Baseball and Fathers

"What's important is that baseball, after twenty-eight years of artificial turf and expansion and the designated hitter and drugs and free agency and thousand-dollar bubble gum cards is still a gift given by fathers to sons." - Michael Chebon

~~~

Last night I sat in the stands of a major league baseball game, eavesdropping.  More specifically, I was catching snippets of a conversation between a father and his seven year-old-ish son:

“What’s a batting average?”

 “Did you see that—right there at the end of the pitch? The way the catcher moves his glove?”

“What if someone hit the ball all the way over that wall and into someone’s house?”

“Keep eating peanuts. We have to keep eating peanuts until the Mariners score.”

And so on.  It reminded me of many an afternoon spent watching the Giants with my dad—him explaining the nuances of a good swing, what ERA means, and why there is the infield fly rule; me listening, and not listening, and wondering if we were going to get chocolate malts this time.

For me, there’s something altogether fatherly about baseball—about spending several hours together with someone whom you care about deeply, pointedly not talking about anything genuinely important, but rather the bits of minutia and trivia that make up our national pastime.  Accentuating this dialogue are moments of contented silence born of shared experience, a sort of conversational negative space.  And from out of it all—the endless stats and scorecards and rally caps—emerges what both of you might say to each other if you didn’t have baseball to say it for you.     

Not all fathers are baseball dads, of course.  But to varying degrees, I think all dads need a construct for communicating how much they care, that they value you enough to invest their time, energy, money, and love in you.  The construct itself is unimportant—it could be fishing, or books, or cars, or a cabin.  But for many, it’s baseball.  It’s this sort of thing that makes the most stoic of men shed half-hidden tears at the end of Field of Dreams when Rays asks, “Dad, you want to have a catch?”  And for more than a few, it is what will keep them returning to a ballpark for an afternoon with dad, long after he is gone.

Paul Richards, former manager of the Orioles, once said, “Baseball is made up of very few big and dramatic moments, but rather it's a beautifully put together pattern of countless little subtleties that finally add up to the big moment, and you have to be well-versed in the game to truly appreciate them.” 

He may as well have been speaking of fatherhood.

Happy Father’s Day, Pop.  Sandoval’s hitting .287. 

Book'em Danno

Amazon puts on these really cool weekly "fishbowls," where famous authors and musicians come to speak or perform.  Today's special guest: Erik Larson, renowned author of beautifully-rendered historical narratives interspersed with lurid true crime.  My sister introduced me to Larson's The Devil in the White City several years ago, so I was pretty excited to hear about his latest best-seller, In the Garden of Beasts--a story of Nazi Berlin as seen through the eyes of William Dodd, America's first ambassador to Nazi Germany, and his rambunctious 24-year old daughter.

Larson spent the better part of an hour describing father and daughter as characters in a true life Grimm Brothers fairy tale, two "innocents" lost in the dusky and darkening wood that was 1933 Germany. He was easily compelling enough that I had fully decided to bump his book to the top of my reading list--and that was before both Bryant and I won the raffle for a signed copy.

Just one of the perks of being an employee at the world's largest bookstore.

      

It's A Small World's New Theme Song

Cool concept music videos, courtesy of Playing for Change.

The Old Man and the Snows of Kilimanjaro

I wrote about the graves of famous authors, but I held off on one story, preferring to save it for tonight.

     '"There are right graves and wrong ones, just as there are good times to die and bad times."     "So you think that grave up on the hill is a wrong grave for a right man, do you?"
     "That's about it," I said.
     "You think there are all kinds of graves along the road for all of us?"
     "Could be," I said.
     "And if we could see all our life one way or another, we'd choose better? At the end, looking back,'' said the hunter, "we'd say, hell, that was the year and the place, not the other year and the other place, but that one year, that one place. Would we say that?"
     "Since we have to choose or be pushed finally," I said, "yes." 

And thus Ray Bradbury describes the central message of "The Kilimanjaro Device," a short-story contained in the sci-fi masterpiece I Sing the Body Electric.  It is the story of a time-traveler who has come back to offer Ernest Hemingway a "right" final resting place, one befitting a man like Hemingway: atop Kilimanjaro, where only "dark warriors and white hunters and swift okapis know the grave."

"Papa," suffering from the ravages of a lifetime of alcoholism and a loss of that manly virility so often acclaimed in his stories, committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.  It was a tragic end for a man whose writing meant so much to so many.  Bradbury must have felt so too, and so decided to rewrite it.  

I read this story years ago, but it's one that has stuck with me.  I'm not really sure why--perhaps it's the unusual use for a time machine: most of us would want to somehow rewrite the past, but I don't know how many would focus on a gravesite.   In some ways, too, Bradbury's story is an ultimate sign of respect--not apologizing for anything Hemingway did in life, but wishing for a death worthy of the man.

At any rate, it seemed to fit with yesterday's theme.

In Memoriam

Last night I read about one lesser-known Memorial Day tradition: people visit the graves of their favorite authors and leave tokens of remembrance.  In honor of that tradition, I've selected a few epitaphs from renowned authors and poets:

Here lies a man whose name was writ in water.

John Keats

Alien tears will fill for him

Pity's long-broken urn.

For his mourners will be outcast men

And outcasts always mourn.

Oscar Wilde

Blest be the man that spares these stones,

And curst be he that moves my bones.

William Shakespeare

Quoth the Raven, Nevermore

Edgar Allen Poe

A Day of Rest

My apartment overlooks the Seattle Art Museum and Jonathan Borofski's "Hammering Man" sculpture--I guess I should more correctly say one of Borofski's "Hammering Men" statues (there are at least eleven scattered around the world) and that we look one another in eye: I live on the sixth floor and he is six stories tall.  As I look my bedroom window, this is what I see:

The giant raises his hammer, the backswing arcing high and well behind his enormous steel head. There he pauses, as if contemplating...one..two...and then swings the hammer toward the piece of metal held in his other hand.  The strikes rain down smoothly, mechanically, and relentlessly.  He used to rest for evenings and holidays, but now the work is unending, although I'm not sure if that's out of necessity or choice.  As it is--nearly midnight on a Sunday--he is hammering away.

Borofski's website explains that the Hammering Men are intended to symbolize the unity of laborers worldwide, but it is hard to imagine a more depressing representation: endless, mindless physical labor with no apparent result.  He stands eternally in front of one of the nation's premier cultural venues, but is unable to lay aside the tools of his trade in order to enjoy the fruits of a society free from incessant toil.

I suppose it's a good reminder to keep this internship (and my twelve weeks here in Seattle) in perspective.