When everything is possible
by digby
This piece in today’s NY Times about fathers, sons and baseball is just wonderful.It’s written by Irish immigrant Colum McCann draws a beautiful picture of childhood, family and memory.
As the years went on, baseball surrounded me more and more. My son began listening to the radio late at night, under the covers. There was something gloriously tribal about the Yankees for him. He learned to imitate John Sterling, the radio announcer. It is high, it is far, it is gone. An A-bomb from A-Rod. He began playing the game too, and so I would walk to Central Park with him. How far was my own father on the street behind me, juggling a soccer ball at his feet? How far was my dead grandfather?
We become the children of our children, the sons of our sons. We watch our kids as if watching ourselves. We take on the burden of their victories and defeats. It is our privilege, our curse too. We get older and younger at the same time.
I never meant to fall in love with baseball, but I did. I learned to realize that it does what all good sports should do: it creates the possibility of joy.
As a child my husband did the same thing with his dad, a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and jazz musician who had followed the team out to Los Angeles and then settled in Las Vegas where he could escape the stultifying conformity of the his small town, east coast upbringing. (In those days, the Dodger games were broadcast all over the Southwest.) And even today, much older than his father was then, I can see a vestige of that little kid every spring when the first exhibition games are played and the whole world seems for a minute as if it has another chance. He even listens on a solar transistor radio rather than the sleek smartphone App. I guess it’s something about the sound of Vin Scully’s voice coming through the tinny speakers that makes it right.
Anyway, it’s a beautiful piece that’s worth reading on a Sunday spring morning even if you aren’t a baseball fan.
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