The Old Man and the Seams
The Old Man and the Seams
By Tommy McAree
Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
He rises at 3 am, sometimes having barely slept from the anticipation. His gear gathered the night before, but he double checks: binoculars for a far-off sighting, trusty blue Sharpie, a gold one for those dark navy blue pullovers. Mom has already put on the coffee pot. The same Thermos she’s prepared for him for the last 25 years sits on the counter. Dad’s going fishing.
As he leaves the house, he must wheel his chair to a walker near the door, hoist himself up with his arms, and trouble the two steps that lead to his van. This may not sound like much––in the past it wasn’t––but watch him complete the task now: heavy exhale, eyeing the handles of the walker like an old gymnast attempting one last go at the pommel horse, carpal tunneled hands straining. After he rises, his ostrich knees bend several degrees in the direction knees don’t bend. As he walks, he employs his legbones as stilts. Each time he lifts the walker there is suspension, as with watching a man on a highwire. He must place the rubber feet of the thing in the perfect position to avoid doorsills and his own feet and the ledge of the top step before he falls onto it with all his weight, triceps quaking.
A few years ago he fell and broke his ankle during this part. He lay on the floor of the garage for several minutes before my mom found him. She was in the bathroom and couldn’t hear his shouts.
When he finally flops into the driver’s seat, he is covered in sweat. At times he waves his hands afterward, as if he has just completed some kind of circus act. He has.
My dad is nearly 70. For the last three decades, the muscles in his legs have been slowly vanishing, one cell at a time, due to a condition called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. SMA. It’s a half-Gehrig. If that sounds crude, at least it’s not as sterile as an acronym. Diseases sound more heroic when they are named after ballplayers.
When he worked, he did this gymnastics routine five days a week, 50 weeks a year for something like 20 years. People can do hard things for their families. When he retired, more than a couple colleagues asked him if he was worried about keeping busy, getting out of the house. They can’t be blamed: bodies grow frail, couches become more and more comfortable, and most people think baseball is something that you watch. Honestly, I worried a bit too.
In the last 10 days, a decade after retirement, Dad has woken up at 3 am two days in a row, driven three hours to Cooperstown and back for the Hall of Fame Induction, risen at 4 am to drive 6 hours to an Atlantic City baseball card show, and made another voyage to the Hall of Fame to catch a lecture and book signing by the actor Dwier Brown, who for less than 6 minutes of screen time played the father of Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams. In between these sojourns, he’s read a book about Jackie Robinson’s four most memorable seasons, organized baseball cards and baseball photo albums, planned a trip to take our neighbor to his first minor league game, and sent out two or three letters to former athletes and coaches in hopes that they’ll sign an autograph and return it to him through the mail. This is not a conspicuously packed week or so of baseball. This is about par for the course.
“If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy,” he said aloud. “But since I am not crazy, I do not care.”
He cries during speeches in sports movies. He texts my sister to tell her sons every time Aaron Judge hits a home run. When each of his grandkids were born, he had my sisters sign baseballs with their name, weight, and birthdate on them. He arrives at games an hour and a half before they start and stays an hour after they end. He flies to Florida every year for Yankees Spring Training, and has begun flying to San Diego for the MLB winter meetings in December. On a cross-country trip, or in a free hour or two during a work conference, he’s been known to visit a ballpark, even if it’s December and there’s snow in front of the ticket office. He circles the whole perimeter the way people visit European churches––craning his neck to see the architecture, reading inscriptions, getting a feel for the place. He’ll spend a lot of time in front of bronzed sculptures of Bob Feller or Harry Caray or George Brett. He grew up a Catholic Brooklynite. He is accustomed to bowing his head before statues.
There are rituals, there are rites, there are temples and pilgrimages and shrines. Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Comment on how long that one farmer’s fence is. The stamping of the cache. It is not like religion. It is religion.
There is a club somewhere with big storefront windows like the ones at Macy’s. If you cup your hands and look through the glass, you’ll see Jehovah’s Witnesses talking people’s ears off about the Good News, and Hare Krishnas with shaved heads chanting in a circle of drums, dervishes whirling and monks rocking and Heyokas mocking them all. And somewhere in the corner there are people in caps and jerseys trading baseball cards.
Above the door is a hologram sign. As you approach from one angle, it reads clearly, “Insanity. Fanaticism. Sickness.” But if you move your head a bit, maybe squint your eyes, come at it from a different perspective, the people appear in a new light, the old words dissolve, and you can start to make out new ones: Devotion. Passion. Glory, even. These are people so moved by the spirit that ensnares them they have no regard for what is reasonable, rational, or for something as trivial as what other people might think.
I sometimes wonder if Rumi’s wife ever rolled her eyes at him, tired of hearing another verse about God’s face, admonishing, “Are you kidding me? More ecstatic poetry!? Don’t you ever get tired of it? Do we really need another goddamn Diwan in the house?”
Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.
There have been many comparisons made between baseball and religion, and there are many baseball pilgrims. But at heart, Dad is more fisherman than parishioner. Open the door to the trophy room that used to be my sister’s bedroom and you’ll find treasures from his greatest exploits: over here an autographed photo of Yogi and Ted Williams, over there a Duke Snider. Pete Rose and Jeter and Jorge. Each is mounted as though it were a petrified steelhead. A signed Mickey Mantle jersey hangs from one wall like the taxidermied head of a moose. Between them are photos of my sister’s family with Mariano Rivera, me and a childhood friend with Monte Irvin, Dad with Buck O’Neill. In all of them, his smile is as wide as that of a man holding a 100-lb halibut. Another wall is covered from floor to ceiling with signed baseballs in stackable plastic cubes.
To the other members of my family, the baseballs are a grandparent’s yearbook; we can’t identify most of the autographs, let alone where they came from. But to my dad, each plastic cube contains a story. Each is a moment in a bottle. He can tell you what the player said to him (“Hello there, young fella.”) Where and when he hooked him (“So we were outside 7th Inning Stretch, near the statue of the farmer boy.”) How the player almost got away, and refused, as a king salmon thrashing against a boat deck, to sign on the sweet spot. The R.O.M.E.O.s (Retired Old Men Eating Out) call this “getting paneled.”
He and his friends sit in diner booths and talk about the catch of the day. They cross-reference each other’s calendars to set dates for the next trip, create plans of attack, and discuss whether or not this player or that is “ballworthy”. Baseball is a center of gravity around which to huddle, something to keep your eye on while you lament marital woes and medical problems. He has converted more than one non-fan into a believer by the strength of his own enthusiasm. The secret is: everyone is still a little kid inside. You just need to give them permission to show it. And the best way to give them permission is to give it to yourself.
But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
There is a lot of studying. An immense amount. But it’s not like writing flashcards to try and memorize fish names as quickly as possible. It’s more like going on countless trips to the river, paying close attention, getting as near as you can.
I once spent a week with a wildlife specialist in Costa Rica. We would go on hikes through the rainforest, him pointing in all directions toward snarls of tree and vine without so much as a second glance, rattling off names of birds that I had to stare for multiple minutes to be able to see. He explained that over the years he had seen these birds so many times that their images were burned into his brain. All he needed was the briefest glimpse of a beak, the outline of a shadow, or a stray tailfeather among the impenetrable green of the forest and he could tell you what he was looking at.
Dad’s the same way. A tuft of hair across the street and…“There’s Brian Kenny.”
That old man with the ice cream cone 200 yards off? “I think that’s Sparky Anderson”
When he tries to explain how he is so certain, he says things like, “There was a look to him,” or “he just had that walk”. And it’s not just baseball people. Recently he recognized the Olympic diver Greg Louganis from 20 feet away and while facing the opposite direction. When my cousin asked how the hell he did that, my dad replied, as if it were a reasonable explanation, “It looked like the back of Greg Louganis’s head.”
This is the difference between a scientist and a naturalist. One studies the world. The other becomes a part of it. Dad’s the Jane Goodall of ballplayers. He has been around so many of them so many different times that on occasion one will come up to him and say, “Who are you? I know you from somewhere.” The president of the Hall of Fame gives him a hug when he sees him. Memorabilia store owners and sportscasters and Babe Ruth impersonators call out to him when they spot him in town. Some of it may be because the wheelchair is conspicuous. A lot of it is just him.
Besides, fishing is not really a science at all. It is an art. You try to find the right spot and learn as you go. Then there’s a reading of signs, whispers in the air, a listening to intuition, and a swift striking at the right moment.
“Not the player’s entrance this time: I have a feeling that’s Mendoza’s girlfriend and mother waiting by the parking lot. I think I saw her in Binghamton once…”
He carries a baseball everywhere there might be the possibility of an autograph, and sometimes for no rational reason at all, going just on a feeling. It’s almost like a security blanket, like a whaler who sleeps with his harpoon, lest his dreams be filled with glimpses of a dorsal fin vanishing into the black depths, or a flash of Don Mattingly’s mustache disappearing into a crowd.
Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.
Someone else’s passion can inspire you, but it can also turn you sour. I’ve spent more than a few hours of my childhood in a swarm of people clamoring for an autograph, grown men shoving me, their armpits and B.O. directly at nose level, shouting at the players like they are caged animals under the Big Top. There are many who would push a kid with cancer out of the way to get a signature, only to turn around and sell it off on the internet. I’d stand next to these people for my dad, because sometimes his wheelchair would not permit him to be where the players were, but I hated being counted among these people. They were pushy. They were greedy. They were Americans.
In my high school years, when the veil got pulled back and I knew everything and my heart was broken for it, I began to see all of baseball this way. The thrill of the park began to seem like a kind of Disney World, like you’ve been swindled into thinking this is the most magical place on Earth, and surprise! Every last detail of it has been carefully curated by a team of corporate vampires who do not love God or Nature or Baseball but only separating hardworking people from their money. Baseball is a business the way the Catholic Church is a business. When I’m having a crisis of faith, I watch the way my dad eats a hot dog. Relishes it. If you listen closely, there’s a voice that begins to whisper, “You can just enjoy it.”
“Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.”
That’s the problem with eyes. They can look without looking. They can let you see the Truth, or let you believe you can. Often the young players, the sluggers who everyone wants to meet, will jog right by you, look right through you. I like to believe they do this as a means of protecting themselves, to refuse to be someone’s King Kong. I don’t blame them for staring back at us and seeing nothing but a bunch of bloodthirsty hounds. They are often treated like pieces of meat on a conveyor. But even though the untrained eye may not be able to discern it, there is a difference between the man who kills the fish for sport, and the man who loves the fish even while he kills it.
See if you can catch it now as my dad approaches a Hall of Famer near that ballpark fence. How his eyes become saucers and the red blossoms on his face, his voice hushed like a child spotting a deer, like if he says it too loud he’ll scare him away: “Look! That’s Fergie Jenkins!”
Or notice how the demeanor of the young superstar changes as he asks, “Could you sign it ‘To Brian’?” Then the conveyor belt stops. The signature is no longer a store of monetary value, indistinguishable from any other. It has become something else.
Did you catch it? The young ones often don’t. Being so good at something at an early age can make you believe you are different from other people, and there are many who don’t yet understand enough about life to realize that they too will one day decay and perish.
My dad group texts our family whenever a Hall of Famer dies. He writes something like, “Sad day today ☹.” Like he knew these men. Like they’d been through something together. In a way, he did. They had. They were part of the same ecosystem.
It’s easier for the old-timers. They have lost enough of what they once had to know that time is the great equalizer, that it takes a certain amount of humility for an old man to stand in front of another old man and ask him for an autograph, to subordinate his own accomplishments to theirs and say “Mr. Boyer, would you sign my baseball?”
The excitement in his eyes says, “I have followed you for years. I know your story. I can recount your great feats.” And something happens in the forgotten ones. These former superheroes, who once stood robust and mighty as a tree, now swimming in their clothes, now indistinguishable to the rest of the world from all the other grey-haired men; a twinkle returns to their eye. Some are humbled in return. More than one has said, “You sure you want my autograph?”
If they are with their family members, a quiet pride washes over their faces that says “See? I once was somebody.” One time, after watching my father ask hers for an autograph, the daughter of Tommy Byrne pulled him aside, squeezed his arm, and whispered, “Thank you for still remembering my dad.”
And doesn’t everyone, at least once in their life, deserve a moment like this? How many ills might be cured if good deeds made the same sound as home runs, and there were little kids rushing up to the neighborhood mailman, encircling him like paparazzi as he made his way to the next mailbox, holding up pens and stamped envelopes and chattering like sparrows, “Oh please, please Mr. Greene, would you sign my envelope?”
Why in God’s name aren’t we mobbing the hotel maid on the sidewalk, excitedly repeating her own stats back to her: “Back-to-back 12-hour shifts, 19 consecutive years without a vacation, and member of the 5000 linens club!” Begging just to shake her hand, to reach out and touch someone so formidable.
“You’re my hero, ma’am.”
“It’s an honor to meet you.”
I understand why athletes get the hero treatment. Humans are still primarily visual creatures, and much can be encapsulated in the image of a strong man hitting a ball a great distance. It is striking. But the wise know that if you pay attention, everybody is somebody. That if there was just a slight adjustment in the kinds of yardsticks used to measure greatness, it might just as easily be you asking me for my autograph. There is no single symbol that can represent what is required of most heroes: the simple yet mighty act of stepping up to plate, day in, and day out, never hitting it out of the park, never leading the league. Just getting to the garage. Just being there. God, what our parents have done for us. God, how can we even look them in the eye?
But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left. That and baseball.
Everything he collects finds its perfect place. Dad is the child of an alcoholic, and a textbook case. The trophy room is arranged in meticulous order, each item squirreled away in one corner of the universe where everything is exactly as it should be. It’s not hard to see his level of fervor as directly proportional to the amount of trauma he’s been through, and all his collecting as an attempt to make sense of a chaotic childhood.
At times the trophy room feels like a Jim Croche song. The little plastic cubes appear absurd, feeble things. Look at all these picture albums. All these cardboard cards in cases. All the gravestones will crumble, and the most technologically advanced, UV-protected plastic money can buy won’t keep horsehide from yellowing. My dad understands this.
I once asked him if he would take the following deal: He could have his legs back, but he could never watch or talk about or be in any way associated with baseball again. I thought this might be a decent would-you-rather.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you kidding?” he said, shaking his head. “Not even a contest.”
I felt silly then.
I had imagined that countless hours watching games, analyses of games, interviews before and after games, the reading of rooms full of books, articles, magazines, the driving thousands of miles for card shows, Hall of Fame inductions, major and minor league games, this autograph appearance, that historic ballpark, the hundreds and hundreds of diner conversations, car rides, phone calls, all the decades spent talking and thinking and breathing baseball might just be enough to make up for losing something that most of us take for granted every day. It does not. I have not made the trip down the garage steps enough to fully understand. I do not know what it’s like.
We can’t ever give our heroes what we know in our hearts they deserve. These people, these old folks who have given their life for yours, who have lived without complaint, who have spared you from their own suffering. You will always fail to properly honor them.
Perhaps the only reply you have left is this: step up to the plate. Let yourself become a little kid again. And hold your reverence for them up like a baseball, whispering, “oh please, oh please, oh please.”
Tommy McAree is a lifelong baseball fan and an MFA student at Simmons University, where he writes picture books and is working on a YA novel about adolescence and (what else?) baseball.
Jeff Brain is a retired public school teacher. You can find more of his art on his website or on Instagram.
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