• Published on February 20, 2019

He cut the grass low, along a straight line, always as straight as you could with a push-mower. It made for a truer infield, easier on the eyes, better hops. There wouldn’t be a rider for a few years yet, so for now he pushed in the summer sun. Neither you nor I know how many times he cut that field, or raked the mound or weeded the base paths. Let’s just say a lot. He’s from a generation where you don’t count things like that. Stats don’t matter, but kids playing on a decent ball field do. He taught me to throw it over-hand, the shoulder fairly brushing the ear on its way through. He grimaced when I dropped to three-quarters or, horrors, side-arm! You just don’t throw that way. And you catch with two hands. Once in a Babe Ruth game at Falconer field I tried a basket catch in the outfield, missed badly, and prolonged an inning. I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe that I was good. That was the longest time I ever spent in the outfield in my life, hoping to get another chance to help the team and do it the right way, waiting to come back to the dugout and explain myself to him.

He hooked his arm in mine, maybe the only time I remember this happening. Senior year, final home football game, parent’s day. We walked down the cinder track, him on my left, mom on my right. My high school girlfriend (and current wife) snapped an iconic picture of he and I looking bigger than life, me because I was wearing pads, him because of who he is, who he was that day. He would have pulled on pads had someone let him, though he wasn’t a football player so much as an athlete. The cardio needs of the game would have killed him, but not the spirit and the competition. No, that part he would have been fine.

He has said more than once (more than ten times, more than twenty times) that he could stand under the basket and leap off two feet and curl his fingers around the rim (he’s maybe 5’9”). It’s impossible to doubt him; he’s prone to hyperbole only when talking about other people. They called him Leaping Lena. Don’t ask me why; try him, he might know, nicknames being what they were back in the day. After my basketball games we would dissect what happened, the good and the bad. I loved and hated those conversations, accountability comes hard to teenagers sometimes, and you are what you left on the court, and your dad sees and he knows everything. No getting around that. Today I do the same thing with my son, and I am more careful I think, but I hear him in there, almost always.

My dad is a great man, not a good man, but a great one. It took me a while to understand that, almost 50 years of trying to negotiate my own life and realize what a man endures in 70 plus years. I learned it because of sports, our common language when politics and home improvement and work and relatives didn’t match up in our stubborn heads. Sports did, and still do. Everyone deals with demons, sometimes they are big and scary, and sometimes they are small and manageable. But they are ours, we have to own them, and we have to look at them daily, weekly, year after year. Dads and sons share a few, they do so through lives mingled in ways they don’t get to predict or control; it’s made up as it goes.

How do you write a piece about your dad without it sounding like a eulogy (he’s still quite alive), and how do you encompass it in 800 words or less? Actually, you don’t, or at least you don’t if you have only my limited skills with words to work with. So instead I’ll leave off with this:

Every game, every play. Every class, every grade. Every cold, every bruise. Every age, all the news. Every house, every home. Every ball, every phone. All the fun, all the shame. The win, the loss, the rides, the pain. A frown, a laugh, a silent tear. Metal forged year on year. A pile of days without end. A hero, a tyrant, the bank, a friend. Everything the mirror sees. Who you are, who you’ll be.