Having a Catch
When you were a kid, did your Dad take you out in the backyard with your baseball glove to play catch or to have a catch? Here’s the thing, I didn’t have either because my father was busy living his best life without us. He and my mother met in Venezuela when she was a well-paid big shot with the Rockefeller Foundation, doing development work in the backwater parts of Venezuela while he was a young, handsome Italian immigrant who pretended to have an architecture or engineering degree from the University of Padua (whatever suited the need of the moment). He carried forward with that fiction for years and even had my mother get a forgery of a Padua diploma to put on his wall. If anyone had bothered to check, they would have realized that due to Allied bomb raids in early 1944, the University suspended operations and did not graduate a class that year, the very year he had asked her to date his fake diploma. He wasn’t much for petty details, but he always looked the part he was playing, including soliciting project business from Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez, a pleasant military officer who participated in a coup d’etat and shortly thereafter took over as the military dictator of the country. My father was too busy having a catch with Perez Jimenez.
After moving to the States and then back to Costa Rica without him (he found California much too much to his liking along with the blonde beach bunnies therein), we eventually landed in Wisconsin, which is where I think of myself spending my more memorable and formative grade school years. The suburban neighborhood sports were about 80% baseball and 20% football (seasonally adjust,of course). We had an actually sandlot, which was a vacant lot just across a gully from the development where we all lived in crackerbox 1950’s vintage houses (we rented our two-bedroom crackerbox for $100/month and I see on Zillow it is now valued at $350k). That vacant lot is now a barber shop, but at the time sat conveniently next to a gas station. That was convenient for purposes of getting a Coke or Nehi after the game and drinking it onsite so as not to lose the 5 cent bottle deposit. The lot had a big For Sale sign facing the road, which made for a nice home plate backstop. The bases were old pieces of discarded cardboard and the outfield was mostly weeds. Our biggest constraint was whether our or someone else’s dog was loose and spent their time chasing our baseball and running off with it.
Eventually, I joined a little league team at the age of eight. It was called The Dragons and about all I can remember about it was the green and white jersey I got (a very big deal in the days of living with a graduate school mother who didn’t have money for frivolities like boy’s jerseys). We had real pitching and slide into bases and everything. It was very unlike the T-ball, no-sliding ways of eight-year-old suburban baseball these days. I don’t remember the games other than to remember that I was sort of the home run hitter on the team, which meant that I struck out a lot, but also hit it out of the park more often than the other boys. What I remember most fondly was the practices, where we would all go out into the outfield and the coach would hit us fly balls. We would stand out there hoping to get one hit near us and learn how to use eye-hand coordination to our advantage to get under the ball, not get scared by the fear of being hit in the face as it came down, and then triumph in actually closing our eyes and finding that the ball ended up popping into our mitts. The ball field was perhaps the one place where I would actually have a catch with someone, something the other boys would regularly do with their fathers in their backyards.
During the same summer of 1962 when I was on The Dragons team, I was hauled off the team and driven across the country to spend a week with my father in California. He taught me that having a bath once a week (on Saturday night) in good Midwestern style was not the California way. I had to take a shower once a day (I could choose morning or night) and despite my protestations that it was unnecessary, I learned all about good hygiene. My father was a busy man who went off to work every day, presumably pretending still that he had a college degree, since he wore a MadMen suit and tie and always a crispy white shirt. He never seemed to be around to have a catch in the afternoons, so I would take my glove and ball into the back yard and toss it the ball in the air and pretend I was being hit fly balls. I guess that means that I learned how to have a catch all by myself. He did take me to Dodgers game where I got to watch Sandy Koufax pitch against the pennant-winning San Francisco Giants. What I remember about the game was that my father was in his white shirt and tie the entire time and I learned that when you get hot in a white shirt you roll up the sleeves only three times to get them just right on your upper forearms so as not to look like a regular working stiff with them rolled up onto your biceps. My father wasn’t much for having a catch with me, but he was good at showing me things to maintain la bella figura, as they say in Italian.
Baseball sort of faded into the woodwork for me at that point as I entered Middle School and spent some time unsuccessfully learning how to stay on a skateboard. Then we moved to Maine and my focus turned entirely to Vacationland sports like skiing in the winter and golf and canoeing in the summer. I’m sure I must have played a little bit of baseball, and I know I went on an Eigth Grade class trip to Boston to see the Red Sox play in Fenway Park, but I don’t remember having a catch very often since once again, I had no father around and never seemed to have a baseball-playing pal that lived nearby.
By the time I moved to Rome at age fourteen, baseball was a distant memory. My world suddenly started to revolve around scooters and motorcycles and organized sports were nowhere to be found. I stayed with skiing and golf, but they took a back seat to motorcycles to be sure. When it was time to go off to college, I chose to go to my mother’s Alma Mater at Cornell, not so much by selection, but by virtue of it being the only one of the three schools I applied to that admitted me. Having my home across the Atlantic Ocean during college meant that I spent most of my vacations and all of my summers in Ithaca, which is certainly not a bd place to hang out in the summer. Ithaca is an idyllic American town where baseball is still a big part of the summer culture. One summer I decided to heal my wounds of youth a bit and agreed to coach a local little league team of sever-year-olds. They were one year past T-ball, but hit against coaches slow underhand pitches. We would practice twice a week and have one game each week.
What I remember most was two kids, one called Cutter and one called Danny. Cutter was a natural and I’m sure grew into a good athlete, but his father was a big shot in the law school and never found the time to ever come to one practice or one game. The one time I met him he was wearing white tennis togs, looking just so, dropping Cutter off and telling him to have a good game. Danny was a distracted kid who would forget things like what he was chasing when he went after a ball or to turn left when he ran to second base. He tried, but his mind was often elsewhere. His father came to every practice and every game and was always having a catch with Danny. What I told myself at the time was that if I ever had a son, I would make sure to have a catch with him whenever he wanted.