Baseball and John 10/12/04

Go. Get a beverage and a snack and settle in, because this one is going to be long. As I start this, I do not know whether the Braves or the Astros will advance to the National League Championship Series (NLCS), and, given my attention span, by the time I finish, I will. Now, I have lots of baseball stories to tell but this is THE BIG ONE, the event where baseball reached into my life and made a huge important difference. I was eleven years old when my mother married my stepfather, a long-time family friend I’d known and liked my whole life, and we moved from Atlanta to a small town in West Virginia (actually a big town by West Virginia standards). It was a radical change, but we stayed there from the middle of my sixth grade year through my graduation from high school, after which my parents moved to Texas for a brief stint before ultimately returning to Atlanta. I loved growing up in West Virginia. My stepfather, John, was a wonderful man, whom I adored (as did my sisters), and the father of three sons from a previous marriage. We had always been very comfortable (financially), and my mother had a successful career at a time when women just didn’t do that. I was also close to my father, who remained in Atlanta, and visited him often. I even lived with him during the times I was off from school, during college. Daddy, in fact, lived the last four years of his life in my house until his death in 1995 (another baseball story for another time). John never tried to be our father, and told us so right off the bat, as we arrived in the dark of night at the beautiful house in the West Virginia countryside (it had a name!), blanketed with six inches of still-falling snow. We walked into the kitchen for the first time, which had been prepared for our arrival, to a ready supper of spaghetti and meat sauce from the restaurant he owned with his father, and the table was set with red checkered white glass coffee mugs imprinted with my and my two sisters' names (the oldest of the four girls was away at school). He sat us down at the table, served the meal and told us that he wasn’t our father, that we had a perfectly good father, and that he was in our lives to be something different. That he did! He provided for us well, financially, spiritually and intellectually, and was, most importantly, always “present” for us and thoughtfully respectful in all of his interactions. He became my friend, my guide and my mentor. He was brilliant (BA, JD, MA and PhD) and wise and intuitive. I was no stranger to baseball. I had listened to it on the radio as a small girl, pestering my Mammy, Thelma, who took care of us while Mama was working, as she cooked. She timed our dinner to the Crackers’ games, knowing that her husband, whose work was driving a truck, but who never missed a home game, would be there to pick her up about thirty minutes after the game ended, when she would hand us off to Mama with dinner on the table. Later, on long weekends spent sailing at Lake Lanier with Daddy when we visited every summer, we would listen to the newly arrived Braves, again on the radio. In West Virginia through the heart of the Big Red Machine years, we listened to the Reds on the radio, sometimes watched on TV, and even took trips (once on a tug boat up the river) to their home games. By the time I graduated from college and was single in Atlanta, Mama and John had moved back to the city and I was living on my own. We were great friends and never in my life had I enjoyed any of my parents more. They helped guide me through that uncharted territory, as I was the first girl in my family not to marry right out of college. My husband was welcomed into our family, as I was into his. There were names on his mother’s invitation list that were also on mine, but, over time, John’s disapproval and displeasure over the nature of my marriage and his disagreements with my husband over how I was being treated led to my becoming estranged from John for many years. It was a painful loss for me, but, overwhelmed with taking care of three small children in not the best of circumstances, it always ended up back-burnered, postponed until a later date, when there might be time. Until 1991, when something remarkable happened and, after being nine and a half games out of first place, behind the Dodgers at the All Star break, the Atlanta Braves, having finished the previous season in the National League cellar, found themselves in a race to win the Western Division (why the Braves were in the Western Division is another story), and the city was consumed, ablaze with baseball fever. Otherwise normal people were walking around like zombies, because we not only had to watch every pitch of every Braves game, but we had to watch the Dodgers too, praying for them to lose, and the entire city was sleep-deprived. We couldn’t afford tickets, but we didn’t miss a minute of it. Our lives were falling apart. My husband had recently lost his job and we were putting the house on the market, but we were mesmerized by the Braves, the magical Braves who could always find a way to do it, come from behind, rookies and veterans together, the 1991 Braves: David Justice, Terry Pendleton, Ron Gant, Greg Olsen, Mark Lemke, Otis Nixon, Belliard, Bream and Neon Deion Sanders, flying back and forth while also playing football (forgive me, those I’ve forgotten). Bobby Cox. The pitchers: Smoltz, Glavine, Liebrandt, Avery, Wohlers, Pena. Then something miraculous started happening. When I would call Mama just to check in, and John would answer the phone, instead of handing it right to her, as he had for years, we would talk about baseball. As the season wore on, and they spent time at their second home in St. Augustine, he would call on Wednesday nights, when the games were not on TBS and not carried by their cable system, first for final scores and then, eventually, for periodic play-by-play. By the time we reached Game Six of the NLCS with the Pirates in Pittsburgh, which we had to win in order to play one more game, the entire city was in a state of hysteria. There were Tomahawks everywhere. I had one on the rear windshield wiper of my station wagon. Our little family sang the Star Spangled Banner before every game for luck, and I found myself talking to John more and more, always about baseball. Game Six of the NLCS went late, into the wee hours. We watched it in our bedroom with the children set up on palettes at the foot of our king size bed. One by one my family fell asleep until I watched alone as it came down to Alejandro Pena vs. Andy Van Slyke with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the game, the season, on the line, with Van Slyke hitting foul ball after foul ball up the right field line, all with homerun distance. Pena finally struck him out and my Braves got one more game, ultimately winning the series in seven. I was all worked up and surrounded by my laid out sleeping family when the phone rang at 1:00 in the morning just after the game ended. It was John, needing to talk about baseball, with Mama long gone to sleep. We talked for hours in the middle of the night, saying everything we had needed to say for so many years. It was jubilant, liberating and perfect. The Braves went on to lose the World Series in seven games to the Minnesota Twins, but, honestly, we didn’t care. What they had done was so remarkable that the entire city embraced them anyway and 250,000 of us, including me and my three little boys (with my buddy and her two little girls) converged on downtown to welcome our heroes home on Tuesday afternoon, two days after it all ended. I went armed with a 7’ red foam core board Tomahawk, bearing the words “Thanks for the ride!” that I made with the children the night before. The next day was Wednesday and my husband closed a deal, which, with just a little bit of help from Mama and John, meant that we no longer had to sell the house, and my parents left for St. Augustine. On Thursday I planted twenty-one flats of pansies, twelve at the boys’ preschool and nine at the house. I stopped at about four in the afternoon and talked to both Mama and John on the phone, as they were about to watch a movie before having dinner. Four hours later, as I was just finishing up outside after ordering pizza for the boys, the phone rang and they called me in. It was Mama. After watching the movie, John had taken a walk out to the beach at sunset to feed the birds (read: sneak a cigarette), collapsed in the surf and died of a massive heart attack. He was 67 years old. It was no longer just about baseball. This time, the Astros are heading to the NLCS, facing a buzz saw called the St. Louis Cardinals. I will watch because I love baseball, all baseball, any baseball, but my heart and my gratitude for giving me back my relationship with my beloved John, just in time, will always belong to the Braves. Go Braves!