Random Thoughts and Writings — Politics, Food, Fiction, Essays, Maybe Even a Haiku every now and then.
Take a look at top. There’s a tab for The Irrepairable Past. Click on it and you’ll see links for Part 1 and Part 2. Here’s the next few pages. Not as much as I had hoped for, and ultimately, it’s really just a part of Part 2. So, consider this Part 2A…
I should have known better. Those three rose bushes were the pride of his garden. Pruned endlessly. Fertilized and weeded, with nary a shoot of green lurking in the ground around them. Other plants and flowers came and went, ripped out at times when his painting struggled. In the center of the garden, in a triangle of color, the roses never faded. His care of them should have told me something his silence could not. Their permanence in a place of an indicator of his undying love. They didn’t represent death to him, but the faith he had in memories and of life.
But what son ever feels totally confident and protected in the quiet love and care of his father? When accomplishments are met with nothing more than a lift of the eyebrows or a grunt. When failures are met with words of anger, punishment, and dismay. While the minutes of days and weeks and years create a separation that cannot be bridged.
There are so many things my father did for me that I failed to recognize at the time. Only years of hindsight and my own parenting experience taught me this. In the moment of my youth I focused instead on his silence, what I perceived to be his neglect and his expressions of anger, and lost sight of the small pleasures he provided as well as the values he instilled in me.
When I came home the last day of the third grade, my father sat on the porch, his bare feet up on the railing as they always were.
“Henry,” he said, looking me up and down slowly. “I think it’s time you started playing a sport.”
“What do you mean?” Up to that moment, my sport had consisted of running through the woods yelling like a banshee, swimming in the shallows of the bay, and fishing from a rickety canoe my father had tied up to a post on the porch so I could go no further than forty or fifty feet out. A sport involving points and competition, sides and hits, innings and quarters was an unknown concept.
As well, although Jake Talbot, a boy a year younger than me, occasionally joined me for spirited battles across the imagined scorched earth of the land around our home, I generally played on my own, avoiding the monsters of the deep and fending off the waves of savage natives bent on scalping my father and I. Those natives were eventually replaced by Nazi’s bent on adding our little plot of land to their growing empire, but I fought them alone and knew nothing of games other than checkers played on the porch in the dying light of the day.
“A sport. With a team. You know … basketball. Or, better yet, baseball.” My father had a gleam in his eye I had not seen before as he reached below his chair and pulled a bag from under his chair. “Here. It’s for you.”
I approached the porch and stopped at the bottom of the steps. He threw the bag to me. “Open it, Henry.”
I grabbed at the sack, dropping my school books in the dirt. I pulled a stiff leather contraption out and turned it over in my hands. “What is it?” I asked. Until that moment, I had no experience with balls, other than mudballs formed at the water’s edge and then lugged into the woods where my fort needed explosives for keeping the marauders at bay.
My father stood and stretched, his hands reaching to the ceiling of the porch. “A baseball glove.” He twisted at his hips and swung his arms around like the arms of a windmill. “It’s time for a catch.” He disappeared into the cabin while I fiddled with the glove, sliding my fingers into the wrong holes, holding it to my face and staring through the gaps.
“A catch,” I whispered to myself, unaware of the concept. I stared into the glove and tried to flap it open and closed. “How’m I gonna catch fish with this?” I puzzled.
A few moments later, my father rejoined me. A weatherbeaten glove was molded like a second skin to the fingers of his left hand. The leather my father had given me, mistakenly and awkwardly shoved onto my right hand, flapped loosely. He saw me looking at it, trying to flap it open and closed, and walked over. Without a word, he slid the glove off my right and put it correctly onto my left hand.
Some of the awkwardness disappeared, but the idea of catching anything with the leather contraption on my hand still baffled me. On the palm were some numbers and letters stamped into the leather, and along the pinky finger of the glove, in flowing cursive script was a name. “Who’s Mel Ott?” I asked my father.
He was twenty feet away, right at the edge of the bushes that announced the forest’s presence at the edge of the small clearing in front of the cabin. “Here. Catch,” he yelled to me as he flung the baseball in my direction. He threw it easily, surely with the idea that it would settle gracefully in my glove. All I had to do was hold my glove up. Unaware of his plan and still unsure of what this new game was, I panicked, stepping back several steps to watch the ball land in the dirt in front of me, bounce a couple of times and roll to my feet.
I picked the ball up to the sound of my father laughing. “You’re supposed to catch it, Henry.” My only reply was a look of befuddled confusion. “Throw it back to me. I’ll show you how.”
Several minutes later, he found the ball in the shrubbery, many yards beyond where he had stood. While my father’s throw had arced casually towards me, my first attempt was like a cannon shot, hard and fast, and about fifteen feet off target. I watched his search sheepishly, but he emerged with a smile on his face. “Nice throw, son. We’ll just need to work on your accuracy.”
We were still at it as the sky darkened. I cannot honestly say that I played catch that night. The game was much more one of drop and pick, throw and search, but something happened that night. After years of living together but finding solo activities, my father and I found one that brought us together. There were many days in our future where he was lost in his painting and I was rumbling through the woods or, a few years later, driving the back roads in the old Studebaker, but more than ever before, a game of catch interrupted our separation. A simple thing, two gloves and a ball, and a few moments of time.
Over a dinner of beans and bread, I learned something else that night. At our small kitchen table, a candle flickering between us, he shared with me a small piece of himself. “I played professionally for a time,” he began.
I, again, had no clue what he meant. Until that moment, I was blissfully unaware of Murderer’s Row, the Rajah, the Sultan of Swat, Joltin’ Joe, and so many other things that were a part of ordinary life in the rest of America. Baseball and its history was an unknown mystery. Living on Sullivan’s Bay, in the final years of the Great Depression, with a father didn’t read the paper because news “was for the witless and the feeble,” I lived a life for which sheltered was likely an understatement. The woods were my world, with a few hours of school interrupting.
My father had yet to answer my original question about this thing called baseball. Who was Mel Ott? And, now he was telling me he had done something professionally. At the tender age of eight, I was baffled just by the length of the word.
“Yup. Made it to the Panthers in ’26 and ’27. Over in Forth Worth.” He stopped for a bite of bread and chomped it noisily.
“Where’s Forth Worth?
“Texas. Not a place I’d ever want to see again. What a dry, hot little hellhole of a place.”
“What’d you do there?”
He chuckled then, finally understanding utterly lost I was. “Played baseball, Henry. Pitched a little bit.
