The Bunt Brings Laughtears

When I was in high school, I memorized a very VERBOSE definition of the “bunt” in baseball. I used to get requests to recite it and it always got good laughs. My good friend Sam Walters especially liked it. A few years back, Dr. Sam and his wife Sue visited us in Marina del Rey and, as we were talking after dinner, Sam’s face suddenly lit up and he said, “Tell me that thing about the bunt.”

Dr. Sam Walters

I knew, of course, what he was talking about, but when I tried to rehearse it in mind, the words just wouldn’t come. So the conversation turned to other things. Then, maybe half an hour later, “The Bunt” suddenly rose, in full bloom, in my mind. And my face lit up! And so I recited it again, after all those years, and we all enjoyed good laughs. I was laughing so big that tears flowed and it seemed for a long moment that Sam and I were enjoying laughter together again, way back then in the halls of Aurora High School. Here’s how the definition went:

The bunt is a perplexing diversion from the norm, an incisive ramification of strategic discipline. Although not deceit or duplicity, it is a wholly unexpected subordination of the heterogeneous maximum in manual ballistics wherein anticipated heroics is subjugated to delusive legerdemain.

HyC

Note: If you look back at Sam’s picture, directly behind his left shoulder is a picture of him and his wife Sue.

You may be wondering about the word “Laughtears” in the title of this Blague. James Joyce introduces us to this word on page 15 of his comic masterpiece Finnegans Wake.

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