Maybe Mary was joking, or maybe she just didn’t want her picture taken. Or maybe she was serious. Either way, Mary said it would cost us. As well it should. Mary’s a big deal around here.
So we never took her picture.
She plopped down next to us, 2 rows behind the Mariner dugout, in Peoria’s 80-degree heat. Dave and I had beers and brats in hand. I was snapping pics and texting my family when she came down the steps to her seat.
I focused on the brat. That was before we met Mary.
“I’m Bill, this is Dave.”
She reached to shake hands. “My name’s Mary. I’m 90 years old, and I’ve had season tickets to Spring Training since they opened this park 30 years ago.”
It’s cheesy, really. A whole book of cheese. We love cheese. With baseball in particular, our weepy overwrought technicolor memories of perfection are just… well yeah. Cheese.
But I gave him the book anyway. And now I’ve had it longer than he did. It was Father’s Day 1996 when he got it from me. With love. Says so right there in my red scribble on the title page.
Tonight’s serving with cheddar please.
It was the June after I took him hobbling up the Kingdome steps to the last MLB game he’d ever see in person, the ALCS opener against Cleveland, when Bobby Wolcott, in the only postseason action of his short career, walked the bases full with nobody out in the first inning. Right about then Dad might have said “well shit, let’s go home” before Bobby found himself and worked the next seven frames for the W.
And it was still a few years from those same Indians sending us a special gift in the form of Jose Mesa, whose two seasons in Seattle were defined by an ERA over 5.00 and by my father’s habit of screaming at the TV that goddammit if they were going to pay any random SOB three million plus to just serve that shit up, why the hell didn’t they let him, Kirby Walker, do it for half that much at 82 years old?
Those are just the kind of cheesy stories that fill the pages of Mudville Diaries. Minus my dad’s endearing profanity of course. People’s best and worst memories of baseball. Verbal imagery. Classmates, teachers, teammates, opponents, brothers, sisters, moms, ballparks, balls, gloves, heroes and goats. But the recurring theme, bang, there it is again, is Dad. And again. And again.
And my dad left the bookmark right at the page where I put it, all those years ago. “Dad, read this” it still says, in that same red scribble. It’s the page that stood out from the cheese. The page that held, for me as I read it in that bookstore, what’s real about men and kids and a game that, like Santa Claus, stays magical for only those lucky few who hold on and believe it to be so. My dad was one of those guys.
Still there after 26 years.
And under that bookmark, still there where I left it on Father’s Day 1996, with love, are these words from Gene Carney:
He was bigger and stronger then And you knew he could knock you over If he really wanted to cut loose He lobbed at first And as he threw harder You knew he was testing you Seeing what you were made of today Noticing how you handled the stings Watching how you backpedaled When he tossed infield flies He made you run Firing one wild high or Bouncing it past your dive Maybe so he could rest up some Maybe so you could rest up some So the game could go on Till dinner time or till dark Or till one of you Grew up
Did we really have that game of catch every day? A couple times a week? Once every season? Once, ever? Did we really, ever? …does it matter?
He was 90 when we lost him. It still hurts after fourteen years, a fresh, jagged blade in the ribs whenever I have big news to tell him, advice I need from him, a ballgame I’d like to share with him.
Or when I just need a game of catch. Cheese and all.
I focused on the brat. That was before we met Mary.
Edgar and friends (AP)