The earthquake had killed many thousands of people and destroyed all of downtown Managua, the capitol. Fourteen years later, in 1986, the only thing that remained of old Managua was the grid system of streets. Each block contained a number of vacant lots and not one building. . . and this extended for hundreds of blocks.

John was then researching a book that would be published with the title El Beisbol: The Pleasures and Passions of the Latin American Game. As it happens, he and I were the only members of the group who were not baseball players, except for the group's one woman, who had a compendious knowledge of North American baseball statistics and was the most fine-tuned student of the game I had ever met.

Riding on the bus with several Sandinista political handlers, we talked almost exclusively of baseball the whole time. Even the political differences between our two countries were usually abandoned when someone would mention, say, Roberto Clemente, the great Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder who had died in a plane crash on December 31, 1972 while trying to deliver medicines to Nicaragua after the earthquake. Talk of American Imperialism and The Need for Revolution, of the prospects for Nicaraguan industry and manufacturing, went out the bus window, in favor of collective admiration of Roberto’s sweet swing.

Indeed, when we had asked out of simple curiosity to see an example of a successful Nicaraguan industry, the bus had taken us to a factory in Managua where baseballs were made by hand.

Baseball in Nicaragua benefits from the profound understanding that all Nicaraguans seem to have of the difficulties of playing the game well. They spoke of it to us as others would speak of Rudolph Nureyev's dancing, Pablo Neruda's poetic inspiration, or the sweeping intensities of Monet’s water lilies. Baseball was the essence of corporeal grace and the finest expression of the human capacity for art, if not for feeling itself.

“Baseball is a poem,” my companion said. I looked out the bus window. The cement factory and the Bulgarians had disappeared. But in the meantime, I had seen at least three other small baseball tableaux, played out by little Nicaraguan kids by the side of the road.

My companion’s sentiment was similar to one that both John and I had noticed among the Nicaraguans in general. Whenever we asked one of them what he did for a living, the answer was almost universally, “I am a poet.” Putting aside for the moment that at the time it was almost impossible to make a living in Nicaragua — the United States embargo effectively cut the country off from most essentials — it still seemed unusual to us that so many Nicaraguans claimed to be poets. It’s well known in the United States that writing poetry will make you no money at all. So John and I figured that maybe the Nicaraguans were simply acknowledging that fact, and that, since there was no money anywhere in Nicaragua, maybe poetry was as good a profession as any.