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April '04 BASEBALL! |
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A Nice Life Andrew Bomback |
Dave Clapper Joe Lee's Fastball |
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A Fool’s Faith Dennis Dillingham
Games were something my dad and I always had. He had played baseball when he was younger, so we would talk the sports, the players, watch games together on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, complaining about the perennial impotence of our chosen teams, lamenting blown calls, chastising poor coaching decisions, sometimes simply drifting to sleep beneath the weight of Vin Scully’s soothing voice. Long-time residents of Long Island, we would occasionally go to Mets games together, a few years after that intoxicating ’86 season. Just me and my father, my four sisters and my mother forced to stay at home, watching to see if they could catch a glimpse of us on TV. I wouldn’t be a teenager for a few years yet; hadn’t yet started to see my father in the way most teenagers see their parents: as liabilities in the all-consuming struggle to be independent, popular, better. It was easier then. The only thing I cared about was baseball. A feeling that expanded to emotionally billowing proportions on those summer nights as my father and I headed out to the Wantagh train station from our big red house on Lufberry Avenue, accompanied by a symphony of the strident cicadas indigenous to that section of suburban Long Island. With gloves and balls in tow, we would board the Long Island Rail Road at Wantagh, switch at Jamaica, hop the line to Woodside, switch again, and take that dirty, fecal-scented train out to the blue and orange oasis on the northern shore of Queens. We would always get there ludicrously early, an hour at least, to watch batting practice and to try and get autographs. In all those years, I don’t think I got a single signature. I don’t know if I ever really tried. It wasn’t a priority, was really just an excuse to get there so early before the crowd piled in. No distractions, just my dad and me sitting in our ticketed seats, content in our exclusive bubble of camaraderie. The sight of the outfield in the setting sun and the chocolate-milk-brown infield would fill our classroom and cubicle-dimmed eyes with rapture as we stared out into the sepia-tinted dusk. And amid all this wonder and wordless connection, the Mets would trot out from the dugout, the stadium lights igniting their uniforms to a piercing, perfect blue; Darryl, Keith, HoJo, and if you were lucky, Dwight, all standing just yards away as the cool summer night descended like a mystical, rejuvenating fog. Those nights at Shea are some of my most poignant memories of childhood. My father and I sitting side-by-side, sharing a bag of peanuts, a pretzel, a bladder-busting cup of soda, sharing a favorite team. In a middle-class, Irish Catholic family, where emotional expression was as unheard of and as unlikely as missing mass on Sunday, the Mets were a meaningful source of connection for my father and me. I mean, is there anything better than being twelve years old and watching your favorite team, win or lose, with your father, the man who had always been there, the one who was immune to the laws of nature and physics, the man who would live forever? Because, if they’re lucky, that’s what fathers are to their sons: immortal, our all-knowing mentors. As a kid you never imagine your father being gone because you never imagine your father being any different than he is right then and there: strong, resilient, the protector, the ever-present provider. You only learn later how naive those images are, sadly how untrue. Truth can be a slippery, elusive thing, masked sometimes in transparent yet somehow effective disguises. And what is growing up, really, but a euphemism for learning and coming to accept the sad, dangerous, and sometimes shocking truths childhood innocence keeps hidden? One such truth I learned and was forced to accept is that my father was not, after everything we had shared and experienced together, the nights and afternoons spent side-by-side cheering and jeering, a Mets fan. Never had been. It turns out that my father was and always had been – of all things – a Yankee fan. A damnable Yankee fan! I never knew that about my father until about three years ago. He took me to Mets games, we would talk Mets together, the players, the history, the befuddling front office maneuvers; it only followed in my mind that he was a Mets fan. In reality, my father had been a long and devoted supporter of the boys in pinstripes. An admirer of Mantle and Maris and Whitey and Billy and all the rest of the single-monichered, larger-than-life characters of his youth. A truth he had kept entirely to himself on our sojourns to Shea, and continued to keep quiet for years after. I don’t know exactly how I found out, that moment of revelation escapes me. Maybe he just told me; maybe I asked him a question about who he rooted for when he was a kid, somehow never putting two-and-two together that the Mets didn’t come into existence until 1962 and my father was born in 1942. I do remember, though, how I felt after finding out: not truly angry or indignant, but shell-shocked, surprised. For as long as I could remember knowing anything, I knew my father was a Mets fan. What was I going to learn next, that I was adopted, raised by wolves, delivered to Earth in a silver pod from a sun-less planet? My father’s admission did shock me. I mean, he had none of the characteristics that typically defined Yankees fans, didn’t wear an ancient satin jacket or beat-up old cap that looked as if it got caught under the wheels of the 6 train one too many times; he didn’t get drunk in public or call girls “babes” or guys “buddy;” he didn’t wear any jewelry around his neck, gold or otherwise. I had been swimming with him countless times, and never saw signs of cloven hooves or an arrow-shaped tail. I was in my mid-twenties by that time and it didn’t really matter. The sport had begun to lose its luster for me by then, the energy I once devoted to it now devoted to other things: making money, dating, finding that ever-elusive contentment. Even if it had, that truth didn’t take away any of the times we shared or temper any of the emotions involved. I joked with my dad about it, elbow-to-the-ribs type jabs, told him how disappointed I was, what a paralyzing shock to my system his confession inflicted, throwing my entire belief system into code-red chaos. It all passed and my father and I and the rest of my family moved on, joking about it occasionally and persisting in our tendency to gloss-over emotional questions and situations with humor. I came to terms with my father being a Yankee fan, as hard as something like that was for a devoted Mets fan to do. Not so easily forgiven, though, was my own failure to realize sooner something so fundamentally a part of the man who dedicated his life to ensuring my sisters and I had every opportunity in the world.
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