All Baseball


       I have dozens of photos of him.  The one where he is holding me up to the light like a bottle of fine wine, the one in which he is posing like an actor in his straw hat, and that one that shows him walking down the boardwalk in a very white suit arm-in-arm with someone who is clearly not my mom.
       I always wonder just who he was as I look at those photos and, by some odd inference, who I am.  After all, he passed away long before I could get to know him as a man but I keep trying, probing with hopeful eyes, and hoping maybe to pull him back out of the lost past.  But it only works in pieces; what I have so far is just a pile of scraps that may mean something yet. 

       And then there is this one.  It is older than the others and therefore holds more mystery, yet is also seems so familiar to me.  It is yellowed like his index finger was from nicotine, cracked like the grooves in his combed hair, and thin as my memories of him.
       He is nothing but a boy in there, a youngster, maybe 14 years old.  That would make it 1916; summer no doubt.  He is wearing a baseball uniform and posing with three of his teammates.  It is an antique uniform with knickers and high socks and odd round caps from a bygone era of pure baseball, Sunday ball, dusty ball.  The boys are leaning casually against a wooden fence under the glare of a high sun.  The logo on their uniforms reads MAS; this was the insignia of the Murray All-Stars.  The team was named for my Dad because he was their pitcher.  It was the age of the pitcher, the so-called “Dead-ball era,” when runs were rare and the man on the mound was the star.

       I needed a magnifier just to get in there and find him second to the right.  It is a pose that I would never associate with him, so loose and limber.  He had thickened by the time I knew him and always wore trousers and a key chain.  Yet in there he is decades younger than the man I barely knew and up close like that I could just barely make out that familiar smile and the grin of the eyes.  My Dad as a boy.  It is a haunting photo in the way that photos are; it freezes one instant from the stampede of life in a frame that you can hold but never quite grasp.
       But what was I looking for in there?  Comfort, clues, a conclusion?  Or perhaps a connection to a man who slipped through my grip.   Perhaps I was holding onto this photo too tightly for my own good but what I found as I looked was that age had folded back on itself in that timeless space between snapshots.  The present and past were twisted into an endless knot.  There in the emulsion, he is only slightly older than I was when he died and with his whole life before him.  I am only slightly older now than he was when he died and wonder how much life I have left. 
       Knots only tighten as you pull on them.

       I knew very little about him really.  I never quite understood what his job was in the yarn industry or what he found so tasty about crackers and milk.  But I did know that he loved baseball.  He taught me how to throw and catch in that sandlot behind the Brooklyn Museum.  How to kneel for a grounder.  He showed me how to oil my glove and how to stick it under the mattress with the ball still in it to create a good pocket.  He showed me his fadeaway pitch, the one he modeled after Christy Matthewson.  He took me to minor league games; he called the games on TV.             
       My father was a formal man, a neat man, a father in a time before they were allowed to be just guys and I think now that baseball was his way of loving me.  I cannot recall us talking or hanging out or even spending much time together in another way.  Yet I know that baseball meant more to him than to me; I was just a dumb kid and it was just a dumb game to me.  Tennis, soccer, sports that rushed and snapped, that was what I liked.  Baseball was too slow, too orderly.  There was too much time to think in it and I was too young to know how valuable that kind of time was.  Or that the time with him would not last.
       I remember that last time that he wanted to have a catch and I had something more important to do.  Something quicker no doubt.  For a long time I dreamed of taking that moment back.

       Deep down I know that we live our lives in the moments lived, not by the ones pressed and preserved.  Not in the aching and not even in the regrets that photographs are so clever at calling up.  When I put the magnifier down and step back from the image, the knot falls away and I can see it for what it is.  It is a moment in there, just a moment.  His moment.  I can see it in his face in that photo, enjoying that instant in the sunlight. 
Before the game, before the first pitch, at that sublime pause of anticipation.  He loved baseball, my Dad did, and there he is all baseball and how utterly wide the universe must have been then and there.
       It was on my last birthday that I officially outlasted my father.  But as I look at this photo of him in his moment, I realize that I have not outlived him.

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