Tom Hodgkinson’s theme about investments of time and quality of art eventually motivates our group to move on. We chat about different kinds of jobs requiring differential expenditures of labor. “Surely,” Barb begins, and I’m proud as she starts to speak, and I sense that she is surprising herself too. “Surely, if a person enjoys producing something illuminating like Margaret MacMillan’s book or beautiful to behold like the Michael Jordan on the court, well...”

Here Barb quasi-winks at Michael and a catchphrase associated with the athlete, “they should Just Do It, Tom. You have got to recognize the long hard work behind their creativity.”

Every now and then, Barb tries to bring opposites together with sentences or paragraphs just like that one above. On occasion, I also attempt to encapsulate and array the essences of complex individuals. Sometimes my rear end is handed to me. Tonight though, the troops seem to take Barb's mesh in their stride.

More importantly, what is this “It” of “Just Do It”? My wife certainly does not mean one should abandon morality and capture whatever one wants? I’m surprised. Is it her liqueur that's speaking? And what's behind that quasi-wink at Michael?

Our Order of Canada lady agrees with Barb on the importance of diligence. Margaret, however, underplays the hard industry invested in her own scholarship. She says History is like a big ramshackle house where important people meet periodically. The rest of us are outside looking in, curious about particulars. She makes it seem like the writing of History is fun.

It turns out that Tom, our champion of idlers, has been a something of a funster since his university days in the '90s. My nickel summary: he agrees with Barb and Margaret that we do need to value labor -- still, “a lot of the stuff [that we do] is not stuff we’ve particularly chosen to do.” Tom says he supports less hierarchy, less hectic lifestyles, and "mucking about each day. His platform is that it’s important for folk to have the guts to limit themselves “to a 40-hour week, not working 50 hours or 60 or 70. It’s irresponsible to you and to your family and friends.” In a nutshell, “You hate being told what to do – you hate the presumption that someone else can tell you how to live.”

This time he winks, and there's no 'quasi' about it, at Barb. Like Jim Lehrer says on the PBS Newshour,What's going on here?

Ready agreement about the pleasures of certain work emanates from Michael, who speaks of his “first job as a hotel maintenance man. Cleaning out pools, painting rails, changing air-conditioner filters, and cleaning out the back room. I said, never again. I may be a wino first, but I [resolved that] I will not have a nine-to-five job. Me and working were never best friends. I enjoyed playing.” Which involved creating his own identity in his beloved basketball.

Seeming to draw pleasure from Michael's account, Tom takes us back to his special, if disputed, 'handle' on creativity: “Being idle is part of the creative process...Ideas happen when you’re idle. You can’t have ideas if you’re working all the time. They come when you’re lying in the bath or drinking…or bicycling along the streets and whistling and raising their hats to each other…or sleeping, day-dreaming, [having] long lunches with chums, taking sick days whether one is sick or not, learning to fish…even [doing] useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home…”

Tom pauses, giving me time to start to free-associate. Often in my free-associations, I'm self-involved. It's a character flaw.

Anyway, I entertain a series of images in my mind. They're not about my creative process but about how I too want to play guitar, and in the home. To myself, I recall once -- before life intervened -- hankering to play the harmonica too. My next flashback, from a decade ago, has Barb telling me that these two instruments aren't related, the skills of the guitar not easily transferable to harmonica, and vice-versa.

For several more interior minutes, my mind reconstructs that particular scene, only this time I'm refuting her, I'm saying that Bob Dylan handles both, I'm claiming those two instruments are compatible. So there Barb, so there.

OK, that rebuttal minimizes the genius of Dylan. (We should invite him to dinner sometime.)

That claim of the instruments' compatibility is one I never was able to voice. My comeback didn't dawn on me until several weeks after Barb's remark, too tardy for effective deployment.

Now Michael and Margaret are verbalizing more of their reactions to Tom's notions about creativity.

Tom is saying he's recently taken up ukulele.

I fade out from the word-flow again and focus on that harpsichord sitting in our living room. Friends of ours, not having space at their downsized place these days, gave or loaned us their harpsichord. (Hope it's a gift. You could say it completes the room.)

Pity is, I can't read music, hardly knowing the speed difference between a hollow note and a black one. Worse yet, I now lack the lifetime ahead for the practice that it'd take to become proficient at any musical instrument. But hold on, who says I have to be proficient?

Time to take up the ukulele.

Dissatisfactions with the reputability of search engines? Tim Berners-Lee frets over the rubbish on his medium too. He admits there’s no way to appraise the reliability of what’s online.

For ten years, though, he's thought one way to promote trust would be to “put what I call an ‘Oh, yeah?’ button on the browser…You should be able to click on ‘Oh, Yeah?’ and the browser program would tell the server computer to get some authentication – by comparing encrypted digital signatures, for example -- that the document was in fact generated by its claimed author....”

Lisa Kudrow speaks about her main medium, half-hour comedies on TV. Today it’s “in a weird place. You have 19 minutes on network television to do something more eye-catching and funnier than people humiliating themselves on Reality Shows, which is a tough act to follow…it feels like there is a lot of desperation.”

The desperate character that Lisa plays in “The Comeback” show endures much humiliation.

Barb asks if Lisa might ever fall back on her Biology degree. Barb is being playful -- but Lisa is excited about Biology's breakthrough news just last week, that embryonic stem cells have been created from human skin cells. Lisa does take the possibility of working in Biology half-seriously: “No, I don't think so. I think that ship has sailed. I would have to do a lot of school to catch up.”

Our reminiscences sail back to Jack Kilby. After a decade as an electrical engineer in Milwaukee, Jack looked for work in miniaturization. Texas Instruments proved an enthusiastic employer, wanting to avoid hand-soldering thousands of components for thousands of bits of wire. "I worked through the period when about 90 percent of the workforce took what we called ‘mass vacation.’ I was left with my thoughts and imagination…I thought it would be worthwhile to try and make everything from semi-conductors. This was contrary to most other major efforts at the time.”

Hey Jack, one should work well even when no one sees it, and one should take responsibility without being asked, but no vacation?

Jack talks about his experiments with various passive and active devices. He aimed “to lower the cost, simplify the assembly, and make things smaller and more reliable.” Jack recalls how he “realized that since all of the components could be made of a single material, they could also be made in situ inter-connected to form a complete circuit.”

Jack’s engineering jargon, and there’s more of it, short-circuits my understanding.

At one point tonight, Hu Jintao finds himself comparing Elisabeth Lloyd’s and Lu Freud’s intensity and honesty. Of all things! What is Hu thinking? What a risky, gutsy, off-putting thing to do when you’ve just met the people.

All that I can surmise that Hu is roughly accustomed to quickly, very quickly, judging colleagues from assorted cadres.

In Hu’s reckoning, the intensity and honesty of Lu Freud’s hogshair-brushed canvases have helped set his work apart from the restrained, more thinly applied paint favored by other British figurative artists. If money is too crass a topic for a dinner conversation, the Communist leader doesn't much care: Hu notes approvingly that a while ago, one of Lu's works brought the highest price ever paid to a living European artist.

Bowing slightly, Hu then moves on to congratulate Elisabeth for her integrity and for academically concentrating on…on what?...I am dumbstruck that he re-introduces this topic… on muscle-tightenings around genital areas experienced as pleasurable waves of tingling sensations throughout parts of women’s bodies. Long live intensity, Hu proposes, and sits back down with a tight brave smile.

From the two other men in the galleries, “Here! Here!”

From the responses of Hu's toastees, I infer artists and academics like to be toasted.

From me, there is curiosity about Hu’s entourage, back in that limo of his. What would his staff make of their Man’s table topics tonight? I doubt if he is always like this.

Taking the cue, Lu warns Elisabeth that he was fond of his paternal grandfather Sigmund and warmly remembers his high spirit. Then in his very own high and amicable spirits, Lu Freud asks Elisabeth whether she rejects the psychiatric theory of vaginal orgasm articulated originally by his ancestor: “I feel very guarded about it [psychoanalysis], but I’m fairly ignorant about it.”

Oh my, we are back to that again. I had hoped that we had moved on…

If you ever want to learn about modern crusading, you should consider our two male persuaders.

During June 2005, Billy Graham ran another big-tent revival meeting in Flushing Meadows, New York. It is one that Rick is knowledgeable about. No big rain drenched it, nothing like Woodstock. Although afflicted by prostate cancer, hydrocephalus, and Parkinson’s disease, Billy made it to that event using a walker after hospital stays to repair a broken hip and pelvis. “You did your gig,” Bob says, approvingly. Billy adopts an aw-shucks posture, saying these infirmities keep him humble, helping him” “relate to people who are suffering…[and] in hospitals.”

Billy tells us that at that revival he had hoped to find people whose life could be changed. ““ Anybody that the Lord touches…I believe that while we are holding the meetings, the Holy Spirit is working among certain people.” Billy advises, “We [may] have all the trappings of true faith, but deep inside, we’ve never been born again.” He has preached that message to over 214 million.

Billy indicates that 20 or so years earlier, in order to distance himself from the Religious (political) Right, he had taken liberal stands on the era’s social issues of homelessness, capital punishment, nuclear disarmament, divorce, wayward teens, and the government’s role in eliminating the poverty that compromises social inclusion in the community. In 2005 at New York City, however, Billy only preached the Gospel. Realizing that he could have divided his audiences if he had taken on this era’s hot-button issues -- like abortion, homosexuality, Iraq, social security, and stem-cell research -- Billy says that he left it to “the younger people” to advise more specifically about responsible behaviors in society. He grins toward Bob, and Bob reacts by saying to Billy, “What’s the matter? Are you old or something?”

Billy: “I want to be shallow and say ‘No,’ but when you get to be my age, all of the world is passing you by.”

Like a schoolmaster, Rick is striving to get back on the rails our discussion about addressing global inequities. He does not succeed initially, for Joan coaxes Bob to say more about his Live Aid outreach in 1985 and his subsequent Live 8 concert for the next generation. I do not quite grasp why she has an interest in that, however...

Bob’s initial Live Aid concert took place just six short weeks after a crusade that Billy had, where the closing night saw 100,000 squeezed into New York’s Yankee Stadium in 105-degree heat. Then, 20 years later and in pleasant weather, Bob and musicians in 8 cities held a globally televised concert; 3 billion people tuned in. It was not so much to re-boost awareness of Africa’s problems but to change political policy. Live 8 was, according to our knighted guest, “the sole continent in decline since Live Aid. Why? How long do we seriously want this to continue?”

Thanks to Bob’s lobbying, that year G-8 leaders forgave debts for 14 impoverished nations, affecting 290 million Africans. Or, as Bob claims, those leaders said they would forgive debts. Governments are slithering out of their commitments, double-counting debt relief as parts of their aid budgets. “You ought to get after them Billy,” Bob urges.

Billy says softly, “We all must be doers of the Word.” (“Must,” Billy had emphasized earlier tonight, “is a Scriptural Word.”)

“We all have voices to which we respond,” Joan of Arc interjects. “Every time my voices appeared, I saw blazes of light. They spurred me to get out more. To become involved, you might say, with government.”

Pretty much Joan has been reticent entering the conversation -- much as she had been reticent 575 years ago before embarking on her divine mission. For a time way back then, when supernatural voices first were counseling her to reveal herself as one who could expel the English from her native France, Joan had demurred, saying “I am a poor girl. I do not know how to ride or fight.”

Tonight in our dining area, apparently she wants her fair share of air time, so she sits forward to recall -- all very explicitly for us -- that very time and those very "I am a poor girl” and “I do not know how” statements. From Billy and Bob’s expressions of ‘So What?’, it is obvious they do not have the foggiest about how to interpret this poor curious girl who is claiming to know zilch about riding or fighting. Rick or I have got to step in and clarify where Joan is coming from -- but at this late hour of the party, how do we start?

Using a cloth napkin to wipe from her lips a little baby arugula with warm mushroom and tomato vinaigrette, Joan chooses to unload as the other guests have done. Perhaps she is miffed that she did not have a chance to opine earlier: “I have three Reasons for being here tonight, “One, a change is better than a rest. Two, I’m also a poor cook -- I do not know how to cook or organize a dinner party. Taking care of a child’s demands can turn even a top chef into a loser in the kitchen.”

Compliment accepted, the cook in me sings. Seconds are served, all round.

Do you suppose Joan had a Reason Three for accepting our invitation?

As for questions about Joan’s knowledge about riding and fighting, they slip off our agenda. For now anyway…

Rick tells the Chairman of the U.S. Professional Bowling Association that “A friend of mine met his future wife at a bowling alley -- actually, at a beauty pageant in a bowling alley.”

Which friend? which future wife? I muse. I so muse because, well because you know what ‘they’ say about couples who have been together as long as Rick and I have: that we already have said everything to each other. But here my hubby is announcing something I never knew about. Nice.

I discern a young-man’s perkiness in Chris Peters. He gets the autobiographical give-and-take rolling by asking if Danica Patrick could tell us how she became interested in her daredevil sport. “Auto-racing,” Chris beams, “takes far more courage than rolling a fairly heavy ball across a greased floor.”

Danica seems to intuit that Chris genuinely wants to learn about this, and is not just being social. She replies, “My father used to race snowmobiles, midges, motorcycles…He met my mom at a snowmobile race on a blind date. We’re very much a racing family…”

Chris says fathers have been supportive of top bowlers too. For example, Kelly Kulick -- a woman who made bowling history in Chris’s PBA league not long ago -- was encouraged by her dad, for whom she works in an auto-body shop.

Danica endorses Chris’s allusion to Kelly Kulick with a smile, and returns to her narrative: “It’s just racing. It sounds so goober, but I just don’t think about it.” Hmmm. From our kids, I know that ‘goober’ means ‘goofball,’ but that may not be Danica's connotation.

James Dean is eye-balling Danica. She refuses the lighted cigarette and ashtray he offers to share. He looks like his feelings are hurt.

Rick is not immune to Danica’s charms either. He is paying more attention to her than to our other guests, even more than he paid last month to Joan of Arc.

Danica, it develops, is an endorser for all sorts of commercial products, including PEAK Antifreeze. Rick professes an interest in winning PEAK’s upcoming sweepstakes. He wants to be 1 of the 15 fans to whom Danica will give driving tips during the Pole-Qualifying Weekend this coming May. Thereafter, each of the 15 will drive a single-seater around the Speedway. To qualify, evidently all you have to do is send in proof that you have bought PEAK antifreeze.

Not long ago, Rick saw a horrific car crash. Since then, he has become a very cautious driver, almost pokey. I can scarcely envisage him tooling a single-seater around the Indy…

I am handing this blog biz over to Rick for now -- one or two things to do in the kitchen...

I had not known that the average weight of a North American woman was 155 pounds. As the men talk about a virtualization server that Microsoft introduced the other day and a class-action lawsuit against the company's Vista upgrade, Danica Patrick and I have a side confab about women’s clothes.

After a while, most the discussion going on around me is about things that unfold in the U.S of A. For one thing, no one is informed enough to speak up for the European Union’s $1.3 billion fine last week of Microsoft. I would have liked to hear Chris defend his former company’s abuse of its market dominance. For our next party, we should again invite people who are different from us but we need foreign Greats so our interactions can be global.

Only James Dean is drinking now from our second bottle of sherry. The others do not appear to like the dry sherry we chose.

One sample from the discussion: James tells about his daytimes as a 20-year-old student at the Actors’ Studio. He was invited to a Broadway producer’s house for a party. On the assumption that he was valued for his personality, James took off that night from his busboy job. When he got there, though, the producer’s wife showed him the kitchen and expected him to load platters and wash dishes. James didn’t even have a chance to mingle with the guests offering nibbles and revealing that star-power of his. The producer never auditioned him for a stage role. That was, James says dryly, a wound, but then he adds that wounds are part of everyday living. {Sorry, I could not resist emphasizing his point as boldly as James did.} “In fact, The Bhagavad Gita defines the human body as a wound with nine openings.”

I try figuring out whether I agree with this or not. Rick looks disbelieving, even of the kitchen part of James’s story.

I may be over-analyzing this, but on balance, I figure that James is giving us cautionary tales. He is urging us to be open, really open, to the triumphs and the tears, the sweet and the sour around us. I could be wrong, but I take James’s argument as this: we always have to be open to the un-wonderful, just as we should never take the wonderful for granted. Not for a second.

It is poignant to watch James infatuate over Danica. As it happens, she gives James no encouragement, none at all. In fact, she dissolves in guffaws at his blowing her a kiss. Chris Peters gets a chuckle out of that too.

You got to love his authenticity. On the surface, he seems ebullient about life’s beauties and possibilities. Below the surface, he manifests such sadness that those beauties and possibilities can be so short-lived, so incomplete, so fragmented. When we toured the house earlier tonight, I saw the side of him that could make for an awfully sorrowful dinner companion. I hoped he would show his playful side. Yet, as he says in another of his stories, “sorrows don't sing.” A mood of steady sunshine would be inauthentic for James tonight.

James is a dear. Yep, he talks too much, but please find it in your heart to forgive him. Your heart has to go out to this young man who was just hitting his stride when...

Following an explanation that the organ-grinder in their next song is the Messenger of Death, our two Germans get a charge out of harmonizing for Schubert’s Winterreise. Anna Amalia’s voice is pleasant, though a little reedy. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s is astounding. The guy has the experience and love to do equal justice to words and music.

While respecting Dietrich’s rich projections of failed love and bitter loneliness, Kenny Chesney raises questions about the despair of those words by the poet Wilhelm Muller. Thus, from Kenny, “Does all this resignationism suit the inner Dietrich?”

“The alienation does suit Schubert,” Dietrich replies. “He knew he had syphilis and madness and death would come of it.” But “My [own] disposition is completely different from that…I’m very cheerful, and I think that’s a certain prerequisite to being an artist: a good measure of cheerfulness and humor.” Kenny then strums a cheerful riff, as if to say that he too is anti-miserabilism.

“I figure as long as I’m here, you might let me play a song,” Kenny cheers, hat still on, guitar in hand, and with some courage given the act that he is following and also given our group's advanced demographic. Rick and I had pondered about the reception that U.S. southern-born Kenny would receive from our two European romantics. After all, Anna and especially Dietrich have benefited from rigorous musical training, whereas Kenny has not been so advantaged. Generally he is a lot more carefree in his choices, regularly singing for instance about “going to class just to pass the time [and having] a keg in the closet, pizza on the floor left over from the night before.”

Just to be clear, this moment is -- if not like a gunfight at the O.K. Corral -- almost like a musical equivalent of a poetry slam contest. In a sense, by proposing Kenny as a fellow-guest, Dietrich has set in motion a clash or an accommodation between wildly different approaches to music. Will our two tradition-minded Germans regard Kenny’s 21st century emotions and techniques as less majestic, emotional, and cathartic than what they're accustomed to? In the wake of exposure to Kenny's firepower, will those elders remember and respect all the creative courage that it takes, in any era, to evolve into a musical artist? That is the question. Of course, that is not as pithy as the most famous question in drama, but 'tis apt for this tough crowd.

Kenny adheres to a classic structure. He starts with an instrumental statement of his melody, embellishes it, adds his voice singing alongside his guitar’s melody, develops that some, and closes by returning his voice to the guitar’s melody. I do not know if that is his technique at his shows, but tonight that is his mode. He presents his tongue-in-cheek She Thinks My Tractor Is Sexy: (“…She likes the way it’s pullin’ while we’re tillin’ up the land/She even kind of crazy ‘bout my farmer’s tan…” Next he kicks into Being Drunk’s A Lot Like Loving You,“…Well I felt the hangover of loving all night/I’ve sat at the bar all alone in a fight/I’ve bottled up feelings and poured ‘em out too…”

Anna Amalia asks if Rick and I might also have a song to offer, and although we are bush-league as vocalists, Rick and I only pretend reluctance. Actually, he is a more gutsy singer than I. Of course we have been marinated in the tunes that clicked with us in that remote and sentimental epoch when our musical tastes were formed.

Neither of us play the harpsichord (every time other than tonight, we have it in our LR just to look at). This time Rick does not pretend an air guitar singing that artful song that used to signal the last dance, Stardust. Rather, a cappella we more or less harmonize in a duet we still sometimes sing in the shower or in bed together: “Someday, when I’m awfully low, and the world is cold, I will feel a glow thinking of you, and the way you are tonight…” We grasp that this happy Jerome Kern song tonight comes across as square and emblematic of the trite, love-saturated stuff no longer churned out by the music industry. But when we listen to the radio station of a local campus, oh my, the alienation, migration, suffering themes of today's music often strike both of us as dark, i.e., un-melodic and worse than square.

Now if you must know, in our rendition tonight Rick and I are off-key, flat, comparatively mechanical. But since we are the hosts, since our singing is affording our guests a time-out for them to eat my German chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, and since they bloody well know the Iron Rule of Guest-hood that they have to be at least tolerant whenever co-hosts perform, Rick and I do manage to extract a round of applause.

The clapping is led by Anna. She says to me, "Oh, you're a soprano. I kind of thought you might be." Rick then smiles, "When she gets mad at me, she's more of an alto." (To myself, I add that if that is the case, I am only briefly an alto...No fun in staying mad.)

Noticing things, I have to say that Anna does not seem quite so entitled as before. Either I misjudged her initially or she has softened over the course of the evening.

A neutral observer would have to characterize our guests’ response to our song as brief and polite. My Rick, however, is nonplussed. Interpreting their grimaces as friendly and generous, he struts back to his chair, with what I perceive as self-congratulation.

You know, sometimes when he is having a challenge or a bad day, my Rick is not especially interested in closely, closely, CLOSELY checking-out dour facts. Fact is, we render our song so abysmally that I slink back to my chair.

Undaunted, our guests do not lack for luminous artistic experiences to talk about, and as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau explains, true “musicians feel the greatest intimacy, such as non-musicians can only guess at.” Kenny points out, though, that it is common for headliners of one era to put down the up-and-coming headliners of the next generation, as Sinatra deprecated Elvis, and as Elvis initially knocked the Beatles. In contrast to that defensiveness, Dietrich and Anna have not panned Kenny’s more contemporary work, and so he says he is happy as an oil stock-holder -- "but not," he quickly adds, "for Exxon Mobil stock. Didya hear yesterday how their first-quarter profits were a 'disappointing' $10.9 billion?"

Hearing music has its way of leaking into other pursuits, and so let me also mention tonight’s dancing. Our room is not a ballroom like the ones where Ann sponsored dances for her generation's German elites, or like those mosh pits where Kenny Chesney’s American fans shake their booties, or like the Middle-European concert halls where Dietrich is sainted. Yet once we peel back the rug, our wooden floors prove hospitable. Mostly we foxtrot which is about all that my Rick easily remembers anymore...

It's great that Jackie Robinson and I can be on this nostalgia kick until Perween Warsi and Barb arrive. Barb’s driving Perween here from our metropolis’s Little India. By his choice, Muhammad Yunus is arriving on his own hook.

I’m clueless about the Negro League. Jackie Robinson explains that bunting and base-stealing were emphasized. The game differed from the “less daring” Major League whose players all wanted to be Babe Ruth -- they put a premium on home runs and big innings.

Sitting here on the porch, we re-live Game One of the 1955 World Series. Jackie shows how he famously avoided the tag/lunge of the Cardinals’ catcher and stole home. He was the front end of a triple steal. On the front page of a newspaper in Bombay, where I was backpacking at the time, I saw the picture of Jackie’s big hook slide. Lots of dust at home plate.

Jackie stole home a record 19 times in the national league –- 19, just imagine. He also counts as a runner, hitter, and fielder. I pester for details on other peak moments, i.e., “How about that final day of the season in ‘51 season? The game had gone into extra innings. The Phillies had loaded the bases with one out. Remember?”

At the bottom of the 12th, Jackie had made a defensive play that saved the season. He dove for a soft liner to his right and injured his elbow. He converted the catch into a double play. Then in the 14th, Jackie hit the Dodgers’ game-winning home run.

We both guffaw over that and other glories of Jackie’s career. This proves not only that we revel in those times but that we’re relaxed and comfortable with each other. In effect, we say to each other, “Trust me, I’m a chum.” Of course, this may be a false bond, as when fans’ sentiments are directed from the grandstands in a positive way toward “their” team (until the team goofs up).

We touch upon the underbelly of sports, the hate pitched at Jackie because of the color of his skin. Jackie refers to the day when racial slurs flew around and Pee Wee Reese, the Dodgers’ captain, walked over to place his hand on the black man’s shoulder. Pee Wee kind of sensed the sort of hopeless, dead feeling in me and came over and stood beside me for a while. He didn’t say a word, but he looked over at the chaps who were yelling at me through him and just stared. He was standing by me.” Then: no more insults. “I will never forget it.”

Our conversation rekindles feelings I had as a ten-year-old, when I’d hop over a barb-wire fence to watch a local team. (Got caught and thrown out once.) Now, I might scream at the TV when a team is on a winning or losing streak, but I’m not as passionate about watching. It’s not like it was back when -- when I was crashing a minor-league game, when Jackie was scoring all the way from first on a sacrifice fly.

When I identify our other guest, Perween Warsi appears, well, shocked: “A baseball player?!” She knows nothing about Jackie Robinson being historically the most significant player in baseball, ever. “He was the first African-American allowed to play in the major leagues. Baseball’s integration gave impetus to racial inclusion by other organizations.”

Some more background and Perween is no longer creeped out. She offers something of a long view about Jackie breaking the color barrier: “You can’t hold good people back forever.”

In-between my pointing out special buildings that we’re driving past, I give an account of Jackie’s early and later years with the Dodgers. Early on, as a rookie, he turned the other cheek to taunts from resentful teammates, opposing dugouts, and so-called ‘fans’ who sent him death threats. Later, as a well-established MVP, Jackie talked back to guys who hollered for him to carry their bags and polish their shoes. The forbearing Jackie is the guy many venerate. My husband is amused that less attention has been given to combative Jackie, the provoked one. The guy who could slide into second with his spikes high.

When we pull into our driveway, Jackie and Rick are there to open the car doors for us. No sign of Muhammad Yunus. Jackie gets a kick out of welcoming me to my own place.

Perween clutches Jackie’s hand and in a low voice, wishes she had been around to see his “controlled recklessness. Barb’s been telling me about your style of running bases. I heard that you’d drive competitors craaaazy. I love that.”

In a surprisingly high-pitched voice (which I had not expected), Jackie banters, “You got kind words, huh?”...