I Know Baseball Isn't Real Life, but.....

As Summer slowly makes its way towards the dog days of August, the slow going of the baseball season follows. I haven't followed the daily (or monthly for that matter) progress of the game as my Father would have. While visiting, he would catch me up on the division standings, outstanding players, minor dramas and major plays.  Living a day's drive away,  I had got use to not seeing him for a few months at a stretch, another rotation of the calendar makes it sink in that we would never again celebrate this sport together.  At least not in person.

The last World Series. Baseball.  Cubs and Indians.  My Dad.  Holy Cow. 

Baseball has a unique place in the psyche of my family.  My Grandfather played minor league ball before the first World War and coached it for many years later.  He knew Ty Cobb.  Some of his players roomed under the same roof my Dad was growing-up under.  Harry Caray even quoted him while calling Cubs games.  Holy cow!

My Dad played high school and American Legion baseball.  My brother and I grew up playing Little Leage ball every year we were eligible.  My Dad umpired and coached.  When he said he was going to give coaching a break, he stepped back in to take another team when no one wanted to.  Once it was a team predominatly African-American, because the "officially random" nature by which teams were elected was most always undermined by personal biases (racism).  I was was the only white kid on that team.  My Dad personally saw to it that each kid got his fair share.  We would leave home early and get back late from every game and practice picking up and dropping off any player needing a ride.  I began to see the small world of my small Georgia hometown in regards to people and how they treated each other. It was easy  It was sad. It was self- realizing. It was the best season of my life.

A Year and a Day

The area to the right looked more promising. Thick vegetation dominated by immature pines faced us straight ahead, which was also up. Up is the direction off trail we had travelled so far, enough so that I was getting light headed from craning my chin skyward  just to see what was ahead. Yeah, it was that steep. Cutting fire lines in Northwest Montana kind of steep.

Which made me think of my Dad. My internal journal always tagged such moments.  Decisions, challenges, the unique, the sublime.  Certain moments have always earmarked themselves for future retelling to Daddy.  The stuff of conversations.

My father grew up on the red clay earth of the lower Chattahoochee Valley in southwest Georgia. Nothing too steep.  Did a stint in the Air Force that included Florida, Okinawa, and Montana.  There’s Montana, again.

But this day was different.  I was here partially because of Daddy. Only on this day I was hanging onto anything that remotely looked trustworthy in the mountains of North Carolina and Daddy had been gone a year.  To the day.

And I miss those conversations.  Face to face when I came home to visit or my parents arrived at my doorstep, willing tourists to my grandiose (in MY mind) guiding, but mostly over the phone.  Almost thirty years of off-the-wall observations and misadventures.  From Blakely to Beijing, Flagstaff to the Flathead.  My mind has not stopped it’s tagging.  I have to tell them somewhere.

I have two daughters. Sweet, sassy souvenirs of trips to China.  They were their Granddaddy’s light and substance, as they are also mine. A teen and a might-as-well-be teen.  They loved my father dearly.  A year is long enough.  It’s time I start those conversations with them.  Now I know their world is band practices, learner’s permits, and soon enough, boys. Their attention span is in more demand by more things than bandwidth at a prepubescent sleep-over..  

So now I start this..  Day-one of year-two. Listen up, girls. You, too, Daddy.

Edward Toole, Sr. (Bud) contemplating some steepness on Whiteface Mountain, NY ca. 1988