Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Eyes Wide Open, Always Dreaming

My four-year-old has it all figured out. When he grows up, he wants to be a cake maker. And play baseball for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
I ask Brady if he prefers one career path over the other. He insists he can do both equally, that he can play baseball during the summer and make cakes during the winter as well as on days the games are cancelled because of rain – or more specifically as he says, “when the whitening detector goes off at the fields and we have to get back in the truck and go home.”
This tells me three things. 1) Brady watches too many cake competitions on The Food Network with his mom. 2) He just might be spending too much time with his older sister at the softball fields. 3) The kid’s got more direction at four then I’ve ever had at any one point in my life.
When I was his age I wanted to be a superhero. More specifically, I wanted to be Superman - so much so that my desire lent itself to becoming one of those stories my mom tells over, and over, and over again. Some cultures refer to stories like these as “lore.”
My mom has two of these non-fictitious tales of lore. You only get one. For now.
When I was five, Underoos were fairly new and gaining tremendous popularity. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, Underoos are children’s underwear depicting comic book characters, cartoon characters, and even video game characters. Underoos give kids a whole new dimension to “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”
The great thing about Underoos, even now, is that they can be worn as either underwear or outfits all on their own…provided you’re staying home. It’s here I note that Underoos should never be worn on the outside of one’s regular clothes in public, especially when attempting to fly to kindergarten.
My mom had a tendency to let me do really stupid things as kid, not because she didn’t care, but because she wanted to make sure she captured it on film. Since she was a big advocate of accumulating blackmail evidence (which ironically she cannot locate thirty years later…), she let me walk right out the front door and up the street to Eugene Ware Elementary School.
I don’t even want to think about how my life would have turned out had I actually made it to school dressed like that, but at the time it seemed like the most rational thing a boy my age could do. All I knew was that we lived in Small Town, Kansas. There were Superman clothes in my dresser drawers. And I too had (and still do have, actually) the few strands of hair that curled against my forehead just as my hero’s did. There was no logical reason not to believe that I did not have super powers enhanced by the sun.
As a kid I was always dreaming with my eyes open. I used to think that I was the Incredible Hulk - constantly ripping the buttons off my shirts before trying to lift the refrigerator. I believed that any automobile I got into had the potential to jump over creeks like the General Lee. I wanted an alien for my very own that I could put in a basket on the handlebars of my bike and pedal off into the forest and eventually fly into the night sky. I wanted to move from New Jersey to Reseda, California and learn karate from our apartment maintenance man, to be a fighter pilot who got to invert over MiGs only to flip them the bird, to be a Ferrari driving detective, and to discover lost pirate treasure with my very own band of misfits. To this day I still dream of owning a time machine.
Looking back at all of that I can’t help but think that maybe I enjoy writing so much because I’m a dreamer. Perhaps it’s because writing allows me to live the lives of so many different characters, not because their lives are better than mine but because their lives are ones that for better or worse I’d wouldn’t know how to live in the real world. Mostly though I think it’s because I don’t know how to turn my imagination off.
That’s what I want for my kids, to never feel like they have to turn their imaginations off. I want them to imagine greatly. Not to think bigger, but to think brighter, or differently. To not think confined by limits, but to think limitless. I want for them what they want for themselves. If that’s being the best cake making ballplayer to ever put on a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform so be it. I like cake and baseball. And superheroes. And time machines.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

More Than Just a Game

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: My mom taught me how to play baseball. She taught me how to throw. How to hit. How to catch.
When I was a teenager she made fun of my batting stance. She said I shook my butt too much.
My mom loved to watch me run. She loved to watch me steal bases and chase down fly balls. She said I was the fastest kid in the world. On some days I was.
But as much as my mom taught me about how to play the game, it was my dad who taught me to love the game. To respect it because it was more than just a game.
He learned to love this game from his dad. My papa learned from his. It’s one of those cycles in our family that’s almost genetic.
My dad’s a New York Yankees fan. He has an entire bedroom in his house devoted to them. There’s a Yankees toothbrush that accompanies him when he travels. A license plate that sets his car apart from every other car in Tulsa. He’s a fanatic when it comes to Yankees baseball. I am not.
On paper, the Texas Rangers are my team. I do not have a toothbrush to denote this when I travel.
When my dad lived in Detroit back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, I would spend two months of the summer with him. On average we’d attend ten to fifteen baseball games a year. One summer he gave me the option of driving to Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Chicago to catch a baseball game over the extended 4th of July weekend. I asked if we could just stay in Detroit. The Rangers were coming to town for a four game road series with the Tigers. We went to all four.
Now, when I say “on paper” I mean that the Rangers may be who I root for, bleed for, and cry for, but they don’t have my heart. Instead they only get a piece of it because I’ve learned that in thirty-five years of baseball I can’t give my heart to just one team. It belongs to the game itself.
Baseball’s always imperfect, except for those rare occasions when it actually is. It’s a game that boys play with the hopes of one day playing as men, and a game that men who wish they were still boys play because fully growing up is something they want no part of.
This past weekend I was in New York City with my dad. He had just turned sixty the weekend before, and to celebrate we took a quick trip to Gotham, and more specifically, to Yankees Stadium for three games.  My dad was finally going to be able to see his favorite team in its own house. More importantly, the fates had aligned to put us in a position to see his favorite player, Derek Jeter, become the first New York Yankee to ever reach the elusive milestone of 3,000 hits in a career.
Within minutes of settling into our hotel room Thursday night, I’d learned via ESPN that a fan had fallen from the stands during the Rangers home game earlier that night and died. At that time I didn’t know the whole story, but without being asked my memory confirmed that this was the third time a fan had fallen from the stands in Arlington.
Friday finally came, and because I wanted the people of New York City to know it was I and not them that was a fan of the greatest team in all of baseball I wore my red Michael Young t-shirt with the number ten in white on the back and a blue ball cap with a red ‘T’ stitched on the front. My attire gave everyone license to stop me and inquire of the previous night’s tragedy of which I had very limited knowledge of.
I responded the same way every time. “Yeah, I saw that on ESPN. It’s the third time since 1994 that someone’s fallen from the stands like that.”
This continued all day and into the early evening as we waited in the rain outside Yankee Stadium. I still knew none of the facts. It seemed the people I spoke with really didn’t either, but they wanted to talk about it right up until 5:30PM EST when those of us hiding under ponchos received word that the game was postponed and began heading back to where we came from. An hour later my life changed forever.
We took the subway from The Bronx back to our hotel in Manhattan. While changing out of my wet clothes, Scott Pelley informed me during the “CBS Evening News” exactly what had happened the night before. It was worse than I could have ever imagined.
He reported of how a man from Brownwood, Texas had driven several hours to take his six-year-old son to his first Texas Rangers game. Pelley talked of how this man wanted to share first hand with his son his own love for the greatest game on Earth. How the man had reached over the left field fence to catch a ball that Josh Hamilton had thrown into the stands for the man’s son. And how the man lost his balance and fell over the railing, landing on his head twenty feet below. Pelley said that the man could be heard pleading to anyone listening to take care of his son. The words were devastating, but the photos were heartbreaking. One photo showed the man reaching for the ball while another a strange woman holding his son, protecting the boy from seeing the horror below.
I sat on the edge of the bed, and fought with everything inside of me to hold back the tears. I didn’t want my dad to see how much this was affecting me, especially on his special weekend. It was a battle I couldn’t win.
On the subway back to The Bronx the next day I found myself thinking about this little boy that I’d never meet. I wondered if he’d ever go to another baseball game again. I wondered if he’d grow up and blame the game I loved so much for taking his father from him. I thought of all the games my own dad and I had attended together, and the baseballs we’d collected in that time. I thought of how many games I’d taken Kacie to. How I’d yet to take Brady because I wanted to wait for him to actually understand the game, to remember it, unlike Kacie who was less than three months old when she attended her first.
I couldn’t help but to feel guilty for getting to experience something so incredible with my dad. Moments of joy were overtaken at times by moments of extreme sadness. I found myself wishing I could give up my shot at witnessing baseball history with my dad if it meant bringing back this little boy his. Baseball was now more than just a game.
During the course of the weekend we reveled in watching Derek Jeter become an elite part of baseball history on Saturday and cheered as CC Sabathia threw a shutout on Sunday, yet all the while I kept finding myself re-living an entire lifetime of baseball. I remembered my mom hitting me in the face with a baseball when I was five and telling me that if I’d kept my glove up it wouldn’t have happened. I remembered my dad telling me of how he’d snuck into the 1985 World Series and watched the Kansas City Royals claim their only title in franchise history. I remembered shopping in 1998 for just the right baseball glove to buy for my first child, not knowing if it’d be a boy or a girl. I remembered how Traci’s mom used to tell me that if I wasn’t careful I’d force baseball on my kids to the point that they’d grow up to not even like the game. I’d defended myself by saying that I didn’t care if they never played on a team or watched the game, but that all I would ever want from them was that they would humor their old man every now and then and play a game of catch in the back yard.
Even as I write this, I find myself hoping that Cooper Stone’s mom is in some ways like my mom. I hope that as she starts the process of merging the life she once knew with the reality she’s now forced to live that she will continue to teach her son how to play baseball. That she teaches him how to throw. How to hit. How to catch. Maybe even how to shake his butt a little too much when he’s batting.
But more than anything, I hope that this little boy who will forever have a place in many of our hearts will one day learn to see past the unimaginable pain he may feel when looking onto a baseball field and love the greatest game on Earth as much as his dad must have.