Fathers and Sons

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up  in the backyard, violent and superficial. Baseball is the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls, cricket and rounders, and the games the Iroquois played in Connecticut before the English came. Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age, and death. This diamond encloses what we are.

- Donald Hall, Fathers Playing Catch With Sons

When I was little the high point of every day was waiting for my dad to get home, waiting for dinner to end, and going outside to play a three inning game of tennisball in the side yard.  The field had about 30 degrees of fair territory, a ball over the street about 100 feet away was a home run (despite the fact that we had a fence), singles weren't allowed because home to first was only about 40 feet, if a ball hit the trees that provided a canopy over the field it was played as a clean fly ball, and yet it felt just like a big league park.  My dad has had multiple knee surgeries (3? 4?), was probably always pretty tired, and yet would seemingly always come out to play with us, providing the nightly counterpart to the Lakewood Vultures, a star-studded team with perennial .800 hitters Michael and Will Streit.  He would always jump out to an early lead, unless his teammate Stuart prevented him from doing so due to the lack of power that a 3 year old can bring to the table, and yet we would always manage to come back and win in a series of upsets that I'm surprised 30 for 30 didn't jump all over.  Those games forced me to hit line drives up the middle, they forced me to play quickly in the field, they taught me to never give up (even after Dad lined a tennis ball square off of my forehead), they gave me an appreciation for the way that the air feels when (and only when) the sun is at the horizon in the middle of summer, that cool humidity that can only be described by the realization that Mother Nature herself must be getting chills by watching the sunset, and they gave me baseball, my first love.

This past Sunday, Fathers Day, for the first time in probably 12 years, all four of us went out to play again.  It was noon this time, at a local Little League field, with a softball (and singles allowed).  We were out of shape, it was hot, we were lacking in the enthusiasm that can only come out of little boys, and it couldn't have been more perfect.  For that hour, we were sent back to those sweet summer nights.  Any normal family would have tossed the ball around and taken a little batting practice, but before we even put down the bases we had decided on playing 2-on-2, just like the old days.  There was Dad running as hard as he could out of the box, Michael wiping out as he rounded first (caused, of course, by hustle and not a lack of coordination or cleats), Stuart throwing out runners from center at depths that may have been home runs at the Polo Grounds... we kept playing to win, even when the circumstances should have been screaming "THIS DOESN'T COUNT, IT DOESN'T MATTER.  WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO YOURSELVES???"

In the past 48 hours, I've realized that it wasn't that field or those games that taught me to hit line drives, that wrapped Nature's cool blanket around my shoulders, that showed me a world that only ballplayers can really understand.  It was Dad.  The same man who taught me to work hard, to take a blue-collar mentality into everything, to play to win, to not make excuses, and to love the people around me, and I can't thank him enough for that.

On Sunday, I made a catch on the run behind our minivan in the parking lot in deep left field that I'd like to describe as Willie Mays-esque, but it was probably closer to routine, but after we got home, Dad told me a story that I don't think I'd ever heard before.  It was short, it was inconsequential except for its relation to the catch in left that I'd made, and it may not seem like much, but to me, it was huge.

Dad smiled and started off, "Ya know, that catch reminded me of one time when Will was really little.  We were playing in the yard and somebody hit a deep fly, Will wasn't wearing a shirt, but the ball was going deep out toward center, and there was Will, running after it.  I didn't think there was any way that he could possibly get it, but he made it out there and caught it.  I can still see him running out there, shirtless, making that play." 

I may be stretching this, but I feel like that story is kind of a metaphor for what Dad did for me on all those summer nights.  Other kids at this stage in their life are running off, out of center field, backs turned, but because of all those lessons I didn't know I was receiving, I'm just going out to try to catch the ball that my Dad has placed out in front of me, everything he's done for me that I can only hope to meet.  It may look uncatchable, it may be long and it may be far, but I'm going to run out there and I hope I'm going to get it, and then I can turn back to him and laugh and smile in the sun.  And hopefully I'll make him even a tenth as proud of me as I am of him.