Spinet Piano

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.