I’m upbeat on a gray morn, steaming Tom White cup of black coffee on the Queen Anne stand beside me, killing time in front of the boob tube before my daily morning walk with the dogs. The phone rings. It’s a dear old friend who’s had a tough go the past year. We share a special friendship, one formed on the softball diamond, where, if the guy making out the lineup was worth his salt, he’d pencil us in back to back, the big guy before me. That way, I could coach him through the hitter’s checklist from the on-deck circle.

“Relax, Kid,” I’d soothe with confident aggression. “Hands loose, eye on the ball, give it a ride.”

My big buddy was a great listener. Sad he never had the luxury of good coaching. His independent streak made it difficult to live by public-school rules and regs, one of many fine country ballplayers to fall through the cracks in a system that didn’t recognize his gifts. Years later, with my diamond skills greatly diminished by age and injury, we fed off each other like only special teammates do. No one will ever break that strong bond between us. We are, even after all these years, still loyal pals, savoring a rare connection worth maintaining.

Fact is I seldom talk or write about my diamond days. I’ve moved on after sticking around far too long. Readers often ask me why I don’t venture back to the diamond. They know I have stories to tell, some that would make crew-cut coaches cringe, maybe even fire off letters to the editor accusing me of irresponsibility for telling the naked truth. That threat doesn’t scare me. No, I guess I just don’t feel like writing about my ballplaying daze. Not now, anyway. I’m sure the day will come. But still, whenever the big guy calls  — not often — our warm conversation always drifts onto the smaller diamond of my twilight years. I’m not hesitant to walk down those gouged dugout steps before breaking free to re-enter the real world of daily routine. Always entertaining, our conversations are apt to initiate gut-busting laughs from both ends of the phone. We traipse from one subject to another like hummingbirds challenging each other for Rose of Sharon blossoms, and, yes, many of the tales are unprintable in a family paper. As usual, the big guy hit on three or four subjects that opened a warm geyser of light chatter and, later, profound thought. He revved me up, so to speak. The salient four topics were bears, cougars, presidential politics and over-30 baseball. They got my wheels spinning, none more than the political seed that germinated into risqué reflection capable of raising some readers’ ire — the price you pay for sharing introspection. Why hide it? I can handle the blow-back. Dangerous territory. Tell me, who is more defensive than battered women trying to conceal the abuse they silently endure?

But enough of that for now, let’s move to the harmless matter of black bears, and the fact that they’re still pestering my buddy in his Miller River neighborhood. There, they enjoy making mincemeat of his birdfeeders and ripping his trash bags open when given the opportunity. But the big guy is plenty cool with that. He kinda likes bears, would even like to get to know them, was once foolish enough to get up close and personal to an injured bruin, calmly talking to the big limping beast from within spitting distance in his yard before coming to his senses and thinking, “Hey, Man, what are you, freakin’ nuts? You could get hurt.” This, mind you, from a man who’d physically blend nicely into any corner of an NFL locker room reserved for the largest of hogs. Because he touched on bears, I told him I had finally heard from MassWildlife about the preliminary September harvest, which was a record 168. Indeed, that’s less than half the annual total needed to stabilize a burgeoning Bay State bear population. But still, there’s no denying 168 is better than 68, so we’ll take it. According to the email received from an official spokesperson last Thursday, the previous-best September harvest is 142 in 2003 and 2004.

Our bear discussion didn’t linger. No, instead we leapt straight to the historic king of New England predators called cougars or mountain lions or panthers and catamounts, depending on who you’re talking to. Whatever you want to call them, believe it, they’re on the comeback trail. I told him of another sighting reported to me this week, it  right in his neighborhood. It seems one Bill Morris, more than familiar with cougars as a former Southern Californian, drove right up to the long-tailed beast in his Erving driveway just before dark a couple of weeks back. He got a clear, close look before the beast ambled off into the woods in no great hurry and disappeared toward Rattlesnake and Northfield mountains, where other folks have reported seeing cougars. My buddy wasn’t surprised. He’s one of many eastern Franklin County residents who’s seen a cougar, his spotted side of the road while driving through Wendell.

Soon our chat predictably swung from wildlife to the softball diamond. He loves to reminisce about the good old days when we’d pull into a ballpark complex for weekend semi-fast tournaments in Athol or Worcester or Gloucester, Turners Falls, Buckland or Whately. The local semi-fast leagues lasted until about 1990, when they and all other local competitive men’s softball died a sudden death. My buddy tried to hang on by playing over-30 baseball, which he said quickly devolved into a hapless joke because the best players fled in boredom. I admitted to knowing little and caring less about over-30 baseball, then just couldn’t resist sharing with him the hot summer day when I stopped on a whim along the raised shoulder overlooking Herlihy Park in Whately to briefly watch such a game while devouring a tasty large-vanilla waffle cone from Pasiecnik’s adjacent creemee stand. I observed six tedious outs and left wondering how that game could satisfy anyone’s competitive juices. The skill-level was pathetic, a far cry from the days when cars lined that same elevated lip to watch the likes of Eddie Skribiski, Matty Murphy, Mike Perenteau, Bobby Bourbeau, Glen Desjkavich, Raul DeHoyos and many, many other fair country ballplayers strutting their stuff for the annual Frontier Men’s League Tournament. Those players carried themselves like athletes and turned the snappy double plays of grizzled vets, a far cry from what I witnessed that day in Whately. No wonder those coed leagues are the new rage. Must be the fringe benefits justify travel costs. Just an educated guess.

Finally, the big guy and I surprisingly ventured into maiden territory, discussing, of all things, presidential politics, a subject I didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t initiate. He must know where I stand from what he’s read, but I would have never surmised him an outspoken Obama man. In fact, the big guy harbors genuine dislike for Romney, and he didn’t hesitate to label the man a liar. Good news, I guess, for Democratic operatives. Imagine that: a big, white, 50-something, former farm boy and ballplayer repulsed by the thought of a Romney Administration. Trust me, the man is not one of these ivory-tower eggheads pejoratively referred to as “secular progressives” by the likes of Hanitty or O’Reilly or Rush. No, just a simple working man, a rugged individual at that, just the type the Romney machine assumes it can manipulate with ugly, race-baited, guns-God-and-gays rhetoric. Well, I’m proud to say it hasn’t worked with my big, lovable buddy. I do hope there are many others like him. The wild card up Obama’s sleeve is Romney’s low-likability factor. Here we have a president ripe for the plucking and the other side marches out a staid corporate stuffed shirt who’s door-handle dull. Then he has the audacity to pick a right-wing ideologue running mate. Too bad everyone in America couldn’t read Matt Taibbi’s “Rolling Stone” piece from a few weeks back about Romney’s Bain Capital. If widely read, my guess is that even folks totally disenchanted with Obama would choose to sit out the election rather than vote for Romney, depicted by Taibbi as the filthiest of capitalist swine.

With the phone call behind me, walking the dogs through Sunken Meadow, preoccupied with thoughts of an evening talk I’ll lead next Thursday at Ashfield’s Bullitt Reservation, my mind skipped backward, reopening the provoking Romney vein, which bled straight into peripheral reflection about our furious Brown/Warren race. Although I don’t know my buddy’s Warren assessment, I’m not afraid to admit I’m pulling for her. The woman has guts. In his 2010 book “Gritopia,” Taibbi eviscerates Wall Street and the lap-dog government overseeing it while, in the same breath, praising Warren as one of the few honest politicians left in America. My guess is that Warren will ride Obama’s coattails to victory. I can’t foresee many voters selecting Obama and Pretty-Boy Brown in one fell swoop. Just doesn’t make sense. Which pulls me straight into that previously mentioned mischievous though train I entertained. … I get a laugh out of these frustrated, desperate housewives proudly sporting Warren stickers on their bumpers these days. They too admire Warren’s guts, but it’s pure envy. Trapped in bad places, outspoken on community chat boards, Facebook and Twitter, maybe even during parent-teacher conferences, they are, once inside the threshold of home, reduced to voiceless servants dominated and demeaned by half-wit spouses. Behind closed doors, these women can only fanaticize about acquiring guts like Warren’s. Publicly, they deny their husbands’ support for Pretty Boy after he bludgeons Warren with his sarcastic “Professor” moniker, inciting that blue-collar throng to howl the Braves’ chant in the streets outside. Meanwhile, these subservient housewives wear their charming Prozak smiles to the mini-mart counter, take the roundabout route home to bawl their eyes out, and stand outside the polling place defiantly displaying large Warren signs high and proud. It’s all show, a very sad charade.

Enough! Gotta go. Lily and Chubby are waiting at the kennel gate, tails a waggin’.