I have seen my grandfather’s letter, written
from free Europe, at the end of the war to his newborn son, Donald. In it, my grandfather explains his tender
feelings about the news of Donald’s birth. He explains to his first son the unfortunate split in the house:
Donald’s mother, Jane, born in Brooklyn, is a Dodgers fan, whereas he is a
Giants man.
My uncle Donald went with his mother’s
Dodgers, and all their weighty sepia-toned history. I think he chose wrong. Mel Ott and the
Say-Hey Kid just seem more like what baseball should be, arrogant and fun
rather than serious. But kids love front-runners. By 1962 the Mets took the place of both teams in
Queens, uniting jilted fans of each, including those at the household in
Halcyon Park. My grandmother and her two sons—my uncles—passed on this sweetly
painful allegiance to me.
Endless maudlin prose has been composed
to describe the experience of baseball at a ballpark. Some of it by me. But in
truth, I only went to a handful of games at the tenderest ages. I never played
organized baseball. My formative experience of the game was almost entirely
through television, framed in a thick wood grain, and planted in the back of
our living room.
And yet, I still think these memories
of the game are just as powerful. The evening sunlight
fading across the old, somewhat harsh carpet. Lying on the floor with my legs
up in the seat of a swivel chair, pushing it back and forth, annoying everyone.
The voices of Ralph Kiner and a much younger Tim McCarver. My grandmother, curlers
in her hair, drinking her last glass of wine for the night. The little plastic
tubes, running from two oxygen tanks, behind our spinet piano, leading at their
end into the nostrils of her beloved husband, suffering from emphysema. They
might be talking about the neighborhood news, or what was in the paper that
day. I remember constantly running up
the stairs to deliver the news of hits and home runs to my mother. And then
before the next half inning began, I would slide down those stairs, my backside
slamming on each step until, at full speed, I crashed on the landing. On Friday
nights, the smell of pepperoni pizza from Calabrese on Franklin Street.
The pizzeria is still there, serving
exactly the same unctuous slices I have tried to find everywhere else pizza is
made. But my mother and her parents—everyone from my childhood home—moved two
miles up the road. They lie together in Mount Olivet cemetery, a garden of
stone and clover.
I could complain of the stupid changes
to the game made by its commissioner in this crisis. But I’m just thrilled to have it back. For
real this time because there are real fans there in the stadium, at least some,
providing a real rolling din, underneath the announcers.
We don’t watch as often as my
grandmother did. But my daughter is making her own memories. The shade of the
trees behind our den suffocates the evening light. She asks a small totem in
the kitchen, “Hey, Siri, are the Mets on tonight?” Her parents curl up on the
couch. The dog lies on the carpet and begins her own pattern of sighs and tail
flaps. The murmur of certain broadcasters tied to the Mets: Gary Cohen on T.V.
and Howie Rose on the radio, are some of the last living voices with accents
her great-grandparents would have recognized as “from New York.” My daughter’s
brothers sometimes bash the spinet piano in the living room—yes, the same one.
And her parents talk about their days and try to teach them how not to be
annoying. Lately we’ve been trying to subvert the local public health junta
that takes them as its subjects.
Baseball fits into our home precisely
because of its ultimate unimportance. It’s exciting, even awe-inspiring, but
the din of the crowd contrasts with that murmur of love between father and
mother, parent and child, sister and brother, even when one of them is crashing
down the stairs. I want my daughter to perceive in her home a refuge from this
world, and even a preview of heaven. At least sometimes. And if the Braves
don’t win fourteen consecutive division races in her youth, as they did in
mine, that might help too.
