been dying to touch you for the past couple of days, I’m a little happy I had the opportunity.”
I stare at my clasped hands on my lap, my nails bitten to the quick. I’m going to be such a hit in sophisticated France with my twelve-year-old habits.
“I hate crying but it was kind of worth it,” I mumble. I don’t need to look up to tell that his smile got wider.
“I don’t really want to do anything now except pull you onto my lap and kiss you, but I have a feeling we aren’t there yet.”
As much as I’m dying to say screw it, we’re there, I nod.
“I know you’re so tired of baseball,” he says, the last word slightly quieter than the rest, as though it’s a disease. “I know that your family is crazy about it and that it’s ruled your life. I can imagine it must be unbearable to have so much of your family’s life obsessed with something that you don’t care about. Something they clearly make you believe is more important than you.”
It’s amazing how much it hurts to hear the words said out loud, even though I’ve known them to be true for years.
“But I want to tell you what I love about it.” He wipes his palms on his shorts, and for the first time I notice that he too has bitten his nails. “I started playing when I was four. My parents signed me up because I was uncoordinated and was totally uninterested in most other sports. It was my grandfather who took me to all my practices, who watched me play in the rain, who was always there. That’s the only reason I kept coming back. Maybe if he’d brought me to my basketball games, I’d have stuck with that. Or maybe it was that he always bought me ice cream afterwards.”
He laughs, and I can’t help myself; I love this picture of pint-sized Zeke with his grass-stained baseball uniform licking a dripping ice cream and sitting next to a much older version of himself.
“See, my grandfather had always wanted to play ball, but when he was a kid, there was never enough money, never enough time for something like that. Whenever he wasn’t at school, he was working, helping his parents and grandparents run their struggling grocery store. And my dad had no interest in sports. So for my grandpa, it was me. And for me, it was him. Him and the ice cream.
“He’s in a retirement home now; it’s hard for him to travel so he almost never sees me play anymore. But all through high school, I’d bring game tapes over to his place and watch a few with him, let him give me pointers, because he has a really good sense about the game.
“I love the game because I’m good at it, because I help my team win, because I feel good about the guys I play with. And I love the game because there’s something about the smell of the ballpark, the dirt, the bat, the mitt. These are the smells of my childhood. Of millions of childhoods. I love the sound of the announcer’s voice calling the game. When I’m tired, listening to it can put me to sleep. And when I’m anxious it calms me down. But most of all, I love it because in a million different ways it’s the same game my grandfather was dying to play as a kid. The same game that gave him the thrill of his life when he got Hank Greenberg to autograph his hand, and he refused to wash that hand until his mother washed it for him in the middle of the night. I love playing it, and I love being good at it, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that part of me wants to be playing on television someday so that my grandfather can watch it and we can talk about it after.”
I love this story. I love it at my core because it is everything that is good about baseball, everything I felt for so long. It reminds me of that amazing moment when Jed taught me the code of the scorecard, the feeling of being inducted into a secret language of symbols and notations. I love the idea of a grandfather who wanted something so desperately, who sat in the rain for months out of every year to impart that love to his grandson.
“I remember being eight,” I say,