Hey kid:

Basically, what you’re looking at is a long slog through a world of mute statistics: percentages of the impoverished, per capita ownership of some given thing, the slide of certain demographies into the achievement gap. And behind these a host of voices trying to make up your mind for you.

You’ll fight through these and decide on softer numbers: RBIs, rushing yards, free throws. You’ll dig up your brother’s old Mets hat from the boxes in his empty room and pause, just a minute, to think about it.

In the end you will find that the vocabulary that settles around any one thing makes it worth it: the epistolary, the continental existentialism, the sacrifice fly, the play-action pass.

Looking past those afternoons in the hospital waiting room, finding out what it means to be a man.