In which your narrator won’t go there.
My sports-loving and generally all-American dad had the misfortune of having three daughters and no sons. He dutifully took us to Mets games every baseball season and always arranged these outings on giveaway days. When we went to the beach, we had Mets Snoopy towels and various Mets hats with designs from the 1980s and 1990s. The house was full of plastic Mets cups for a time. A few years ago I was explaining at a family gathering that my dad was a big Mets fan. He interrupted: “No. I’m a Yankees fan.” I was confused. Why had we been dragged to all of those Mets games as kids? “They gave away better free stuff.”
— MEGHAN KEANE, Brooklyn, New York
1994. ONCE, IN COLLEGE, I CAME HOME FOR A WEEKEND WHEN I was somewhat depressed, for those vague, completely stupid reasons people get depressed in college. It was springtime, and the Cardinals were playing an afternoon game at Wrigley; I was supposed to meet my father for lunch to watch it. I drove to his office, the CIPS Electric Company substation, where a bunch of electricians had Playboy calendars and posters of Camaros peppering all available wall space.
My dad works, essentially, as a troubleshooter for the electric company. You know those big unwieldy metallic configurations with the power company’s logo slapped on a chain-link and barbed-wire fence? They’re usually siphoned off away from everything else, because they’re highly dangerous. When your power goes out, because of a storm or something—sometimes a kamikaze bird will do a death dive right into a transformer, shorting out half the town—it’s because one of those has broken down.
Well, my dad’s the guy who fixes those and makes sure nothing goes wrong with them. He’s been doing it my whole life, and he’s very good at it. He has developed a reputation among his coworkers and bosses as a guy who never does a job half-ass, never complains, and never leaves work for others to do. Troubleshooting can be hazardous; while on the job, Dad has watched a man be electrocuted to death, only a few feet away. When I was in junior high, an accident once chopped off his middle finger at the knuckle. They put it in iced milk and sewed it back on. You can poke his middle finger with a needle, and he can’t feel it. It’s kind of fun.
About fifteen years ago, my father’s union was threatening a strike. Management had been considering the possibility of locking the workers out as a preemptive maneuver, but they weren’t quite sure if the union was bluffing. A large part of my father’s job is overtime; he’s on call twenty-four hours a day, because you never know when your power’s going to go out. In twenty years, my father had never once, for any reason, turned down overtime; when they called, no matter what time of day, no matter what he might have had going on (he once left halfway through opening Christmas presents), he always dropped what he was doing and did the job. The union, as a matter of protest, distributed word throughout its ranks that, as a show of solidarity, when the dispatcher called, they would feign sickness to let management know they meant business.
At 8 P.M. one night about two weeks before my high school graduation, our phone rang, and I answered. The dispatcher said, “Will, is your dad there?” I handed him the phone and watched as my dad, saddened, going against his very nature, said, “Sorry, Bob, I’m, um . . . I’m real sick. I can’t make it.” If Bryan Leitch was turning down overtime, management knew the union wasn’t kidding around. They locked out the workers the next day. Eventually management caved. There were a lot of guys like my dad in that union.
Anyway: The day I went to go meet Dad for the Cards-Cubs game, Buck, a guy my father has worked with forever, saw me pull in and told me Dad was stuck on a job just outside of town and wouldn’t be back for half an hour. We shared a cigarette and he asked me about college. “You still writing about the Illini for your student paper? I’ve had just about enough of Lou Henson; he should retire.” I told him I was, in a dismissive, this-is-a-waste-of-my-precious-time type of way. I was sure he didn’t care about my newspaper columns any more than my dad did; my father had famously lectured me on the foolishness of majoring in journalism, where no one did anything but write pointless, usually inaccurate stories, and besides, there weren’t any jobs anyway. I had a big chip on my shoulder about my family in college. I think most college students do.
Buck told me I should just wait in Dad’s office—which didn’t really have a desk; it was mostly a card table where he ate lunch—until he returned. I scowled and pouted my way through the endless parade of work trucks, with ladders and hooks and big metal things I’d never know how to use stacked loosely on their sides, past the welders and the sparks and all the real work, and made my way to Dad’s office. He shared the large room with about ten other guys, and it was empty.
I threw my backpack next to his desk with disgust and slouched in his chair. I then looked up. The first thing I noticed was a picture of my sister in her cheerleading uniform. This was before my sister had discovered the counterculture, back when she was a gymnast and a popular kid. She was carrying pom-poms and flashing a bright braces smile. Next to that was, to my shock, my most recent sports column for the Daily Illini, surrounded by a whole collage of others. My father’s desk was covered in his son’s newspaper clippings. He even had one I’d written about the annoyance of incompetent teaching assistants; that story must have had as much cultural significance to my father as an exposé of the oppression of Muslim women in Iran. I’d had no idea he’d ever even read the Daily Illini. I’d had no idea he even cared.
I sat quiet for a moment, then grabbed my backpack and headed out to my car. I’d wait for Dad there. I didn’t want him to see me seeing all that at his desk. It would have been embarrassing for both of us.
ON A 2–0 PITCH, Derrek Lee flies out to right field. Somehow Adam Kennedy, who looks bewildered to be playing right field in the first place, gets a good read on the ball and it lands safely in his glove.
Dad is on another beer run. The short top of the fifth, the looming sense that this game is already over, the fear that Dad’s big trip up north was pointless and unnecessarily painful, has me in a self-pitying mood. This was dumb. We are idiots. My team sucks. When your baseball team looks helpless, the world’s a forlorn place. You feel impotent. You feel like real life.
For distraction, I decide to dip briefly into that real life.
“So, Mike, how’re your parents, anyway?”
Mike’s parents are lovely, lovely people. When he and Joan were married, they invited my parents, and everyone became instant friends. His mom and dad are wide-necked Chicago folk: thick Dah Bears accents, deep dish pizzas, bighearted Catholic traditionalists. I have an urge to hug both of them every time I see them. I try to be subtle about it.
“Oh, you know, fine,” Mike says. “Ma’s been having some health issues, but she’s hanging in. They’re excited to be grandparents. That kind of freaks me out, actually. My mom is a grandma.”
“Nevermind” is on classic rock stations now. I actually remember what it was like to be in college and not have an email account. Baseball players I cheered for growing up are fat bald men now. Flecks of gray are sneaking into my own hair. Four drinks give me a hangover. I’m thirty-four.
My grandfather died at the age of sixty-six, the age my father will be in six years. I like Dad’s odds of making it past that. By the time my grandfather died, he’d had lung cancer, three heart attacks, and painful, debilitating arthritis. He wore false teeth, which he would take out and rub up against my ear to freak me out. (It worked.) None of this stopped him from smoking on his deathbed. He was old. He was elderly at sixty-six.
Dad is not that old yet. He was born in 1949, and modern medicine has served him well. He’s been on blood pressure medication since he was my age, he has a hawkish nurse for a wife, and he stopped smoking twenty-five years ago. He’s never had a heart attack, and even though he’s developed a substantial beer gut in the last decade, it’s a thick, sturdy one. He’s thick all over. He has the muscular arms and legs of a man who has been doing manual labor his entire life. I could spend three hours in the gym every day, and I’d never look like that. I’m not sure anyone should be more muscular and strong than his dad. Dads are different. They’re just bigger.
It’s getting near now, though. I have accepted that I am growing older, that I am a grown man, that I am an adult. I kind of like it: Age has a way of giving humans a gravitas that they haven’t earned. Like most people, I have essentially the same personality I had at twenty-two. But because a decade has passed since then, I’m given more authority now. I’m thought of as wiser. I’m not. The same shit will happen in another decade. I’ll still be the same guy. But “wiser.” And as much of an idiot as ever. I like it. I could get used to this adult business.
Parents grow older too, though, and I could do without that. My father needs to be forty-two forever, speckled gray beard, but vibrant, powerful, able to play on the CIPS company softball team, drink beers and laugh in the outfield, toss pop flies to me that soar infinitely heavenward, my eyes growing massive, in awe of just how high that went. He is indestructible at forty-two. He is going to live forever.
My father is still strong. He conceded to needing glasses a few years ago—he has those cool older guy glasses like Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon wears—but there is no cane, there is no limp, there is no walker, there is no hearing aid, there is no wheelchair. He is the same guy he has always been.
But he’s a little different. He’s a little more emotional: He’s not as taciturn as he used to be. He’ll tell my sister he loves her. He’ll talk more openly about his life, about what he’s feeling. This is a man I have seen cry exactly once: When his father-in-law, my mother’s dad, my grandfather, died, Dad, a pallbearer, lowered the coffin into the ground and came back to the car with me. He was quiet for a few seconds and then burst into tears. It lasted about three seconds. He then coughed, and it was over. “My underwear must have been too tight,” he said, and it was never discussed again. That was twenty-one years ago. I haven’t seen him cry since. My mom and sister say he has. They say he’ll get misty-eyed over something as simple as a sad episode of House.
He’d never get misty-eyed around me, though. He knows how hard that would be on both of us. I prefer to think Mom and Jill are just lying.
He gets lonely more. I think of my father as an old Western cowboy, content to work on his own, spanning the frontier, content in quiet and open space. But I know this isn’t true.
My dad plays a lot of video poker. In our house—one that he built with his brothers, drawing up the plans himself, buying the materials, doing the whole damn thing on his own—he has fashioned the basement as a home for his long-dormant id. There are bar posters and neon lights all over the walls. An enormous Chicago Bears mural hangs next to the bar he’s installed. A blonde in a bikini is straddling a Miller Lite bottle. My father drinks only Natural Light, no hard alcohol, but nevertheless the bar is stacked with whiskey and vodka bottles, for decorative purposes. They are filled not with liquor, but with colored water that has been sitting around for months. I found this out the hard way.
Dad has set up an entertainment center down there, with a huge TV, stereo surround sound, and access to the satellite dish. Every time the Cardinals play, he grabs a six-pack, sits at the bar, and screams at the television. Dad is never satisfied. Cardinals games at home are glorious routines of obscene verbal gymnastics for my father, and even if the game is boring, he never is. “Jeee-zus Ka-RYST! God-DAMN it, Wellemeyer! Get him out of there, LaRussa! Son—Of—A—BITCH!” My favorite part is when the Cardinals are trailing late and appear likely to lose. Dad, who has been setting off Richter scales in Iowa every time an ump’s call goes the wrong way and has developed a frightening vein that sticks out about six feet from his forehead, begins to rationalize. “You know, this isn’t really that big of a game. If they lose, they’ll be fine.” (I suspect, at the beer stand at Wrigley he’s at right now, in 2008, he’s looking at that 5–0 score and doing the same thing.) If the Cardinals mount a comeback, he begins jumping up and down. I’ve never seen my father jump in life. Only during Cardinals (and Illini basketball) games. And maybe if he sees a spider.
The real highlight of the basement, though, is his poker machine. It’s set up in the corner, out of the way, but you can’t miss it. It flashes, beeps, sets off sirens. It’s simple, just like any old poker machine. If you get two kings, or a flush, you have the option of trying to double your points in a game fittingly called “Double Up.” You have to guess if the next card is higher than seven or not. Every time you guess correctly, a digital picture of a naked woman pops up. Dad loves that part. “I have to shut those off when the neighbor kids come over.”
Dad is addicted to this game. One night over the holidays, when Mom was working all night at the hospital, where she works as an ER nurse, he called my cell. “Hey, I’m over at the VFW. Want to grab a beer?” The VFW is my father’s favorite watering hole; he is an Air Force man. I braved the cold and drove the six blocks, because nobody walks in Mattoon. Dad was sitting at the poker machines. In fact, he was sitting at the exact same poker machine he has at home. Except he was putting money in it this time. Twenty after twenty after twenty. This is not Vegas; this machine does not give money back. But off they went, twenty, twenty, twenty. He even asked me if he could borrow a twenty-spot when he ran out, so he didn’t have to run to the ATM. I watched my dad drop a hundred bucks into a machine that doesn’t even pay out.
Because he doesn’t like sitting in that basement, that basement he built for that very purpose, by himself. It unnerves him. “Too quiet down there. Spooky.”
A FRIEND OF MINE, an older friend, disappeared for about two weeks once. We were close enough friends that I noticed he was gone, but not close enough to know why, or to ask. This happens a lot more than it used to. Age turns us into far less attentive friends.
Realizing belatedly that I hadn’t talked to him for a while, I dropped my friend an email. He wrote me back within seconds.
Sad news, man. My Dad passed away in his sleep last week. As wrenching as it is, there’s also a sense of relief. No man as vital as my father who ran a company til he was 80 and got “stuck in” til he was 85, should have to live as he did the past few months, shuttling between hospitals and nursing homes. A few days before he died, in a rare moment of lucidity, he said, “we had a great run.”
Two days later, he and I were drinking heavily at a midtown bar. We small talked for about an hour, yakking baseball and publishing and large-bottomed women, before I put my best Dr. Phil face on. “So . . . how are you, sir?”
I’d rather not have asked this. The notion that someone’s father could just be gone, just like that, was more than I felt comfortable dealing with. To allow that my friend’s father could have died would be to allow that all fathers could die.
But I had to ask. I couldn’t be that selfish.
He pulled a long swig of Stella. He held it in his throat for a while, and it bubbled up and filled his cheeks before he yanked the rest down.
“You know, they say it’s the worst thing that can happen to you, that you never can be prepared for it no matter how much you think you are,” he said. “They’re completely fucking right.”
I’d never met his father, and actually I’d only heard him come up in conversation a few times. My friend proceeded to tell me an hour’s worth of stories, about growing up, about family troubles, about old flames, his own and his father’s, about giving the eulogy, about what kind of man he thought his father was when he was a kid, about how different Dad turned out to be when he was older. He talked about the whole process, working through it all like he was just thinking about it for the first time, though he surely wasn’t. Every moment was raw and gaping, a big, throbbing wound kicking with every word. He wasn’t calling attention to himself through this. He just looked like he was in the middle of a war and was giving a news report from the front to a concerned citizen back home. It was a war he was losing. He wasn’t particularly upset about losing it, or even surprised. He was just beaten down. He was just reporting facts.
I couldn’t handle it. I listened and listened, and when he appeared spent, I raised my own glass. “To your dad,” I said, because that’s what you’re supposed to say in that situation. “Cheers.”
He wanly cheered, and I steered us back to more about baseball and publishing and large-bottomed women. He left twenty minutes later, out into the world, unprotected, just plodding forward, the night a little longer. I didn’t talk to him for another few weeks. Too much. We become such worse friends as we get older. We really do.
WITH A 1–2 COUNT on Aramis Ramirez, Tim McCarver uncorks this gem about the baseball playoffs:
Josh, I once heard someone whimsically say that since the wild card started back in 1994 but didn’t get a chance to get off the ground until 1995, that a Major League season was like a scientist studying elephants, and then in the postseason, that same scientist studying parasites. Because what that scientist has to do is put things under the microscope in the postseason.
Hmmm. Go on, Tim.
If you think about it, a 162-game season, and now all of a sudden, the first round is a maximum of five. So the Cubs and the other teams in postseason play will, without a doubt, be under the microscope.
I see.
I’VE NEVER TOLD my father I love him. Well, that’s probably not true: I’m sure when I was, like, four years old, I said it all the time, though probably not nearly as often as I said it to my stuffed ALF. I mean since I was a sentient, walking-around-earth-with-awareness-of-my-surroundings human being, I’ve never said it.
The Leitches are not one of those families. I have friends who toss in I-love-you’s at the end of parental conversations the way most people say “Bye.” I think this is great and totally insane. We are solid Midwesterners, taciturn, fearful of the touchy-feely. If something is wrong, you rub some dirt on it and walk it off. “I-love-you’s” are not what we do here.
My father came from a family of eight children, with a father who worked his can off for ten hours a day and, by the time he came home, just wanted to smoke his Pall Malls in peace. With that many kids screaming, it was no wonder he retired to his study to read the paper and find some quiet. (Fortunately for him, he had a wife who, after dealing with those same eight kids all day, apparently was perfectly fine with this arrangement.) There were no heart-to-hearts in that family. There was no time, and there was no interest. Seven other kids were sitting around to keep you company and remind you that love divided eight ways is divided awfully thin.
It wasn’t until my grandfather grew older that my father had many meaningful conversations with him, and even then, they were mostly about Grandpa’s health. Dad was the de facto liaison between Grandpa and the rest of the family, because he had named his son, William Franklin Leitch, after him, and because Dad was married to a nurse who could take care of his father. But even then: No I-love-you’s. Mom once told me Grandpa wasn’t into that “queer shit.” You put your head down, you worked to put food on the table, you left everybody alone, and you expected to be left alone, and you retired to a quiet bed at the end of the night, and dammit, that’s what life was supposed to be about.
Dad married a more fiery woman, and ended up with two slightly loony kids who felt compelled to pretend they were “interesting” somehow. (When adulthood came, my sister moved to San Francisco. I moved to New York City. Mom jokes that we just went in opposite directions until we hit water.) My dad’s more open than my grandfather, a little more world-wise, a little more accepting of people who roam the planet in a different fashion than he might be used to. He’s a more social guy, funnier, cruder, less stoic, less closed-off. My dad is a likable guy in a way I suspect my grandfather was not. My dad even text-messages now. I could do without that. I know technology has revolutionized the way human beings communicate, but all told: I don’t think it’s supposed to be that easy to communicate with your father.
None of that love crap, though. It’s a holdover from his father, and I’m certain, when I do it with my son (and I will), it’ll be a holdover from my dad. It’s just something you should know. Those meals he paid for? That roof over your head? That college tuition? Those phone calls to check in? The big Christmas tree he insists on chopping down every year? The stocking with the name of the cat on it? The way, after you say good-bye to him and get on the plane, you always find a $100 bill he hid somewhere on you? The way those newspaper clippings and cheerleader photos surround his desk even though he never told you about them? That’s “I love you.” Every day is one big “I love you.” No need to say it. No fucking need.
You know when I’m supposed to tell my dad I love him? When he’s on his deathbed. When he knows he’s going, and I know he’s going, and I take his hand and I finally, finally tell him. That’s when he wants it to happen, and that’s when I want it to happen. If one of us ends up dying before that moment occurs? Well, one more pain, one more thing to rub some dirt on and walk off. That’s the way it works. Them’s the rules. I’m comfortable with that.
AFTER EVERY Cardinals game, I call my father. I’m in New York, he’s in Mattoon. I’m living a dramatically different life from him, not better, not worse, just different. I’m still years away from a child of my own. When he was my age, I was eight. We have a picture of Dad, and the whole family, from when he was thirty-four. Our insurance agent was friends with then Cardinals general manager Dal Maxvill, and the agent had secured us dugout passes before the game. We met Whitey Herzog and Ozzie Smith and Darrell Porter. But for whatever reason, we only secured photographs with two players: left-handed reliever Ken Dayley and fourth outfielder Tito Landrum.
The photos are still on our wall at home, right next to the bar with the liquor bottles filled with water. I’m carrying a score book and have a pencil behind my ear and my socks pulled up to my knees, and I’m wearing a T-shirt that reads “I Root for Two Teams: The Cardinals and Whoever Plays the Cubs.” My sister is wearing oversized sunglasses and a big toothless smile. My mom has a camera around her neck and large bangs. And there’s my dad, young, fit—fitter than I am at thirty-four—with a tank top, short black hair, and a mustache. He’s staring into the sun, wincing, waiting for whoever to just take the picture already. The kids are surely antsy, Jill probably needs to use the bathroom, and the Astroturf field holds the heat like a catcher’s mitt. Pete Rose, playing for the Montreal Expos, is shagging balls at first base, and he’s my favorite player who doesn’t play for the Cardinals. I want to watch him. Dad’s just trying to keep everybody together. The Cardinals do that. Only for a short while, though. Eventually, everyone will scatter.
Ken Dayley is in one picture, and Tito Landrum is in the other. Dayley is only twenty-five years old and has just started his Cardinals career. He’ll play in St. Louis for six more seasons, then head to Toronto for two before retiring at the age of 34. Landrum began his career with the Cardinals, was traded in August of the season before to the Baltimore Orioles, where he won a World Series, and then was traded back to the Cardinals that March. He’ll play two-and-a-half more seasons with the Cardinals, then rattle around Los Angeles and Baltimore before retiring. He’ll also be thirty-four when he hangs ’em up.
It is a tiny snapshot of one tiny moment, the Leitches as close to their family obsession as they will ever be, actually on the field at Busch Stadium. And Dad looks like he’s about ready to run out the door. He looks happy. We all look happy. But there are more adventures out there, and besides, it’s really hot and look there’s Pete Rose.
After every Cardinals game, Dad and I bitch and we moan and we cheer and we make plans to get together, every season, one weekend at the new Busch, just the two of us, drinking and watching baseball, our Cardinals, in quiet. It’s my favorite weekend of the year, and I suspect it’s his. I don’t know for sure. I wouldn’t dare ask.
It can only be that one weekend out of the year. Phone calls can only do so much, but I have business in New York, and he has his home in Mattoon. The Cardinals are our one constant and our one tether, but the rest of the world is chaos, and it is much bigger. Eventually there will be a family of my own, and we will start our own traditions, our own constants. I’ll still be in New York. He’ll still be in Mattoon. Time will keep going.
Then he will grow old, and then he will die. I can’t talk about it.
DAD RETURNS with the beer—as always, three, breaking all the Wrigley rules—right as Jim Edmonds hits into a double play to end the inning. Dad hands me a beer and then high-fives my empty hand. He is more optimistic about this 5–0 deficit than I am.
“All right!” he brays. “Come on now! Plenty of time! We need some base runners!”
Mike smiles at him, and so do I. For reasons I don’t understand, I pat his knee when he sits down. It was there. I don’t know why. He looks at me oddly. “What, did I spill some nacho cheese on there? It’s a long way down to the seats.” I tell him no. It wasn’t cheese.
You see, life’s like studying an elephant, and age, and time, are like parasites. What you have to do is put things under the microscope.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE