“The Best Thing That You Could Do Is Show Up”
Something had indeed happened in Vienna. My attitude toward the notion of family began to shift. Perhaps I was simply ready to see it, or experience it, differently.
As with so many important emotional events in my life, there was no “aha” moment. It was something that happened gradually, without my knowledge, over time, but with a seeping certainty. The change that had silently begun in Vienna had manifested one day in my consciousness, and announced its presence, while I was down in Costa Rica, where I had the space and silence to hear its not-so-confident whisper of arrival. Perhaps I was indeed finally ready to take the plunge and commit to family and all it might offer besides responsibility and strain.
Yet as I sat with the idea, there was still a voice in me, still a resistance, an ambivalence that flashed like a yellow light of warning just at the edge of my consciousness. But if it wasn’t the resistance to the idea of family, then what was it?
This newly uncovered reluctance—which had been cloaked beneath my obvious misgivings—felt darker, more pervasive in my character, more embedded in who I was, than my more obvious and garden-variety resistance that I had been aware of up to now, no matter how difficult it had been to overcome. It felt like something I’d need help with, something this traveler couldn’t do on his own. Which explains why I’m on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line, heading south.
When I press the black plastic button that says “push,” the silver metal door snaps open, slides across, and I see Seve standing two-thirds of the way down the aisle, holding on to the back of his seat as the train gathers speed and bounces from side to side down the track. He’s grinning, that Seve grin. We haven’t seen each other in nearly a year.
We high-five, hug, and settle down. I begin to criticize his choice of seat, the time of day of our travel, the hotel he’s booked us into. This kind of snapping, caustic judgment I am engaging in is not an unusual way for us to begin; it’s the sort of childish behavior I am free to indulge in only with Seve. Usually he ignores me.
“So who’d you invite?” He cuts right to the topic he knows I’m avoiding.
“No one yet.”
“Isn’t it about that time?”
“I guess.”
“Who are you going to invite?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, how many?”
“I don’t really want anyone to come.”
“Great,” he says.
“Not many anyway.” I am looking past him, out the window at the back of small and run-down houses on the outskirts of Philadelphia. We roll past empty lots, garbage, stray dogs. I was in Philadelphia talking to a bunch of students about travel writing—they weren’t interested in what I had to say—and Seve was in Boston, where he had been on business. We are on our way to his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.
“Well, from the sound of it, this wedding is going to be a lot of fun.”
D has identified a subgroup of my friends, of whom Seve is the closest—men who are usually physically larger than me, often older than I am, and have a protective nature. “Your bodyguards,” she calls them. I had never noticed the pattern until she pointed it out. Perhaps I’m trying to re-create my relationship with my older brother—who was all those things for me growing up, before we drifted off into our own lives. I do know that I relax when I’m with any one of my “bodyguards” in a way I don’t with my other friends.
Seve and I met not long after I moved to New York, when I lived in a top-floor apartment of a five-story walk-up on Bank Street in the West Village with an unobstructed view of the Empire State Building from my bedroom. I would often lie awake at night, waiting for the colored lights that lit the upper floors of the great building to snap off at midnight.
I came of age in the year I lived on Bank Street. I had my first real girlfriend in that apartment. I got my first acting job while living there. And I began a pattern of drinking during that year—just a few blocks away at the Corner Bistro on Jane Street—that would soon grow to haunt me. I can’t walk past my old building without looking up and recalling the sense of wonder I knew at the time, when I felt like my life was just beginning.
Seve’s girlfriend lived in the apartment across the hall from me, and he was a frequent visitor. We began to play tennis together and would sometimes go out to the racetrack at the Meadowlands or down to Atlantic City on a late-night whim. We drank a lot in the local bars. Occasionally we played golf. It was on the golf course that Seve got his nickname. A terrible golfer, he once hit what was for him a superb shot. Our playing partner, another good friend, called out, “Nice shot, Seve!” referring to the great Spanish golfer Seve Ballesteros, whose charismatic style was dominating the golf world at the time. The nickname stuck. Over the years I’ve introduced Seve to scores of people who have no idea that Seve isn’t his real name—no one has ever questioned why a fair-skinned, blue-eyed Irish-American would have a name like Seve.
And it was with Seve that I first went to Ireland, back in the mid-eighties, establishing a relationship with a place that would first influence and then change my life. And it was on that first trip to Ireland that I initiated the impulsive, serendipitous, and intuitive pattern of travel that would take me out into the wider world. We roamed around the west, drinking, getting lost, occasionally playing golf. We found a spot by the Burren that I still return to every few years.
At some point Seve moved away for business, first to Los Angeles and then to Denver. I went through my dark times with drink, while he went through some searching of his own—we saw little of each other and spoke rarely. Eventually we found our way more regularly back into each other’s lives, but when he couldn’t come to my first wedding because of a dental convention, I never missed an opportunity to remind him of his failure to show up. I have told him that his being my best man in my marriage to D is his one shot at redemption.
“I’m only getting married so you can set the past right, dude.”
“Will you stop being an asshole?”
Seve has booked us into a large, generic chain hotel downtown. I find such buildings soul-crushing in their lack of individuality, while he likes the transient invisibility of the herd that such places offer. He justifies this by saying they’re convenient.
“Convenient to what?” Our train crosses the bridge over the Susquehanna River. “It’s downtown in a nothing neighborhood, with a bunch of conventioneers.”
“Where do you want to go, Mr. Cheerful?”
“What about Fells Point? I heard that was a good neighborhood.” While in Baltimore, I am supposed to be writing about the hidden charms of an overlooked American gem, a city on the rise.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a nice area,” Seve says.
“What about this hotel?” I point to a picture in my guidebook.
“You have a guidebook, to Baltimore?”
“Obviously I can’t depend on you to show me what I need to see.”
He pulls out his cell phone to try to change our hotel reservation. “I really thought you’d be better at handling this whole wedding thing this time around.” Seve shakes his head as he dials.
“Go to hell.”
We end up in Fells Point. The inn we check into is just off the water. Built in the late eighteenth century, it has a nautical theme; framed drawings and photos of sailing vessels of days long gone line the walls. A ghost reputedly haunts the halls. The bumpy streets outside are paved with stones originally used as ballast in the holds of sailing cargo ships. The brick-covered Fells Point Square is out my window. A tugboat is tied up at the old Recreation Pier. One of the small white water taxis that ply the harbor is docked nearby. This used to be a rough-and-tumble neighborhood. You would never know it today. Like much of Baltimore, Fells Point has had a facelift. Now a camera-ready nook comprised of narrow and crooked lanes down by the waterfront, filled with art galleries and ice cream parlors, where local bars anchor corners, it is a poster child of urban renewal. We head just down the block, to Duda’s Tavern. There are brass lamps affixed to the bar and a life preserver ring mounted behind it, above the rows of whiskey bottles. The walls are covered with black and white photos of old Baltimore and sailing ships. Stevie Wonder’s album Songs in the Key of Life plays from the stereo.
Our waitress comes over and introduces herself. Suzy is in her fifties, blond, stout, wearing no makeup and a loose green T-shirt, pleated black shorts, and sensible shoes. She’s friendly, not casual. Her manner is direct and uncomplicated. She takes our drink order and walks away. I take my napkin from the plastic tablecloth that is emblazoned all over with the black and orange symbol of the local baseball team, the Orioles.
“How are the O’s doing, still suck?”
“Hey, hey, we’re rebuilding.”
“We should go to a game while we’re here.”
“Planning on it.”
Suzy returns and plunks down our drinks. “Ready?”
“How are the crab cakes?” Seve asks.
Suzy glares at him. “The best.”
“I’ll take ’em. I’m from Baltimore, so I’ll know,” he says, and raises a finger of warning.
“You won’t be disappointed.” She stares him down and then turns to me. “What about you, hon?” It’s the first time I’ve heard the famous Baltimore salutation.
“How’s the steak?”
Suzy shrugs, almost imperceptibly. “Good.”
“I’ll have the cheeseburger, medium.”
“Better,” she says, jabs her pen behind her ear, and pivots away.
Seve nods after Suzy. “That’s Baltimore.”
“Ordinary Pain” fades out and Stevie Wonder segues into “Isn’t She Lovely?”
“So how did this come up—that you’re finally getting married?”
I tell him the story of my son calling me on the phone to say he didn’t want to come back home to us and how it acted as the needle that punctured D’s and my balloon of habitual conflict, and that since our trip to Vienna, we have been getting closer.
“One moment can just change everything, can’t it?” He’s reacting to my story, but I know he’s also talking about his own relationship that recently ended. “I just never saw it coming. I walk in and she says, ‘It’s over.’ I was just totally blindsided.”
I was never a big fan of Seve’s recent ex. “Well, it’ll give you a chance to be alone for while.”
“No one really wants to be alone,” he retorts, and then looks across at me. “Well, almost no one.”
Our food arrives. The burger is huge and good.
“I’ve always wanted to ask this,” Seve says. “The moment you met, what happened? Was there a moment when you said, ‘I’m not in control here’?”
“Are you kidding me? I wasn’t in control for six months. I’m still not in control.”
Seve has always idealized my relationship with D—the notion that love can just slam into a person and there’s nothing to do but follow it. As if love were something that happened to you and not a thing that requires the work we both know it does. But that Seve seems to recognize some nugget in my relationship with D that he holds in special regard always triggers in me a gratitude that D and I found each other. And it helps keep me moving forward.
Later, when the check arrives, I give Suzy my credit card.
“You know, when I heard you on the phone, when you told me, there was a real excitement in your voice,” Seve says. “I’m not saying you accept this whole marriage thing yet, but you actually seem to be embracing it.”
I resist the impulse to push back at his assessment and simply nod instead. “Well, I mean it’s going to happen.”
“And how do you feel about it?”
I shrug. “Yeah.”
“Let’s try that again. How do you feel about it?”
Again, I shrug. “I mean, I love her. And I think it’s the right thing to do. And a good thing to do.”
“But?”
“There’s no ‘but,’ I just—” Suzy returns with my card and I sign the receipt with a pen she gives me advertising “Big Boys Bail Bonds—3 locations in Baltimore.”
“Oh, how were the crab cakes?” I ask Seve.
“Disappointing.”
“Too late, I already overtipped her.”
Just down the street from Duda’s we come upon a man in a plaid shirt and glasses, with tufts of unruly gray hair flying in the breeze. He’s standing beside a large blue telescope that’s pointed up into the night sky.
“Have a gander, fellas,” the man says.
“What are you looking at?” Seve asks.
“Right now, Saturn.”
I peek into the eight-inch Schmidt-cassegrain reflector telescope and there is what must be Saturn with what must be rings around it.
Herman Heyn has been standing on this spot for approximately 2,255 nights—“That’s within a night or two,” he says, correcting himself. “I first came down on November 13, 1987.”
I resist asking the obvious question of why. Herman is a Baltimore native from Waverly, a few miles north; he was a concrete inspector on the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, among other jobs, before he retired and started hanging out on street corners with his telescope. Beside him is his lady friend, Phyllis. They met under the stars, only recently, 118 nights ago, and have been hanging out together since. They’re tender with each other and have a humble, contented air about them, as if they understand something that Seve and I don’t. We drop a dollar in their bucket and cross the street.
Seve returns to the subject of his ex.
“But, Seve—is it ego, confidence, or heart that’s been hurt?”
“I was totally blindsided.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
He’s silent a minute. “What’s the difference?”
“It wasn’t your last best chance.”
“I don’t know that.”
“Hey, look at Herman and Phyllis,” I say. “You just need a good telescope.”
We wander past a building with a self-congratulatory plaque out front, proclaiming that it was this very building where television history was made with the show Homicide. “My mother used to do marionette shows here when she was a teenager,” Seve tells me. Just up the street, the comforting smell of baking bread grows strong. Through an open back door we see a lone man in white apron and hat, baking in the kitchen of Bonaparte Breads. Out on the waterfront, the red neon of the Domino Sugar sign glows across the harbor. Our amble is without purpose; we say very little.
Later, I call D.
“I need your list, we need to get these invites out.”
“Well, how many people are we going to have? You need to decide,” I say.
“My family is at least a hundred and fifty, before friends.”
“I thought you were going to have like eighty or ninety.”
“I don’t know how I can’t invite my cousins, but what I was thinking is that maybe . . .”
This goes on for a while, different permutations and possibilities. D agrees that maybe all the cousins are too many; maybe we can keep it to two rings of extended family. But then how could she face her relations down in Cork? They had invited her to a christening.
Eventually I give up. “I mean, these conversations are ridiculous, because you know you’re just going to go back to the original idea because it’s all you can do, which is why you came up with it first.”
“Which is?”
“Invite everybody. Throw it against the wall and hope it works out.”
“Aw, thanks, baby!”
“So, are we going to go to Mozambique?” I have a potential writing assignment there, and we’ve been talking about its doubling as a honeymoon.
“Well, what’s the deal with malaria?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “I mean, they got it. We should just take Malarone.”
“I’m not taking that poison, and neither should you.”
“Well, it’s better than the other option.”
“Which is?”
“Dying.”
“Let’s just go,” she says. “It’ll be an adventure.”
“Done. Amazing, something actually got decided.”
“Oh, shut up, it’s going be a great wedding. Are you inviting your uncle Hank?”
“I’m going to bed.”
“We’re actually in the same time zone, aren’t we? That’s so weird.”
I’m sitting on a bench across from our hotel, waiting for Seve. BALTIMORE: THE GREATEST CITY IN AMERICA is stenciled in large block letters on the back of the bench. There’s an empty Paul Masson brandy bottle carefully placed beside it. It’s 8:39 in the morning, and already the temperature is in the nineties. And it’s humid. I send D a text, “Did I miss you?” wondering if she has left the house for the day.
Seve comes out of the hotel and we walk across the square to Jimmy’s Diner. We take a seat at the Formica counter. “My family used to come here on Sundays when I was a kid,” he says, looking around the large, fluorescent-lit room. A waitress slides two plastic glasses filled with water across the counter.
“Two coffees?” she asks, and is already turning away to get the pot.
“I’ll take a tea,” I call after her.
The waitress stops, turns back, gives me a good long look. “Course you will, hon.”
Seve starts right in. “You meet any beautiful women on any of your trips lately?”
“Don’t.”
“So?”
To satisfy his need for a thrill I tell him about Holly, the woman I met down in the Osa who ran the remote lodge deep in the rain forest. I describe her blond hair, her blue dress, and her solid knowledge of her beauty.
“So how’d that end?”
“It didn’t even start.”
“There’s a rule, you know, the Mississippi rule. Anything beyond the Mississippi doesn’t count,” he says.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Yeah, right. I would just finish having sex and I’d get a text from my beloved fiancée, ‘Did you enjoy that?’ ”
“My fear would be bringing something home,” Seve says.
“I can’t talk about this anymore.” Then my phone beeps; it’s a text from D in response to the question that I sent while waiting for Seve, asking if I missed her. D’s text reads, “I don’t know, do you??”
We head downtown, toward the Inner Harbor. “When I was a kid, I couldn’t get anyone to go downtown with me,” Seve says. “Now, my nieces and nephews, no one wants to be anywhere else.” The port of Baltimore was created at Locust Point in 1709 to support the tobacco trade. It grew quickly as a granary for sugar-producing colonies in the West Indies and was hugely important in colonial times. There were riots in Baltimore during the Civil War and a great fire in 1904. There were riots again when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and by the 1970s Baltimore was entrenched in hard times. The harbor area was cluttered with derelict warehouses and seedy bars. But as we walk along the redbrick promenade, sweating in the morning sun, past swarming young families heading to the aquarium and the restaurants and shopping malls, all this is just a story of the past. So much of Baltimore’s life now takes place along the waterfront that a large number of visitors never see anything else.
We make our way a few blocks inland, over to the house where baseball legend Babe Ruth was born. It was my ex-wife who first introduced me to the “home as micro-museum.” We were in Stockholm, Sweden, when she dragged me to the apartment of August Strindberg. What I feared would be a dreary and dull hour proved to be a fascinating look inside the writer’s life. His desk and chair, his pens and notebooks and letters, his eyeglasses and walking stick, relics of his life, proved fascinating. I have sought out “home museums” ever since. The Bambino’s home is on Emory Street, a narrow lane of red brick row houses tucked just off the six lanes of throbbing traffic on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard—and a two-minute walk to Camden Yards baseball field.
Inside, an old man rises to greet us from behind a counter.
“Gentlemen,” he calls out. “Welcome.” We are the only visitors and our host is eager for company. I leave Seve to make small talk and head inside.
There are uniforms, and bats, even a wooden chair that was used in the box seats at Yankee Stadium, and there’s a video of the old Biography television show, hosted by a very young Mike Wallace, telling all about “the Babe’s” improbable life. Yet there’s something lacking; the museum is nearly all memorabilia. There are very few personal things that hint at the lonely boy, discarded by his parents, who grew up to be the hero of a nation. I’m looking for something. Perhaps that’s why I turn to Seve—“Let’s go out to your house,” I tell him.
“Huh?”
“Let’s go out to where you grew up. How long since you’ve been there?”
“To the house I grew up in? Uh, I don’t know. Thirty years?”
“How far away is it?”
Seve shrugs. “Fifteen minutes.”
“You grew up fifteen minutes from here and you haven’t been back in thirty years?”
“When we moved, we moved.”
“How far did you move?”
“Another twenty minutes out.”
“Let’s go.”
Seve wavers.
“Why is this like pulling teeth? Come on. It’s too damn hot to walk around. Let’s get a cab and go.”
The air conditioner of the taxi we get into is broken, and the windows in the back won’t go down. The driver is upset when, after a block, we switch cabs. The next car we get into is cool, and the driver is an easygoing young guy from Nigeria called Paul. Juju music plays softly on his radio. We head west.
Just fifteen minutes from downtown are a series of small, freestanding, identical-looking brick houses with aluminum awnings and small, fenced-in lawns. Like most American cities, today’s Baltimore is an outgrowth of the suburbanization of the country in the 1950s. Seve’s parents were part of that great migration away from the inner cities. Seve’s mother has since moved even farther out.
“That’s St. Bonaventure’s,” he announces as we pass a yellow brick church. “I was an altar boy there. Turn left.”
Paul cuts through the parking lot. “Where to now?” he asks.
We turn right and farther on a ball field opens out beside us. “I hit my first home run right there.” Seve points. “I remember it like it was yesterday.” We drive on. Seve leans forward in his seat, squinting through the windshield, looking for his youth. “Make your next left, my friend,” Seve says softly.
Paul slows the car and eases onto Knollwood Drive. These are no longer single-family homes but a series of two-story apartment buildings that line the left side of the road across from a park.
“A little bit farther,” Seve directs him. We glide on. “That’s it.” And we stop out in front of number 4105. It’s much more humble than I had anticipated.
We ask Paul to wait.
“You take your time,” he says slowly, and lowers his window to rest his elbow and watch our progress.
There’s a short, steep incline that leads up to the apartment building’s metal storm door. Seve stops halfway up the hill. “I knocked my brother out right here.” He pulls on the door; it’s open. Up a flight, Seve stands in front of a red door with a number 1 on it. He has a quizzical expression on his face. He wants to go in, or to knock, something. Then he shrugs.
“I was always ashamed—all my friends lived in houses, and we lived in an apartment.” I can feel his shame again now.
I want to turn away. “Stand by the door, let me take your picture,” I say instead.
“Yeah,” he says, and a silly grin comes onto his face. He looks befuddled and awkward, in a way I’ve never seen him look. He looks decidedly vulnerable and human.
“Nice,” I say when I snap the shot.
Although Seve lives out in Denver now, his work has asked him to consider a move back east. He decides that maybe he ought to look at a few apartments while we’re here. We head back to town and Paul insists on shaking our hands when he drops us in front of a sterile-looking glass tower. We have no appointment. We simply walk in, but an on-site agent is only too eager to help. The building and the apartments in it are so new, geometric, and without history, so strange in comparison to the worn, memory-filled halls we’ve just been to, that we are both left baffled and speechless. After the third apartment Seve says, “I don’t want to have a place, I just want to leave Denver and keep moving around.”
What I hear behind Seve’s words is a sense of transience to which I know he is attracted—to a large degree it is the reason he doesn’t have a family. It’s a sentiment I understand and one that could easily be mistaken for my own wanderlust. But my travels are driven by a force that is quite the opposite. Impermanence is not what I crave and never has been. That I’ve traveled in order to feel at home in myself is a paradox that has helped me to create that feeling while in my familiar surroundings—I desire a feeling of “at-home-ness” everywhere, quite the opposite to Seve’s desire for transience.
“Let’s get out on the water,” Seve suggests, and we quit the apartment hunting and hop on the first water taxi that comes to the Fells Point Landing. It’s headed to Fort McHenry, the old military base made famous during a battle in the War of 1812, after which, upon seeing the American flag still flying, Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” and set it to the tune of an old English drinking song. The entire fort and interactive displays are dedicated to this song, including a brief movie intended to stir feelings of patriotism and moisten the eyes. At the climax of the film, the screen drops away and through the glass wall behind it, we gaze out upon the actual banner yet waving, o’er the land of the free.
When the lights come up, the crowd seems more confused by the jingoistic assault than moved by patriotism. I find Seve leaning against a wall, shaking his head.
“When did patriotism become so aggressive?” he asks.
“September eleventh,” I mutter in return.
We wait down by the dock for the boat back, and then the wind blows through us on the bow of the water taxi. “Where to, tour guide?” I ask my friend.
“Let’s go up to Mount Vernon.”
Once home to the blue-blooded gentry and captains of industry during Baltimore’s rise, Mount Vernon is filled with formidable nineteenth-century marble homes, radiating out from the nation’s first monument to its first president. It was the hub of town before the Inner Harbor was restored and sucked life back toward the water. On the corner of Biddle and Morton, Seve stops in his tracks.
“I bought my first car right here, on this corner,” he says. “I was dating a girl and her father was putting a For Sale sign in the window when I walked up—a Chevy Biscayne.”
We walk on. Perhaps it is because of the oppressive late-afternoon heat, but the streets here are deserted and lifeless. I see a formidable beaux-arts building.
“What’s that?”
“Good idea,” Seve says, and we’re through the revolving doors of the old Belvedere Hotel. We slide into the Owl Bar at the back of the lobby. There’s not much life in here either, but at least it’s cool. With its stained glass windows, red tile floors, and a heavy wooden bar backed by a beveled mirror, the Owl has the comfortable feel of the speakeasy it was in the 1920s. “This was always old Baltimore to me,” Seve says, looking around the deserted room.
Perched high above the bar is a replica of an owl. Legend has it that the owl’s eyes would wink when the booze was flowing and the Feds were scarce, and if the bird’s gaze was fixed, it meant there was trouble afoot and mum was the word. Etched into several of the stained-glass windows flanking the owl is a children’s nursery rhyme.
A wise old owl sat on an oak.
The more he saw, the less he spoke.
The less he spoke the more he heard,
Why aren’t we like that wise old bird?
I’ve often thought that Seve applied the old owl’s wisdom to my relationship with D. He was there nearly from the start. After D’s and my first, brief encounter in a hotel lobby in Galway, and after our subsequent exchange of e-mails, Seve was with us a few months later to witness our casual one-hour coffee swell into four days of intensity.
“That’s lightning,” was all Seve said to me when we were alone in my room, just down the hall from the one D had taken. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
I had no idea what I was doing or what I was getting myself into. “Yeah,” I bluffed, “don’t worry about it.”
Over the next four dizzying days the three of us traveled the west of Ireland, with Seve acting as chaperone. He and D got on immediately, with the bickering banter of siblings. What might have been an awkward triangle quickly evolved into a playful trio.
“You deal in facts,” D said to Seve, summing up their relationship, “I deal in feelings.”
When she finally got on a train and returned to Dublin, I walked for hours alone along the misty and windswept beach in Lahinch and wondered what implications those few days had for the rest of my life. Seve said very little. He listened as I explained with certainty how my path had just taken a turn I had to follow. He gently wondered what this would mean for my life back in New York. Another friend would have strongly advised me to walk away—take my infatuation, head home, and let it pass. It would have been the prudent counsel. And yet he didn’t; having seen what he saw and experienced what he did between D and me, Seve simply stood by my side and said, “Be careful, my friend.”
And that there was someone who understood what it was I was moving toward, without my having to say anything, was invaluable to me as my life began to unravel and then slowly put itself back together.
It’s 104 degrees when Boog Powell, a slugger I remember from very early in my youth, throws out the ceremonial first pitch at 7:01 in the evening. The humidity is resting steady at 94 percent. Because the Orioles are struggling so badly—as they perennially do—tickets were easy to come by. We just stand out by the front gate of Camden Yards, and people come running at us to unload their extra seats. The baseball stadium was built in the retro ballpark style that launched a trend and helped spearhead the revitalization of Baltimore when it opened in 1992; I’ve always wanted to see it.
A skinny guy with bright red hair promises us his tickets are right behind the dugout and offers them at less than face value. Buying tickets on the street outside a venue was something I used to do often. Reading a scalper’s pitch and potential for scam is an art form, but this is an Orioles game in Baltimore, not a Bruce Springsteen concert in New Jersey, and the urgency and potential for being ripped off are minimal. Still, I walk away and let Seve handle it.
“Deal, Seve. They just better be good.”
And they are. In fact, they’re the best seats in the house, front row, right behind the Orioles dugout—as promised.
“Who would have thought, someone told the truth.”
“Baltimore, baby,” Seve says.
A vendor comes down the aisle, shouting, “Ice-cold water. Tasty beer!” His face is pouring sweat. The first few innings roll past with little action. Neither the Orioles nor the Angels get a man on base. The normal rhythm of the game—practice tosses, warm-up swings, and covert signals—asserts itself. From the sparse crowd around us come halfhearted encouragements. “We’ll get ’em next time, J.J.,” and “Get wood on it, baby,” and after a called third strike comes a baseball favorite, “That’s bullshit!” echoing out onto the field. I haven’t been to a baseball game in several years, and although I’ve never before set foot in Camden Yards, I feel as comfortable here as in my living room.
When my brothers and I were kids, my father occasionally took us to Yankee Stadium, and it is my fondest memory of childhood—even then, it was how I thought a childhood ought to be. I can remember, as a very small boy, sitting behind a large pillar and leaning over to see when my father said, “Look now. That’s Mickey Mantle, he’s one of the best ever, this will be the last time you’ll ever see him.” And I watched as the small figure far away struck out and hobbled back to the dugout. Another time we went to Fenway Park in Boston; we sat far out in right field and I couldn’t see anything over the other patrons except second base. When a fast runner got on with a single, and I complained I couldn’t see, my father said, “Just keep your eye on second, he’s gonna steal.” And when he did, and my eye was glued to second, I felt like my dad knew everything there was to know.
Yet this was the same man who, several years after the Boston game, took my Little League buddy and me to Yankee Stadium. I hadn’t seen much of my friend since we moved several towns away, and when my mother suggested I invite him to go to the game, I was excited. My father had recently bought a used, battered Jaguar sports car. It only had room for two passengers, except for a tiny jump seat in the back, and my father insisted on taking it to the Bronx. I let my friend sit up front and I squeezed into the back. As we set out, our spirits were high.
Driving through Harlem in upper Manhattan, the Jaguar overheated and broke down. This was not unusual; the car had constant problems. But this was in the 1970s, when Harlem was a very different place than it is today. Quickly, my father grew tense. A man approached us and, trying to help, suggested, “I wouldn’t leave that car here.” We looked for a nearby gas station. My friend proposed calling his father, who might be able to help. It was then that my father snapped at him, suddenly and ferociously. My friend was shocked; I could see him fight back tears. I was mortified, and my father busied himself with getting us out of there. We never made it to the game, and I never saw my friend again, so deep was my teenage shame.
In the bottom of the fifth, the Orioles break the no-hitter and the meager crowd has something to cheer about. That baseball unfolds in its own time, at its own pace, and isn’t subject to any clock is something that makes the game increasingly attractive in our multitasking world. Meandering conversation is as much a part of the experience as the game itself. Our exchange rambles from batting helmets and rosin bags, to the name of that hotel in Galway we stayed at years ago, to Patti Smith and John McEnroe, to the two marines who were killed in Afghanistan the day before. A foul ball is hit high in the air and drifts our way. We rise. As it begins to fall it is coming straight for us. I can see the laces of the spinning ball. When it lands two rows behind us I’m relieved—I didn’t want my hands burning from a catch I knew I would try to make. The Angels score two runs in the seventh inning, and the O’s come back with one in the eighth. With a bit of cunning, a base runner takes an extra base in what is one of the more intangible aspects of the game. “There’s just something about watching someone run the bases well,” I comment to Seve.
“You have a keen instinct for someone who does something well,” my friend says.
I turn to him. One of the nicer things about Seve is his ability to compliment or criticize with insight and without ownership, as if he’s talking about a simple fact that is worth noting. And in doing so, he is able to elevate the discussion to a higher significance than that of the mere observation being made.
“I do?”
“You do,” he says, “and you know you can trust it.”
“Which? Trust my instinct or trust what the person is doing well?”
“Both.” Seve is quiet a minute and then he goes on. “I never heard you say you wanted to be a world traveler.” It’s an odd segue, and I’m not sure what to say. “It’s not that you consciously started traveling to learn to trust people, but I think you wanted to trust people and inherently you don’t. And in your travel you’ve learned to trust yourself, and if you can trust yourself, then you can trust others. You took your son to the Sahara because you could trust yourself in that situation. And you need to know that. And if you could trust people there, with your son’s life . . .” The Angels come up and quickly load the bases, and Seve continues. “That’s what’s so good about you getting married to who you’re getting married to. She recognizes and embraces humanity; you’re just the opposite. To learn the things you had to learn, you had to go out and deal with people, and I know that’s not something you easily do. It’s something that’s difficult for you, but travel helps you in that.”
I nod, taking this on board. The Angels’ Vernon Wells steps to the plate and hits the first pitch on offer deep into the bleachers for a grand slam. The bulk of the already dwindling crowd heads for the exits.
We linger to the bitter end and are among the few remaining fans when the final out is recorded. By the time we are on the street, the area around the ballpark is nearly deserted.
A few blocks away we find the crowd, down at the Inner Harbor. The long promenade by the water is jammed with families, couples, and swarming teens. A band is performing on a temporary stage. The patios of the waterfront restaurants overflow. The USS Constellation, the last surviving Civil War–era vessel, built in 1854, sits at anchor, its tall rigging motionless in the heavy air.
“Can we get out of here?” I ask.
A water taxi is just getting ready to push off.
“Where you headed?” Seve calls to the older man untying the lead.
“Canton,” the man shouts back.
Seve turns to me. “Let’s go see if my sister is around.”
“Do we have to?”
“Do you try to be a complete jerk?”
We climb on board.
Drifting away from the pulsing mass, we pass the aquarium and a former power plant, now a Hard Rock Café, and chug past pier five and the Seven Foot Knoll lighthouse. On the wrought-iron balcony that encircles the red building, a solitary couple is dancing in the humid night. I am reminded of a recent conversation with D—while we were preparing dinner.
“I just don’t know whether the ceili should be Saturday night before the ceremony or Sunday, after,” she said.
“The what?”
“The ceili?”
“We’re having Irish dancing?”
“You didn’t think I was going to get married without dancing, did you?”
I took an onion out of the bowl on the counter and began to slice it.
“Would you get out the feta and pass me the olive oil?”
I reached deep into the refrigerator and handed D the cheese and slid over the bottle of oil. “And where is this ceili going to be?”
“That’s what we need to decide. We could do it at the hotel next door to my folks’ house, or in their backyard, but if they’re going to have the dinner on Saturday night, it would be a lot for them to have a ceili there too, especially on the same night.”
I stopped cutting. “Your parents are having a dinner? For who?”
“For everyone coming in. Are you going to chop that onion, luv?”
“Everyone? How is everyone going to fit into your parents’ living room?”
“Well, not everyone, just the relations coming up to Dublin. You can’t expect my parents not to do something for their brothers and sisters. And the Americans who are coming, we need to do something with them for the weekend. We can’t just give them a ‘welcome drink’ cocktail party at the Shelbourne on Friday and say, ‘See you Sunday morning.’ They’ll have come a long way and we’ll need to—”
“Whoa—whoa, we’re giving them a ‘welcome drink’ party at the Shelbourne Hotel? When did we decide all this?”
“Nothing is decided for sure, that’s what we need to do. I’ve just been talking to Mum and Dad. Now, Dad is insisting he make dinner for the family, so that’s done. If you don’t want to do that, then you call him. But he’s planning the menu and he’s going to do it.”
“But if he’s going to have the dinner on Saturday, then the ceili has to be on Sunday.”
“Perfect. That’s what I thought too.”
“Wait a minute. What happened to the picnic idea?”
“We’re having that, too.”
“But—”
“I need that onion, luv. Are you going to chop it?”
“Here, you do it, before I start crying.”
The water taxi drops us at the Canton Waterfront Park. Seve’s sister lives just up the hill from the water. Once a run-down neighborhood of shuttered canneries, this part of the city has become one of Baltimore’s trendier places to live, with a buzzing bar and restaurant scene. Seve’s sister is out and we walk two blocks farther on to O’Donnell Square, a narrow strip of green anchored by the Messiah Lutheran Church on one end and a firehouse on the other.
“I used to come here to play basketball in the CYO league,” Seve says. We circle the square, looking in a few of the crammed bars playing loud music to see if his sister is around. We walk past a storefront shop that looks more like the living room of a college student. The folding glass-paneled front door is wide open to the heavy night and Middle Eastern techno music blares. Couches line the exposed brick walls and low tables are scattered around under dim lighting. A Marilyn Monroe poster hangs beside one of Manchester United soccer club. It’s deserted, except for a young guy sitting behind a counter in the back, deep in the shadows.
“What’s this joint, Seve?”
“Never seen it before.”
The young guy hops up when we cross the threshold. “Welcome,” he says with a thick accent. He has dark olive skin and jet-black hair.
“Hi, what is this?” I ask—it comes out in a worse way than I intended.
“This is my place, Anubis Hookah Lounge. Have you ever smoked the hookah?”
“No,” and “Sure,” Seve and I say simultaneously. Seve turns to me. “When did you smoke a hookah?”
“In Qatar, dude.”
“Please,” our young host says, spreading his arms, “sit. You are most welcome here.” And we take the front couch, looking out past the hood of a Dodge Ram pickup truck and up into the trees lining the square and the suddenly low-hanging night sky.
Our host is an Egyptian named Karim Kamel who came to America several years ago and just recently opened his hookah lounge. Karim lists a dozen flavored tobaccos for us to choose from. “You come at a good time. Once the bars close, we are slammed.” I smile at his American vernacular, spoken in a thick Egyptian accent. “Why do you laugh?” Karim asks.
“I’m not laughing,” I protest. “You’re great. I’ll take the mango.”
“Apple,” Seve says. And Karim hurries away. The wind begins to pick up and blows strongly through the trees outside. Then we hear distant thunder. “A place like this would absolutely not have been possible here twenty years ago,” he says.
Once we are puffing away at our hookahs, Seve leans back and closes his eyes. We smoke in contented silence for a while. The whipping wind is blowing in on us now, moving the hot air, and the thunder is closer. And then, as if we were in midconversation, Seve speaks again. “I assume her parents are very excited.” Seve spent Christmas in Dublin with us a few years ago and D’s parents, particularly her mother, fell for his charm.
“Oh, yeah.”
“So I know you’re not exactly sure who’s coming yet,” he says gingerly, “but how’s the wedding shaping up? All set?”
“What do you mean?”
“Yeah, just that, what I said.”
“Oh, well. I’m sure it’ll be an amazing day.”
“Nothing is decided. There are a bunch of ideas, including a ceili, but nothing is decided.”
“Irish dancing? Great.”
“Well, if it happens, it’ll all be done the day before.”
Perhaps it’s the result of running their own hotel for so long, but D’s family operates in crisis-management mode as normal procedure. It is something they have passed down to their daughter. D’s ability to create last-minute magic out of chaos is as impressive as it is maddening.
“I’m just glad it’s in Ireland. I’m just going to show up,” I say.
Seve moves from treading lightly to his usual more matter-of-fact tone. “Dude, you never just show up.” He means I always have a lot to say about what happens in my own life and how it happens. Then Seve looks at me for a minute, puffing away on his hookah pipe.
“What?” I ask.
“Let me tell you something, my friend.” He blows a big puff of apple-scented smoke and continues very slowly. “The best thing that you could do is show up.”
And Seve has put his finger on it.
Once again, he has tapped into something bigger than the mere topic at hand. My hesitation. My remaining ambivalence. It all centers around this. Can I show up? Not literally—of course I’ll be there, on the appropriate date. That is not the issue and never has been. But can I bring all of myself to this marriage? Am I strong enough to be the kind of person that I know I want to be, the kind of man I’ve felt myself to be at certain moments—when self-interest is left behind for investment in others, when responsibility usurps blame, and humor diffuses tension, instead of fearful ego asserting itself for dominance? Am I willing to live in a generous way? Can I be patient with my kids, encouraging them to go out into the world but ensuring their backs are covered, so they have the security and confidence to reach for big things, knowing that someone is there to catch them if they fall short? Am I willing to be interested?
Isn’t that what marriage is, a commitment to become the best version of ourselves, a pledge to continually grow toward that ideal, on a daily basis? And then recommitting again when I fail, owning that failure, yet not living in it, but moving through it and stepping farther into partnership. That’s what I’ve been afraid of all these years, that level of investment. Suddenly there is a loud crack of thunder, and then it’s pouring. The rain is bouncing off the hood of the pickup truck outside and we watch people running back and forth on the sidewalk, scurrying for cover. The pressure that has been building all day is suddenly and mercifully released. The temperature drops noticeably and the air has a welcome coolness as the clouds free their burden. Just show up. Be the best version of myself every day for the rest of my life. That’s what I’m committing to. Easy.