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I went down at 6:47 PM on a Tuesday last July. In left field. The starting pitcher was already on the mound warming up.

I remember the sprinkler head. Green plastic. I was bending down to shut it off before the crowd came in, and the world tilted sideways.

Then it was black.

Then it was the ceiling of an ambulance and a woman named Sherry cutting my shirt off with scissors.

My name is Roland. I'm 62 years old. I live in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I spent 34 years grooming a baseball field for a minor league club that most people in this town couldn't tell you the name of if you paid them.

I was the field guy. That was my name to everybody. Roland the field guy. The guy who painted the foul lines. The guy who dragged the infield between innings. The guy who cared more about the pitcher's mound in the top of the 8th than most of the ballplayers did.

I loved it.

I got there at 5 AM. Sometimes 4:30 if we'd had rain. I knew every low spot in the outfield. I knew which sprinkler head was going to give me a problem on a hot Tuesday. I knew the difference between the way the grass drank in April and the way it drank in August.

I had a wife of 38 years named Diane, a son named Micah who lives up in Raleigh with a wife and two little girls of his own, and a dog named Biscuit who I'd inherited from Micah when he moved into an apartment that didn't take pets. Biscuit and I had a long friendship of 11 years.

And that was my life. Field, wife, son, dog. In no particular order.

For about 4 years before it happened, my doctor had been telling me things.

Cholesterol's climbing, Roland.

Blood pressure's up again, Roland.

Have you thought about cutting back on the fried food, Roland.

I had thought about it. I had also kept eating it.

I was 62. My father made it to 71. My grandfather made it to 68. Nobody in my family had ever seen the far side of 75. I figured whatever was coming was coming.

Diane didn't figure that. Diane cooked me salmon on Wednesdays and made me eat oatmeal and stopped buying pork rinds. But I'd sneak them in the truck. I'd sneak a lot of things in the truck.

And I'd tell myself I was fine, because I could still bend down and pull a weed out of the third base line, and I could still lift a bag of Turface, and I could still walk the whole field before a game without stopping.

Until I couldn't.

It was July 22nd. A Tuesday. The Wilmington Ospreys had a home game against a team from Fayetteville that nobody cared about, but it was Bark in the Park night, and the crowd was going to be bigger than usual because we sold discount tickets to anybody who brought a dog.

I was in left field at 6:47 PM, bending down to shut off a sprinkler head that had gotten stuck open, and my chest felt like somebody had reached inside and put a fist around something.

That was the last thing I remember before the grass.

I was told later that a father and his 10 year old daughter were in the outfield seats and the little girl saw me go down and screamed. Her father got over the wall in about 4 seconds. He was a paramedic on his day off. His name was Corey. If Corey hadn't been at that game with his daughter, I would not be writing this to you right now.

They put 3 stents in me at New Hanover Regional 2 hours later.

I woke up on Wednesday morning to Diane holding my hand.

I was in the cardiac unit for 6 days.

I lost 14 pounds in the hospital, most of it fear.

When they let me go home, I didn't recognize my own house.

Not because anything had changed. Because I had.

I sat on the couch. I looked at the pictures on the wall. There was one of me and Micah at his high school graduation, and I looked at that photograph like it was a photograph of a stranger, because that man had been sure he was going to be around for grandchildren, and the man on the couch was not sure of anything anymore.

Diane drove me to cardiac rehab 3 times a week. She wouldn't let me drive.

I took 4 new pills every morning. Sometimes 5, depending on which one you counted.

The rehab center was in a shopping plaza off Oleander Drive, next to a nail salon and a Bojangles. That was funny to me for reasons that only somebody who's been through cardiac rehab would understand. I'd finish 32 minutes on a treadmill and walk past a Bojangles smelling their chicken biscuits and I'd want to cry.

I didn't touch my field for 8 months.

They gave the groundskeeping to a young guy named Beau who did a fine job. I know he did a fine job because I stopped by one Saturday in October and the third base line was straight and the mound was crowned and the outfield grass was cut on the diagonal I used to cut it on. He'd learned from me the year before. He was carrying it on.

I sat in the parking lot for 40 minutes and couldn't make myself go in.

The wedding invitation came in March.

Cream envelope with gold lettering. Diane picked it up off the porch on a Wednesday afternoon and set it on the counter, and it sat there for 3 days before I opened it.

You're invited to the wedding of Tyson Marchetta and Aubrey Lynn.

Tyson.

I hadn't seen Tyson in a full year. Not since before the collapse.

Tyson was the bat boy for the Ospreys from age 11 to age 17. His mother worked in the front office. His father wasn't in the picture. Tyson would show up at the field 3 hours before game time and follow me around while I worked, and he'd ask me questions like why do you rake the mound in circles instead of lines and how come the grass in center field looks different from the grass in the corners.

He called me Mr. R.

He rode with me in the gator to pick up the bases after every game.

When he was 14, his mother told me that she couldn't afford to keep him in his summer camp anymore, and I told the front office that I'd be happy to hire him part time as long as they filed the right paperwork. So he got paid a small stipend to be my shadow for 3 more summers. He learned to paint a foul line before he learned to drive.

He went to N.C. State and studied civil engineering, and now he works for a firm in Raleigh that designs sports fields for a living. He credits me for that. He shouldn't. He credits me anyway.

And on the second page of the invitation, in his handwriting, was a note.

Mr. R,

I'd be honored if you'd give a toast at the reception. You were the first person outside my family who believed I could be something.

Ty.

I read that note 6 times.

Then I put it down on the counter and I went out to the yard and I cried into Biscuit's fur for 20 minutes.

I didn't think I could do it.

I didn't think I could stand up in front of 200 people in a Marriott ballroom and deliver a speech that meant anything to Tyson without falling apart. And I don't mean emotionally falling apart. I mean physically.

My legs were still shaky by the end of an easy day. My chest still tightened when I climbed the 2 flights of stairs at the rehab center. My voice, when I tried to practice the toast in the bathroom mirror at 5 AM, sounded thin. Like something was wrong with my throat. It wasn't my throat. It was everything.

I sat with the invitation in my lap on a Sunday afternoon and I thought about writing Tyson a note saying I couldn't make it. That I was sorry. That I'd send a card.

Diane came in and sat next to me on the couch and put her hand on my knee.

Roland, she said, you have to go.

I know.

You have to give that toast.

I know.

She didn't say anything for a while. Biscuit was asleep on my foot.

Then she said, is there anything you haven't tried.

I said, I don't know what you mean.

She said, you take 4 pills. You go to rehab. You eat what I make you. Is there anything else. Because if there's anything else, I want to know what it is.

I didn't have an answer.

The next morning I asked Lena.

Lena was the nurse who ran my Monday, Wednesday, Friday sessions at the rehab center. She was maybe 44, maybe 45. Short, olive skinned, dark hair she kept in a braid, wore Hoka sneakers with jeans on the days she wasn't in scrubs. Her mother had come from the Azores in the 1970s and Lena had been the first one in her family to become a nurse.

She was kind in a way that didn't feel like a customer service kind. She was kind in a way where you could tell she'd probably watched a lot of men my age go through what I was going through, and it hadn't hardened her the way it hardens some people.

That Monday I told her about the wedding.

She listened while I did my stretches.

Then she asked me how I was sleeping.

Not great, I said.

She asked me how my energy was in the afternoons.

Bad, I said.

She asked me if I felt like myself yet.

I said no.

She was quiet for a bit. Then she said, my mother had a scare 4 years ago.

I didn't know your mother had a scare.

She said, most of the men in here don't know a lot about me. That's okay. But my mother had a scare, and she went through what you're going through now, and it took her a long time to feel like she was on solid ground again.

I said, how'd she get there.

Lena said, a few things. But there's one thing I'll mention to you if you want to hear about it.

I said, I want to hear about it.

She said, my mother started taking a concentrated pomegranate extract about 2 and a half years ago. Not the juice. Not the seeds. The peel.

I said, the peel.

She said, the peel. That's the part with the compounds that seem to matter for what your body is trying to do right now. Most people throw the peel in the trash. They eat the seeds, they drink the juice. And the juice is fine, but it's not where the good stuff is. The good stuff is in the peel.

She wiped down a machine behind me and kept talking.

She said, there's a class of compounds in pomegranate peel called punicalagins. Some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in nature. And what they've been shown to do, in a lot of research, is help support the environment around your cardiovascular system. The vessels. The lining. The pathways that carry your blood.

She said, when your body is under oxidative stress, and I don't have to tell you about oxidative stress because you've been in here 4 months, what happens is your LDL cholesterol starts to get oxidized. Think of it like rust. Rust on the cholesterol that's floating around in your blood. And it's the rusted cholesterol that causes a lot of the damage. The plain cholesterol isn't really the villain. The rusted cholesterol is the villain.

I said, the rusted cholesterol.

She said, that's a simple way to put it. And what punicalagins seem to do, based on what the research suggests, is help protect that cholesterol from getting rusted in the first place. So it can do its job the way it's supposed to. Your body knows what to do. It just needs the environment to be less hostile.

I said, and this is a supplement.

She said, it's a supplement. It's not a drug. It's not a replacement for your drugs. You take everything your cardiologist told you to take. This is on top of it. It's the environment. It's the ground your medications are working in. Better ground, better outcomes.

I said, where's your mother get it.

She said, a company called Auniva. She said it a little quieter. She said, I don't tell everybody about this. I tell the people I think will pay attention. My mother's been taking it for a couple of years. She's a different woman than she was 4 years ago. Not because it fixed anything. Because it gave her body room to breathe.

I said, room to breathe.

She said, that's how she describes it. That's not medical language. That's my mother's language.

I went home that night and I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and I typed in the name.

Auniva.

I found the page. Two capsules a day. Organic. Made in the USA. Standardized to punicalagins from the peel, not to ellagic acid from wherever, which apparently is what a lot of the other companies do and which Lena had specifically told me to watch for.

There was a 90 day guarantee. If it wasn't working for me inside of 90 days, I could send the bottle back for a full refund. Every penny.

I ordered a bottle.

It came in 4 days.

I put it on the kitchen counter next to my other 4 bottles, and I took 2 capsules the next morning with my coffee.

Diane watched me do it and didn't say anything.

The first 2 weeks, I noticed nothing.

I told Diane on a Sunday morning, at the end of week 2, I said, I don't think it's doing anything.

She said, give it time. Lena said give it time.

Week 3, still nothing.

Week 4 was when the first thing happened.

I woke up on a Thursday and I felt like I'd slept.

Not just I'd been asleep. I'd slept. I'd rested. There was a difference and my body knew it and my mind knew it.

I didn't say anything about it to Diane. I didn't want to jinx it.

Then Friday I woke up rested too.

Then Saturday.

By the end of week 5, I was sleeping through most of the night. Which I hadn't done since the collapse. I'd been waking up at 3:14 AM, 3:47 AM, staring at the ceiling, running through the whole thing again. The fist in my chest. The grass. Sherry with the scissors.

Week 6, my rehab sessions started to feel different.

The treadmill portion had been 32 minutes at 2.8 miles per hour on a 4 percent incline. I'd been finishing it winded. I'd be leaning on the handrails at the end.

Week 6, I finished it and walked off the treadmill and got a drink of water, and Lena looked at me.

You look better today, she said.

I feel better today, I said.

Week 7, I walked Biscuit around the whole block for the first time since the previous summer. Diane came with me. It was a Sunday evening and the sky was pink over the roofs. We didn't talk. We just walked.

At the end of the block, Diane stopped and looked at me, and I could see she was trying not to cry.

You look like you, she said.

I said, I feel like me.

Week 8, I got in the truck by myself and drove to the field.

Beau was there dragging the infield when I pulled in. He looked up from the gator and waved, and I waved back, and I got out and I walked across the grass in center field.

The grass was cut on the diagonal I used to cut it on. Not because he was copying me. Because there's a reason to cut it that way. The angle catches the afternoon light and it looks better from the third base seats. He'd figured it out on his own. Or maybe he'd remembered me telling him.

I walked to left field. I found the sprinkler head. It was working fine.

I stood there for a long time.

I remembered the fist in my chest. I remembered the ceiling of the ambulance. I remembered Sherry cutting my shirt off.

Then I remembered Diane on the porch on our first date in 1985 and the way her hair looked in the porch light, and I remembered Micah on my shoulders at the beach when he was 4, and I remembered Tyson at 14 painting his first foul line and getting it crooked and me laughing at him about it.

And I remembered that I was still here.

I walked back to the truck and I drove home.

The wedding was 3 weeks later.

I stood up at the head table at the Marriott in Wilmington on a Saturday in April.

I had my toast in my back pocket, folded twice. I'd rehearsed it in the bathroom mirror at 5 AM every day for 2 weeks.

The room went quiet.

I looked out at 200 faces. I saw Tyson at the sweetheart table with Aubrey Lynn in her white dress, and I saw his mother in the front row with tears already running down her cheeks, and I saw Diane at table 8 with her hand over her mouth.

I unfolded the paper.

I didn't need it. I'd memorized it. But it was something to hold.

I said, Tyson was 11 years old the first time he asked me why the mound is crowned. I told him it's crowned so the water runs off. And he said, well why don't you make the whole field crowned then. And I said, because then you couldn't play baseball on it. And he said, well what if you crowned the outfield too but not the infield. And I said, Tyson, you're going to be an engineer.

The room laughed.

I said, he asked me a thousand questions. He asked me a thousand more. He didn't ask them because he wanted to bother me. He asked them because he wanted to understand. And that's rare in a person. It's rarer in a boy. It's rarer still in a boy who didn't have a lot of people around him telling him it was okay to ask questions.

Tyson was looking at me now with his eyes wet.

I said, I don't know exactly what a groundskeeper is supposed to be to a bat boy. Nobody ever wrote that job description. But I know that Tyson gave me more than I gave him. He gave me a kid to teach, at a time in my life when my own son had grown up and moved to Raleigh and had daughters of his own and didn't need me the same way anymore.

He gave me somebody to notice. He gave me somebody to explain things to. He gave me a reason to slow down and describe why I did what I did. And there is no greater gift you can give an old man than a young person who wants to know why.

Tyson, I said. Aubrey Lynn. I've watched Tyson turn into the man you married. I'm not surprised he turned out this way. I'm just grateful I got to see it.

Raise your glasses.

To Tyson and Aubrey Lynn.

To knowing why.

Every glass in the room went up. And I stood there, on my own 2 feet, and my legs didn't shake, and my chest didn't tighten, and my voice didn't crack.

I finished my toast and I sat down and Diane put her hand on my knee under the table.

You did it, she whispered.

I said, I know.

I'm 62 years old.

I had 3 stents put in me 15 months ago and I thought that was the end of the man I'd been.

It wasn't.

I still take my medications. I still go to rehab. I still eat the salmon Diane cooks on Wednesdays. I don't sneak pork rinds in the truck anymore. Not because I couldn't. Because I don't want to.

But somewhere between all of that, there's a bottle on my kitchen counter that has 2 pomegranate extract capsules taken out of it every morning with my coffee, and I don't know exactly what it's doing inside of me, but I know that my body feels like ground I can stand on again.

If you're where I was 14 months ago, or if you know somebody who is, I want to tell you about it.

It's called Auniva Pomegranate. It's an organic concentrated extract from the peel of the pomegranate, standardized to punicalagins, the compounds that actually seem to matter for what your body is trying to do. Two capsules a day. That's it.

They have a 90 day guarantee. If it doesn't do for you what it did for me, you send the bottle back and they refund every penny. No arguments. No hoops.

Go to the page below and read what they have to say about it yourself. Then decide.

👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5

P.S. I want to say something about the peel, because Lena told me this and it stuck with me. Most pomegranate supplements on the market are made from the juice or the seeds, and they're standardized to a compound called ellagic acid. The peel is where the punicalagins live. Punicalagins are what a lot of the research on pomegranate has actually been looking at. If a supplement is standardized to ellagic acid but not to punicalagins, you're getting a different product. Auniva is standardized to punicalagins from the peel. That's the whole reason I'm on it.

P.P.S. I want to say something about the guarantee, because I know people are skeptical of these things and I don't blame them. I was skeptical too. The way it works is you order a bottle, you try it for up to 90 days, and if it isn't working for you, you ship the bottle back and they refund you the money. You do have to send it back. That's fair. That's how a guarantee is supposed to work. I've never had to use it because I'm not sending anything back, but Diane made me look up their return policy before I ordered and it's plain English and it's honest.

P.P.P.S. I gave Tyson's toast on April 12th. If somebody had told me on July 23rd of the previous year, when I was in a hospital bed in the cardiac unit at New Hanover Regional, that in 9 months I'd be standing in a Marriott ballroom without my knees shaking, I would not have believed them. I don't know if pomegranate extract was the reason or a reason or part of the reason. I know what I felt. I know I got up and I stood there and I said what I needed to say. And I know that the boy who used to follow me around the field now has a bride, and I got to be there for it. That's what this stuff gave me. Time. Ground to stand on. A voice that didn't shake.

👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5

On your day, every detail should reflect your story... starting with the stationery 💍

I went down at 6:47 PM on a Tuesday last July. In left field. The starting pitcher was already on the mound warming up.

I remember the sprinkler head. Green plastic. I was bending down to shut it off before the crowd came in, and the world tilted sideways.

Then it was black.

Then it was the ceiling of an ambulance and a woman named Sherry cutting my shirt off with scissors.

My name is Roland. I'm 62 years old. I live in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I spent 34 years grooming a baseball field for a minor league club that most people in this town couldn't tell you the name of if you paid them.

I was the field guy. That was my name to everybody. Roland the field guy. The guy who painted the foul lines. The guy who dragged the infield between innings. The guy who cared more about the pitcher's mound in the top of the 8th than most of the ballplayers did.

I loved it.

I got there at 5 AM. Sometimes 4:30 if we'd had rain. I knew every low spot in the outfield. I knew which sprinkler head was going to give me a problem on a hot Tuesday. I knew the difference between the way the grass drank in April and the way it drank in August.

I had a wife of 38 years named Diane, a son named Micah who lives up in Raleigh with a wife and two little girls of his own, and a dog named Biscuit who I'd inherited from Micah when he moved into an apartment that didn't take pets. Biscuit and I had a long friendship of 11 years.

And that was my life. Field, wife, son, dog. In no particular order.

For about 4 years before it happened, my doctor had been telling me things.

Cholesterol's climbing, Roland.

Blood pressure's up again, Roland.

Have you thought about cutting back on the fried food, Roland.

I had thought about it. I had also kept eating it.

I was 62. My father made it to 71. My grandfather made it to 68. Nobody in my family had ever seen the far side of 75. I figured whatever was coming was coming.

Diane didn't figure that. Diane cooked me salmon on Wednesdays and made me eat oatmeal and stopped buying pork rinds. But I'd sneak them in the truck. I'd sneak a lot of things in the truck.

And I'd tell myself I was fine, because I could still bend down and pull a weed out of the third base line, and I could still lift a bag of Turface, and I could still walk the whole field before a game without stopping.

Until I couldn't.

It was July 22nd. A Tuesday. The Wilmington Ospreys had a home game against a team from Fayetteville that nobody cared about, but it was Bark in the Park night, and the crowd was going to be bigger than usual because we sold discount tickets to anybody who brought a dog.

I was in left field at 6:47 PM, bending down to shut off a sprinkler head that had gotten stuck open, and my chest felt like somebody had reached inside and put a fist around something.

That was the last thing I remember before the grass.

I was told later that a father and his 10 year old daughter were in the outfield seats and the little girl saw me go down and screamed. Her father got over the wall in about 4 seconds. He was a paramedic on his day off. His name was Corey. If Corey hadn't been at that game with his daughter, I would not be writing this to you right now.

They put 3 stents in me at New Hanover Regional 2 hours later.

I woke up on Wednesday morning to Diane holding my hand.

I was in the cardiac unit for 6 days.

I lost 14 pounds in the hospital, most of it fear.

When they let me go home, I didn't recognize my own house.

Not because anything had changed. Because I had.

I sat on the couch. I looked at the pictures on the wall. There was one of me and Micah at his high school graduation, and I looked at that photograph like it was a photograph of a stranger, because that man had been sure he was going to be around for grandchildren, and the man on the couch was not sure of anything anymore.

Diane drove me to cardiac rehab 3 times a week. She wouldn't let me drive.

I took 4 new pills every morning. Sometimes 5, depending on which one you counted.

The rehab center was in a shopping plaza off Oleander Drive, next to a nail salon and a Bojangles. That was funny to me for reasons that only somebody who's been through cardiac rehab would understand. I'd finish 32 minutes on a treadmill and walk past a Bojangles smelling their chicken biscuits and I'd want to cry.

I didn't touch my field for 8 months.

They gave the groundskeeping to a young guy named Beau who did a fine job. I know he did a fine job because I stopped by one Saturday in October and the third base line was straight and the mound was crowned and the outfield grass was cut on the diagonal I used to cut it on. He'd learned from me the year before. He was carrying it on.

I sat in the parking lot for 40 minutes and couldn't make myself go in.

The wedding invitation came in March.

Cream envelope with gold lettering. Diane picked it up off the porch on a Wednesday afternoon and set it on the counter, and it sat there for 3 days before I opened it.

You're invited to the wedding of Tyson Marchetta and Aubrey Lynn.

Tyson.

I hadn't seen Tyson in a full year. Not since before the collapse.

Tyson was the bat boy for the Ospreys from age 11 to age 17. His mother worked in the front office. His father wasn't in the picture. Tyson would show up at the field 3 hours before game time and follow me around while I worked, and he'd ask me questions like why do you rake the mound in circles instead of lines and how come the grass in center field looks different from the grass in the corners.

He called me Mr. R.

He rode with me in the gator to pick up the bases after every game.

When he was 14, his mother told me that she couldn't afford to keep him in his summer camp anymore, and I told the front office that I'd be happy to hire him part time as long as they filed the right paperwork. So he got paid a small stipend to be my shadow for 3 more summers. He learned to paint a foul line before he learned to drive.

He went to N.C. State and studied civil engineering, and now he works for a firm in Raleigh that designs sports fields for a living. He credits me for that. He shouldn't. He credits me anyway.

And on the second page of the invitation, in his handwriting, was a note.

Mr. R,

I'd be honored if you'd give a toast at the reception. You were the first person outside my family who believed I could be something.

Ty.

I read that note 6 times.

Then I put it down on the counter and I went out to the yard and I cried into Biscuit's fur for 20 minutes.

I didn't think I could do it.

I didn't think I could stand up in front of 200 people in a Marriott ballroom and deliver a speech that meant anything to Tyson without falling apart. And I don't mean emotionally falling apart. I mean physically.

My legs were still shaky by the end of an easy day. My chest still tightened when I climbed the 2 flights of stairs at the rehab center. My voice, when I tried to practice the toast in the bathroom mirror at 5 AM, sounded thin. Like something was wrong with my throat. It wasn't my throat. It was everything.

I sat with the invitation in my lap on a Sunday afternoon and I thought about writing Tyson a note saying I couldn't make it. That I was sorry. That I'd send a card.

Diane came in and sat next to me on the couch and put her hand on my knee.

Roland, she said, you have to go.

I know.

You have to give that toast.

I know.

She didn't say anything for a while. Biscuit was asleep on my foot.

Then she said, is there anything you haven't tried.

I said, I don't know what you mean.

She said, you take 4 pills. You go to rehab. You eat what I make you. Is there anything else. Because if there's anything else, I want to know what it is.

I didn't have an answer.

The next morning I asked Lena.

Lena was the nurse who ran my Monday, Wednesday, Friday sessions at the rehab center. She was maybe 44, maybe 45. Short, olive skinned, dark hair she kept in a braid, wore Hoka sneakers with jeans on the days she wasn't in scrubs. Her mother had come from the Azores in the 1970s and Lena had been the first one in her family to become a nurse.

She was kind in a way that didn't feel like a customer service kind. She was kind in a way where you could tell she'd probably watched a lot of men my age go through what I was going through, and it hadn't hardened her the way it hardens some people.

That Monday I told her about the wedding.

She listened while I did my stretches.

Then she asked me how I was sleeping.

Not great, I said.

She asked me how my energy was in the afternoons.

Bad, I said.

She asked me if I felt like myself yet.

I said no.

She was quiet for a bit. Then she said, my mother had a scare 4 years ago.

I didn't know your mother had a scare.

She said, most of the men in here don't know a lot about me. That's okay. But my mother had a scare, and she went through what you're going through now, and it took her a long time to feel like she was on solid ground again.

I said, how'd she get there.

Lena said, a few things. But there's one thing I'll mention to you if you want to hear about it.

I said, I want to hear about it.

She said, my mother started taking a concentrated pomegranate extract about 2 and a half years ago. Not the juice. Not the seeds. The peel.

I said, the peel.

She said, the peel. That's the part with the compounds that seem to matter for what your body is trying to do right now. Most people throw the peel in the trash. They eat the seeds, they drink the juice. And the juice is fine, but it's not where the good stuff is. The good stuff is in the peel.

She wiped down a machine behind me and kept talking.

She said, there's a class of compounds in pomegranate peel called punicalagins. Some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in nature. And what they've been shown to do, in a lot of research, is help support the environment around your cardiovascular system. The vessels. The lining. The pathways that carry your blood.

She said, when your body is under oxidative stress, and I don't have to tell you about oxidative stress because you've been in here 4 months, what happens is your LDL cholesterol starts to get oxidized. Think of it like rust. Rust on the cholesterol that's floating around in your blood. And it's the rusted cholesterol that causes a lot of the damage. The plain cholesterol isn't really the villain. The rusted cholesterol is the villain.

I said, the rusted cholesterol.

She said, that's a simple way to put it. And what punicalagins seem to do, based on what the research suggests, is help protect that cholesterol from getting rusted in the first place. So it can do its job the way it's supposed to. Your body knows what to do. It just needs the environment to be less hostile.

I said, and this is a supplement.

She said, it's a supplement. It's not a drug. It's not a replacement for your drugs. You take everything your cardiologist told you to take. This is on top of it. It's the environment. It's the ground your medications are working in. Better ground, better outcomes.

I said, where's your mother get it.

She said, a company called Auniva. She said it a little quieter. She said, I don't tell everybody about this. I tell the people I think will pay attention. My mother's been taking it for a couple of years. She's a different woman than she was 4 years ago. Not because it fixed anything. Because it gave her body room to breathe.

I said, room to breathe.

She said, that's how she describes it. That's not medical language. That's my mother's language.

I went home that night and I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and I typed in the name.

Auniva.

I found the page. Two capsules a day. Organic. Made in the USA. Standardized to punicalagins from the peel, not to ellagic acid from wherever, which apparently is what a lot of the other companies do and which Lena had specifically told me to watch for.

There was a 90 day guarantee. If it wasn't working for me inside of 90 days, I could send the bottle back for a full refund. Every penny.

I ordered a bottle.

It came in 4 days.

I put it on the kitchen counter next to my other 4 bottles, and I took 2 capsules the next morning with my coffee.

Diane watched me do it and didn't say anything.

The first 2 weeks, I noticed nothing.

I told Diane on a Sunday morning, at the end of week 2, I said, I don't think it's doing anything.

She said, give it time. Lena said give it time.

Week 3, still nothing.

Week 4 was when the first thing happened.

I woke up on a Thursday and I felt like I'd slept.

Not just I'd been asleep. I'd slept. I'd rested. There was a difference and my body knew it and my mind knew it.

I didn't say anything about it to Diane. I didn't want to jinx it.

Then Friday I woke up rested too.

Then Saturday.

By the end of week 5, I was sleeping through most of the night. Which I hadn't done since the collapse. I'd been waking up at 3:14 AM, 3:47 AM, staring at the ceiling, running through the whole thing again. The fist in my chest. The grass. Sherry with the scissors.

Week 6, my rehab sessions started to feel different.

The treadmill portion had been 32 minutes at 2.8 miles per hour on a 4 percent incline. I'd been finishing it winded. I'd be leaning on the handrails at the end.

Week 6, I finished it and walked off the treadmill and got a drink of water, and Lena looked at me.

You look better today, she said.

I feel better today, I said.

Week 7, I walked Biscuit around the whole block for the first time since the previous summer. Diane came with me. It was a Sunday evening and the sky was pink over the roofs. We didn't talk. We just walked.

At the end of the block, Diane stopped and looked at me, and I could see she was trying not to cry.

You look like you, she said.

I said, I feel like me.

Week 8, I got in the truck by myself and drove to the field.

Beau was there dragging the infield when I pulled in. He looked up from the gator and waved, and I waved back, and I got out and I walked across the grass in center field.

The grass was cut on the diagonal I used to cut it on. Not because he was copying me. Because there's a reason to cut it that way. The angle catches the afternoon light and it looks better from the third base seats. He'd figured it out on his own. Or maybe he'd remembered me telling him.

I walked to left field. I found the sprinkler head. It was working fine.

I stood there for a long time.

I remembered the fist in my chest. I remembered the ceiling of the ambulance. I remembered Sherry cutting my shirt off.

Then I remembered Diane on the porch on our first date in 1985 and the way her hair looked in the porch light, and I remembered Micah on my shoulders at the beach when he was 4, and I remembered Tyson at 14 painting his first foul line and getting it crooked and me laughing at him about it.

And I remembered that I was still here.

I walked back to the truck and I drove home.

The wedding was 3 weeks later.

I stood up at the head table at the Marriott in Wilmington on a Saturday in April.

I had my toast in my back pocket, folded twice. I'd rehearsed it in the bathroom mirror at 5 AM every day for 2 weeks.

The room went quiet.

I looked out at 200 faces. I saw Tyson at the sweetheart table with Aubrey Lynn in her white dress, and I saw his mother in the front row with tears already running down her cheeks, and I saw Diane at table 8 with her hand over her mouth.

I unfolded the paper.

I didn't need it. I'd memorized it. But it was something to hold.

I said, Tyson was 11 years old the first time he asked me why the mound is crowned. I told him it's crowned so the water runs off. And he said, well why don't you make the whole field crowned then. And I said, because then you couldn't play baseball on it. And he said, well what if you crowned the outfield too but not the infield. And I said, Tyson, you're going to be an engineer.

The room laughed.

I said, he asked me a thousand questions. He asked me a thousand more. He didn't ask them because he wanted to bother me. He asked them because he wanted to understand. And that's rare in a person. It's rarer in a boy. It's rarer still in a boy who didn't have a lot of people around him telling him it was okay to ask questions.

Tyson was looking at me now with his eyes wet.

I said, I don't know exactly what a groundskeeper is supposed to be to a bat boy. Nobody ever wrote that job description. But I know that Tyson gave me more than I gave him. He gave me a kid to teach, at a time in my life when my own son had grown up and moved to Raleigh and had daughters of his own and didn't need me the same way anymore.

He gave me somebody to notice. He gave me somebody to explain things to. He gave me a reason to slow down and describe why I did what I did. And there is no greater gift you can give an old man than a young person who wants to know why.

Tyson, I said. Aubrey Lynn. I've watched Tyson turn into the man you married. I'm not surprised he turned out this way. I'm just grateful I got to see it.

Raise your glasses.

To Tyson and Aubrey Lynn.

To knowing why.

Every glass in the room went up. And I stood there, on my own 2 feet, and my legs didn't shake, and my chest didn't tighten, and my voice didn't crack.

I finished my toast and I sat down and Diane put her hand on my knee under the table.

You did it, she whispered.

I said, I know.

I'm 62 years old.

I had 3 stents put in me 15 months ago and I thought that was the end of the man I'd been.

It wasn't.

I still take my medications. I still go to rehab. I still eat the salmon Diane cooks on Wednesdays. I don't sneak pork rinds in the truck anymore. Not because I couldn't. Because I don't want to.

But somewhere between all of that, there's a bottle on my kitchen counter that has 2 pomegranate extract capsules taken out of it every morning with my coffee, and I don't know exactly what it's doing inside of me, but I know that my body feels like ground I can stand on again.

If you're where I was 14 months ago, or if you know somebody who is, I want to tell you about it.

It's called Auniva Pomegranate. It's an organic concentrated extract from the peel of the pomegranate, standardized to punicalagins, the compounds that actually seem to matter for what your body is trying to do. Two capsules a day. That's it.

They have a 90 day guarantee. If it doesn't do for you what it did for me, you send the bottle back and they refund every penny. No arguments. No hoops.

Go to the page below and read what they have to say about it yourself. Then decide.

👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5

P.S. I want to say something about the peel, because Lena told me this and it stuck with me. Most pomegranate supplements on the market are made from the juice or the seeds, and they're standardized to a compound called ellagic acid. The peel is where the punicalagins live. Punicalagins are what a lot of the research on pomegranate has actually been looking at. If a supplement is standardized to ellagic acid but not to punicalagins, you're getting a different product. Auniva is standardized to punicalagins from the peel. That's the whole reason I'm on it.

P.P.S. I want to say something about the guarantee, because I know people are skeptical of these things and I don't blame them. I was skeptical too. The way it works is you order a bottle, you try it for up to 90 days, and if it isn't working for you, you ship the bottle back and they refund you the money. You do have to send it back. That's fair. That's how a guarantee is supposed to work. I've never had to use it because I'm not sending anything back, but Diane made me look up their return policy before I ordered and it's plain English and it's honest.

P.P.P.S. I gave Tyson's toast on April 12th. If somebody had told me on July 23rd of the previous year, when I was in a hospital bed in the cardiac unit at New Hanover Regional, that in 9 months I'd be standing in a Marriott ballroom without my knees shaking, I would not have believed them. I don't know if pomegranate extract was the reason or a reason or part of the reason. I know what I felt. I know I got up and I stood there and I said what I needed to say. And I know that the boy who used to follow me around the field now has a bride, and I got to be there for it. That's what this stuff gave me. Time. Ground to stand on. A voice that didn't shake.

👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5

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