Watching Baseball with My Dad
Baseball, memory, and the bicameral brain
I watch baseball with my Dad several times a week. He died about 18 months ago, but that hasn’t really slowed our pace.
I’m sure nearly everyone reading this knows that my Dad died at the beginning of 2020. Nearly half the posts here mention it directly or indirectly, and it permeates every word I write, here and elsewhere.
He lived with us for the last ten years of his life. We’d always watched a lot of baseball together. Mets games mostly, an artifact of my days in NYC. When he first moved in my kids were still pretty little, and my wife was healthy, so the life of our family was very busy: school, homework, dinner, reading, bath, bedtime. The games—which generally started at 5 p.m., and lasted around three hours—were always on in the background, as the events of everyday family life swirled around it. If something important happened, we’d rush to the television for the replay, but rarely caught it live. Baseball was like having the radio on in the background at the city pool in the summer; never the focus of attention, but coloring the entire experience, so that your memories of the summer are always accompanied by the music.
My kids grew older. My wife died. We moved.
The new house we moved to was smaller. My kids no longer needed the 24/7 kind of attention pre-tween kids need. The fabric of our days shifted slightly. After I was done with work, I’d turn on the game, get supper cooking, and then plop down on the couch next to my Dad. We’d quit watching when supper was ready, as I had a rule that everyone eat supper together at the table, every night. After supper, the game resurfaced, and my kids would clear the table and do the dishes while Dad and I finished the game.
There are 162 baseball games in the regular season of a normal year. That’s nearly every night. A football season, in contrast, is sixteen games. Someone once described football as a one night stand, and baseball as a romance, and there’s a lot of truth in that. There is an everyday-ness about a baseball season. It becomes less about the win and the loss, and more about the continuity of game to game.
Here’s the thing: even a bad team wins about 40% of their games (REALLY bad teams can tumble into the 30% range; the worst Met team ever won 25% of their games). So even though your team might really suck, on any given night, there is a reasonable chance of winning. I love the optimism that surrounds that idea, and it follows me into every other area of my life. Today, right now, as these two teams take the field, you have a real chance of winning this game. The playoffs may be a pipe dream, the World Series may be a hopelessly unattainable goal. But for THIS game, the one we are just now sitting down to watch, the chances of winning are reasonable.
My Dad died. I got offered early retirement and accepted. I moved again, to my fiance’s house, though one of my kids still lives in my old house, about five minutes away. I still watch baseball nearly daily, though usually time shifted, so I watch the replay in the early evening. I talk to my Dad in my head while I watch. Not in some melodramatic way, with me silently missing him, lost in memory. It’s about real things, very specific. Why aren’t they bunting? What a perfect, made-to-order double play! That new extra inning rule of starting with a runner on second is utterly insane (side note: it is).
It’s habit by now. We’ve had a conversation running through well over a thousand games. Death barely even affects our continuity anymore. I think of it like the bicameral brain (literally meaning: two chambered brain), the theory that early humans used to think by staging a dialogue in their head. I know I often think in terms of dialogue, not just baseball. It’s one of the ways I process the world.
The way I process baseball is by talking to my Dad. No one knows my love of baseball the way he did. No one knows as well the rules I hate, the plays I love, which players have risen to hero status in my mind. So, nearly every day, at least during baseball season, I sit down, turn on the game, and talk to my Dad.
Peace.
The links follow. If you like my newsletter, consider buying a story. Or share the Oort Cloud with a friend!
May’s story: Nine Lives
April’s story: Prince Albert in a Can
March’s story: Fuck, Marry, Kill
February’s story: Veronica Scissors
My first novel, Life Under Water
My website:Â jeffmwood.com.
My erotic flash fiction series, Serious Moonlight (as J G Cain)