Of who we are and what we're made of. (Subtitled: The baseball story that has nothing to do with baseball)

Years and years and years ago, I was watching a Yankees vs Red Sox game on T.V. My then 2 year old son came into the room and declared, "Daddy watching baseball!!!". Proud and only able to barely contain my enthusiasm, my wide-eyed boy asked me the eternal 2 year old question:

"Why?"

"Because I like it", was my immediate reply. "Why?" he countered. I sat back and fell into that time warp where real time passes in mere seconds, but your mind's time scans the past lazily; at its own leisure.

At first I thought of answering his question with the story of the small town in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts where I grew up. A town that had a maximum population of 6,000, and even with such a minuscule population in the lost and sleepy region of mountainous Mass, this town had produced Mark Belanger, 17 year major league veteran, with 5 World Series wins while playing short stop next to Brooks Robinson with the Baltimore Orioles. I could have told my son about Tommy Grieve, 2nd baseman for the Texas Rangers who eventually left baseball with a devastating injury to become the General Manager of those same Rangers. I might have even mentioned daddy's boyhood friends, Jeff Reordan and Dan Duquette, Reordan winning two World Series with the Minnesota Twins while known as "The Terminator", and Duquette being the General Manager of the Montreal Expos and the Boston Red Sox, his boyhood dream fulfilled.

I could have talked of my parents house, a traditional New England Colonial made out of Beech,Birch, Maple, Pine and Oak. Daddy could tell you about the day Grampa poured cement for steps leading up to the porch - big stuff in those days - and how daddy learned to throw and catch by tossing a rubber ball against those steps and working on his accuracy and fielding skills in the process. Fielding skills? Yes, of course. Daddy could throw the ball against certain parts of those steps to produce ground balls, line drives, and over-the-head fly balls that daddy could dive for and learn to catch major league style. Hour after hour, day after day.

As my son waited for my answer, I wandered off again. Should I tell him when all the dad's in the neighborhood got together and made the ballfield behind the grammar school, the one with the cinder block dugouts? Real dugouts!! Like the Red Sox had at Fenway. Daddy decided it best to leave out the fact that 35 years later, daddy returned to find that ball field done under for swing sets and jungle gyms, those beautiful dugouts only a vast, distant memory.

Nahhhh...too depressing for a 2 year old.

Perhaps it would be better to tell him about baseballs unmistakable smells. Yes.. the smell of the leather of that glove. You could also smell the oil used to soften it, the spit used to make a kid feel like a real major leaguer, and you could sense in that smell the love and the inspiration behind every practice; every ball thrown against those steps producing the fabulous catches in front of an invisible fan base of thousands; and you could sense above all else the effort, the tears, and the aches and pains borne of the love of a game that can only be explained by those that take the time to experience it; true love that makes athletic effort and achievement what it is - special in ways that cannot be quantified.

I don't know...maybe I could tell him about my first trip to Fenway park in the mid-1960's, and HOW OLD Fenway was even back then - 43 years ago. I'm sure I would have told him about the color green everywhere, from each level and every wall, to include the monstrosity in left field.
How bigger than life the players looked, and how radio was our TV back then, a practice (listening to ball games on the radio) I still do whenever possible today.

Oh, I thought to myself. I could tell him his dad was in Fenway Park on July 19th, 1969...the day man first landed on the moon, and how 35,000 people fell silent after the announcement over the PA system, and then a lone man stood up - and with one of those long stemmed plastic foghorn horns, proceeded to play the most beautiful version of "God Bless America" I'd ever heard to an absolutely dead silent and reverent stadium...

...Still to this day.

Yeah, daddy could have told him all of this and more, but daddy's boy was but two... at least several years from actual understanding, and several decades from true appreciation. I could have had Barney the purple dragon at first base and big bird at third, with the power rangers playing outfield, and it wouldn't have sunk in. So instead of wasting time elaborating on something incomprehensible to him at this time, I simply said to his one-word question "WHY?":
"Because it makes daddy happy"

And as then the 30 inch tall, 35 lb boy, snuggled underneath the crook of his daddy's arm to begin taking in his first ever ballgame, his daddy finished by saying to him:

"Especially when the Yankees lose."


JL4 Notes: As I reread this for clarity, my wife must have been chopping onions or something, because my eyes got all misty and stupid. Yeah...

- must be the onions.