Sunday Paper Wars

Growing up, my sisters and I competed for many things, from who chose the TV programs to after school snacks to who got the funnies in the morning. If you were able to read the funnies completely before your siblings did, You Won. Sunday was the Playoff each week, whoever won first access to the Sunday Funnies was the champ for the week.

My sisters, being devious females, younger than I, would use my status as eldest and male to undermine me at every turn. Skillfully, they would sob and enlist my mother as referee in many disputes. “Skipper, you are the oldest and a boy, you should be nicer to your little sisters.” Sometimes I had to give up the hard-won Sunday Comics.

Sulking, I would sit at the counter in the playroom, spooning in my cereal and waiting for the crumpled and stained pages of Dagwood, Dick Tracy, Lil’ Abner and Peanuts after my sisters had worked their destructive worst upon them. Of course, my sisters never gloated, never smirked at me over the ruined pages of the comics. Not much, they didn’t.

Many years later, tempered by real life and children and now grandchildren, my sisters are quite nice and generous to me. I know that is only because they now have their own Sunday Comics, though.

This Sporting Life

I have never been athletic, or ambitious to be so. Between native uncoordination, what amounts to monocular vision, due to great imbalance in the strength of my eyes, and a disinclination to any sort of competition, no accomplishment in sports ever was likely for me. Nevertheless, I retain a great fondness for baseball, probably because it was the one game that neighborhood informal games made available to me without stress or much embarrassment. At organized baseball, I was a dud.

I like to watch baseball still, preferably games locally where I can sit in the stands and enjoy all of the game, including the audience, the vendors, the play on the field. I don’t much care for watching on television. I can’t follow the changes in position of the players as each batter comes up, the almost kabuki-like interplay between umpire and players, the conferences between catcher and pitcher when at some moment indiscernible to me, the umpire almost reaches the mound to end the conference, only to have the catcher and pitcher magically part without a word spoken.

I thought of this today as I read a poem that had been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” back on May 2nd, titled “Little League,” by Paul Hostovsky. A father watches a game with his daughter, and they exchange smiles over the rituals of baseball, from the sweeping of home plate by the umpire, to the production from his capacious pockets of new balls following fouls. The poem concludes after this little ceremony, with the lines:

. . . the ump has dipped his hand
into his bottomless black pocket
and conjured up a shiny new white one
like a brand new coin
from behind the catcher’s ear,
which he then gives to the catcher
who seems to contain his surprise
though behind his mask his eyes are surely
as wide with wonder as hers.

Watching my grandchildren play T-ball and softball gives me the same joy and wonder. This is how I play baseball, through observation by myself, and shared by my family. Some days we simply enjoy, some days we have hot dogs, and some days it rains.

Generations

Moving through the third childhood of my family, starting with my own, then my children, now my grandchildren, I watched a softball game last night. Our granddaughter played a kindergarten level game with other little girls, some even smaller than she, some bigger. She was serious about her game. Her father was the same. I was not, in my time, but did show up. Apart from being unable throw, catch, bat or run well, I was a natural. Now I benefit from the enthusiasm of both my granddaughter, and my son before her.

Wedding Blues

In 1952 my Aunt Barbie was married. The family gathered in Arlington, VA, some of  us staying in a rambling old house my grandparents had rented for the summer. My grandfather was stationed in Washington pending the Army sending him to Korea. The summer was very hot, even in June, as were the summers throughout the early ’50s. The street in front of the house, where the busses stopped, had pavement that had softened in the heat so much that ridges of asphalt had hilled up against the curb. Under the deep eaves of the house, shaded by tall trees and windowed with crank out casements, however, breezes gave relief.

None of us had met my future uncle Tommy before arriving in Arlington. Tommy was staying in the house, tucked away in a bedroom on the third floor. We arrived early in the morning, having stopped overnight on the road in a convenient motel, my parents exhausted from loading up three children and driving almost six hundred miles the day before. Uncle Tommy-to-be came downstairs to greet us in his bathrobe. We all liked him immediately, such a gentle and affectionate man. My Aunt Barbie beamed and clutched her fiancé’s arm. She was my godmother as well as my aunt, and had given me a big hug and kiss, which at the age of eight I bore as well as possible, loving her for loving me.

In fact, I was ambivalent about my aunt getting married and moving out of my grandparents’ house. She would no longer be there when we visited my Nana and Boozle, but off somewhere with her husband. They would be married. At eight, changes of this magnitude were disturbing. I remember sitting beside her in an upstairs porch that night, opened casement windows admitting breezes from under the eaves murmurous with pigeons. She was dressed to go out with my future uncle, perfumed, made up, harnessed with mysterious undergarments which I could feel under her pleated and starched blouse as I nestled next to her. I thought to myself that soon such moments would be gone. Things would change. Welcome to life, I might have said to myself, but reflection is not natural to boys who are only eight. To girls, perhaps. But not to me that hot night.

Things worked out, as they do, and visiting my Aunt Barbie was even better once she and Uncle Tommy were married, adding another layer of comfort to my extended family. I love them both in  ways that an eight-year-old boy could not have understood. Life does that for you, every seeming loss is often a blessing for the years ahead.

Music to Make Your Heart Grow

I am still listening to my most recent music acquisitions, especially to Ricky Skaggs. My favorite cut on the Brand New Strings CD is “My Father’s Son,” the first stanza sets the tone of family, tradition and the past which is also the present:

My history is no secret, it’s written in the stones
In the hill beside this river rests my mother’s gentle bones
And Daddy there beside her, home among his next of kin
And their legacy passed down to me the sons of mountain men.

Roots and tradition are important, more so to me as the years pass.

Memorial Day…The last letter

Last year, I posted about the letters my great-aunt Emily Miller Smith posted to her son Miller, who died in World War II in France. Each Memorial Day Aunt Emily would provide the local newspaper an essay in epistolary form, addressed to her lost son. In these letters she commented on the world, nation and local matters, as though telling her son how life went on for those he left behind.

Aunt Emily’s last letter was published in 1977.