward the baseball fields, the players could look out beyond the outfield and see a line in the rows of cornfield whipping and weaving as it were a blessed wind that stirred them, and by the time everybody knew it was Henry Aaron running through there, there was the image of his head rising up above the stalk, emerging unto the playing field, and just as quickly too there was the image of him standing in the batter’s box with a cross-handed grip, replacing whoever was up at bat, fixing to hammer out another homerun into the seeds of destiny, like the forming of a myth and legend first being shaped and drawn, witnessed in the beginning, in the flesh, fixing to come into being.