Baseball season is back. It's this time of year I find myself wishing I could enjoy the game as much as I used to. They've made it unwatchable now; the television broadcasts have so many graphics and so much whooshy crap intruding on it, too many of the current announcers don't understand subtlety, and all the emphasis on home-run histrionics (and how they got there) really turned me off.
(On the other hand, the other week hubby and I were at a pizza joint, and the television was tuned to the Cardinals-Reds game. The sound was turned off. I spent several minutes turned backwards in my side of the booth watching. The word "longing" doesn't capture it. I felt like a sad-eyed, whimpering puppy. Baseball does that to me. It makes me yearn for something that's gone.)
Something else baseball season does is make me remember someone who's long gone now. In my hometown, there were a couple of ladies who lived up the street from us, a widow and her daughter. We used to do their yard work and other odd jobs for them. They were both up in years; the widow had to have been in her eighties, and the daughter had to have been around 60. The daughter was housebound because of chronic illness; the only time she really got out was for another in a string of endless doctor visits.
When I stopped doing yard work for people and started getting into other, steadier, better-paying lines of work, I fell out of touch with them. A few years later, the widow passed away. I felt awful for falling out of touch, so I wrote the daughter a little note and mailed it to her. It generated a very kind response, and from there we got back in touch. We'd write notes to one another, or sometimes she would call me on the phone and we'd talk for an hour or so. On occasion, I'd go visit.
We had a few common interests, but what brought us together was baseball. She was a huge Yankees fan. I mean, she bled Yankee blue. She had autographed baseballs, game videotapes, books about the Yankees, even an old poster of Ron Guidry hanging up in her room. Her favorite Yankees of all time were DiMaggio and Allie Reynolds. Oh, she loved ol' Super Chief, and treasured the baseball she had that was signed by him. (She was also very interested when I told her about the connection one of my professors had with Allie Reynolds, that he went to school with Reynolds' children.)
While my loyalties differed, that didn't stop me from feeding her habit. We traded videotapes (she lent me her recordings of old All-Star games, and I'd tape games off satellite for her -- and when I was able to dub her copies of my videotapes of the 1996 World Series, she was beside herself). We'd swap newspaper clippings. Sometimes we'd swap other items; for instance, she gave me a note written to her by Bob Watson, the player turned Yankees general manager. Another time, she was able to call in a favor with a friend who knew someone with the San Francisco Giants, and that's how I got a baseball signed by Dusty Baker.
That's only part of it, though. For me, if I have a friend with a shared interest, it becomes a lot of fun for me to find a Christmas present or a birthday gift that's special, or that someone couldn't otherwise get for themselves. I knew my friend thought Derek Jeter was one of the greatest things to happen to the Yankees in forever, so one Christmas I ordered her a baseball signed by him. I wish you could have seen her reaction. I kept getting her gift subscriptions to Baseball Weekly, and the publication would send me a classic ballparks calendar each year (because that's where my interest in baseball really started, with the old ballparks). One year's calendar featured a painting depicting the final out of the 1996 World Series at Yankee Stadium, so I took that, cut it out and had it mounted and framed, and gave that to her. Oh, she loved it. She would find me things and give them to me, and though I very much appreciated them, the best present I got each year was watching her. It's sort of like part of the fun of being a parent at Christmas (or so they tell me, anyway) is watching the kids' faces light up.
There was one promise I kept making to her: when she got well, I'd take her to see the Yankees play. I meant it, too. She often told the story that she was to have gone to New York to see the Yankees play in the 1952 World Series, but got double-crossed at the last moment by her boss. I may not have been able to take her to a World Series game, but I was definitely going to take her to Atlanta to see the Yankees when they came to town for interleague play or an exhibition game. I meant it, too.
But, it wasn't to be. She never got any better. I moved away, but we remained in touch. The last time I saw her was at Christmas ten years ago, when I came back home for the holidays. The last present I gave her was a copy of Richard Ben Cramer's then-new book about Joe DiMaggio, which had just come out; I went to the bookstore and bought it hours before my flight home. We spent a couple hours visiting and catching up on things. I wasn't following baseball as closely, but I was still conversant in it enough to keep up.
One night about three months later, the phone rang. It was a weeknight. It was my mother. We normally talked on the weekends, so if it was a call during the week, it was something bad. Sure enough, it was. My friend had passed away. I can't say it was much of a surprise, but it made me sad nonetheless. (I never got a chance to make good on that promise, but somehow I think in the great beyond, she's getting a better view of the Yankees' exploits than I could ever give her.)
To this day, when I think about baseball, I think of her a little, and I miss her.
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