Opening Day

I am immersed in the noises of my son Max’s baseball practice. Even though we are in a high school gym due to the sub-freezing temperatures of March, it is the sound of Spring, the baseballs slapping into mitts, the tiny racing feet against the basketball floor boards, the chatter and laughter as ground balls miss their gloves and roll between their legs. I hope my son will embrace and love these noises the way that I did and the way his dad did.

There is something about watching the ball smack into the gym floor just a few feet in front of him that breaks my heart. His coach, a big Latino guy named Ronny, scoops it up and learns over to offer him some throwing instructions. I’m watching Max intently while Lucas scales the bleacher cliffs around me like a carousing teen, singing the Ben 10 theme song and digging into my backpack for juice boxes and toys.

Ronny puts Max fingers on the strings of the baseball then demonstrates how to step forward as you throw. I forgot you even had to do that. I want to break inside Max’s mind and help him to understand how that split second between the step forward and the release of the ball will make him feel so strong once he gets it, and understands the rhythm of it. But I don't need to. In less than 30 seconds, he was throwing line drives. I am elated.

Lucas is half-crying and it takes me a few extra seconds to shift my attention away from Max back to him. “Where the hell is he?” I think, slightly panicked. I look down to see him 4 feet below our elevated bleachers, on the gym floor rubbing his arm and debating about whether or not he should cry. “Luke, how did you get down there?” I ask. “He fell,” snips another mom as if she's about to add a “duh!” at the end of that sentence. I don’t bother to look at her but I do want to punch her repeatedly as a thank you for being a judgmental bitch.

This is the way my brain reacts to many things these days -- like someone irrationally trying to justify or defend her harried state of day to day living. Fortunately, such imagined actions stay inside my brain and don't result in an actual assault. Instead I go get Luke and check his arm, which is thankfully fine. But oh the angry things I imagine: myself calling her something like “sweetie” and gently telling her in a soft but scary voice that I am a widow and that even organizing myself to get to this goddamn baseball practice was indeed a major accomplishment. That when I signed Max up for baseball he screamed at me and told me I was stupid and that he hated it because sports were dumb and that I wanted to throw him like a baseball into the dirt for reacting that way. I want to mention to this perfect mother that one of the last things my now dead husband was able to do before his shockingly rapid and surreal decline in health was to take Max to a game at Yankee Stadium…the old one. The real one that Ruth built, and all that history shit. How I almost talked him out of doing it by arguing, “Is 85 bucks a ticket really worth it to a kid who isn’t even 4 yet and doesn’t know the difference between Jeter and Jar Jar Binks?”

Well, fellow mommy, on this freezing Spring Saturday, my eldest son is learning what baseball is. So don’t ruin this moment.

My internal tirade ends and the sadness of why I am all bent out of shape due to two words from a stranger begins. This garden-variety normal Saturday baseball practice would have meant so much to Max’s dad, my husband. Paul would have applied oil to Max’s baseball glove and come up with all sorts of clever ways to break it in. I only got as far as putting the glove under his mattress, which the babysitter removed explaining that it would make the bed too lumpy. Paul would have told him all about Maz and Clemente, elated with the news that Max’s team mascot was the same as our now hapless but beloved hometown Pirates. He would have dug out his old uniforms and hats and souvenir tickets. He would have told him about how he was working at Yankee Stadium as an editor during the 2001 World Series, the night Jeter became Mr. November with an extra-innings homer.

But Paul's been gone a long time now. So on the way home from practice, I talk instead. I tell Max and Lucas that when I played softball, I used to strike out sometimes and hit home runs sometimes, and once had an inside-the-park homer after an opponent tried to call time out while I was rounding third. I explain that their dad, Uncle Philip, Uncle Billy, and Uncle Jamie all played. How their grandpa played in the Army. I describe how I loved to play Wiffle ball against my big brother and my older cousins. I tell them about getting slugged with a bat when I was a catcher, and that complaining in the dug out about the heat during a July tournament resulted in a cooler of water over my head. They laugh at some of the stories. Some of them they find so boring that they ask me to turn on some music instead.

In the movie A League of Their Own, Tom Hanks, playing a liquored-up coach of a womens baseball team, famously declares, “There’s no crying in baseball.” When we get home after Max’s first ever baseball practice, I ask my two sons if they want to practice stopping some grounders later. When they both say yes, I don’t bother to hold back the tears.