We were in Sanibel Island, Florida, my wife Kathy and I,
celebrating our first real vacation in two years. Staying in a condo 180 feet from the beach,
the good life had never seemed so good. The company we kept, my brother Eric and his
wife, Renee, was excellent. They were
recovering from a home sale and relocation.
Kath and I were coming off of a year where our upstairs bathroom had
been gutted for months. When your knees are bad and you’re on blood pressure
meds…well, you do the math.
For once, we had not planned ourselves into a corner, where
we would return from a vacation and go right back to work. Our flight home arrive was on the evening
before Memorial Day. We had a family
gathering scheduled for the Monday afternoon, but not until later in the
day. After decompressing for nine days,
we knew we could ease back into the grind with that Monday buffer. Sleeping in was the only thing on the
breakfast menu for Memorial Day.
We were still days away from departing our island paradise
when Kath repeated the contents of a text she had received. “Lucy needs to come home and drop off her car
with us and catch a bus to Chicago.”
Lucy is our oldest child, who was just finishing her first year of law
school and headed for a paying internship in the Windy City.
“Okay. When?” I asked.
“She’s coming in late Sunday, leaving early Monday.”
Well, shit.
I turned to my brother (who has no children) and told him, “This
is a perfect illustration of what it is to be a parent.” I wasn’t angry. It was a statement of fact. Babysitters are hourly, parents are salary. We think we are done at various turning points
in their lives but, the truth is, if you embraced being a parent, you will
always be a parent. If not to your own
children, then you find others to assist, mentor, lecture or nurture.
I won’t go into detail about what sort of damage we did on
vacation, but it was extensive and self-inflicted. I have been on vacations with people who
fancied themselves partiers. On Sanibel
Island, we spilled more than those braggarts drank. We got off the plane in Detroit relaxed. Dog tired, yes, and our livers were screaming
the Roberto Duran mantra, “No mas, no mas.”
We grabbed a small dinner and headed back to the house. Dan, our youngest, came by not long after Lucy
arrived and we had some laughs in the mid-evening before he left for his
apartment and the rest of us collapsed into familiar mattresses. We had to meet a bus arriving downtown at 8:45
a.m., so alarms were dutifully set. Lucy
shares my affinity for arriving early for virtually any event, no matter how
mundane. To do otherwise makes us
somewhat anxious.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m on blood pressure meds, which
means I frequently wake up at night with an urgent need. After a 4 a.m. roundtrip to the bathroom, I
found myself wide awake and suddenly aware that we had no groceries in the
house for breakfast. We had some flakes
and some milk, sure, but that simply won’t work for a send-off. In a house where many of our greatest
memories have occurred around the dining room table, breakfast is a
religion. This called for a full
spread. I began making a shopping list
in my head. Knowing there were hours
before we had to be at our afternoon gathering, at 5 a.m I went ahead and got
up. At 6 a.m., I recognized I wouldn’t
be able to relax until I had bacon and eggs and bread and potatoes for my young
Crusader, so I went grocery shopping. We
finished our early morning feast before 8 a.m. and prepared to meet the bus
across town. We arrived with plenty of
time to spare. In an hour’s time, I
would be back at home, napping.
There was just one old man waiting for the bus when we
arrived. He appeared to be about seventy
and was waiting alone. He looked at the
logoed hoodie and cap I wore and chirped, “You a Cub fan?” I told him I was a baseball fan. Turn on a game and I will watch it. You can get fed up with the big money aspects
of the game. You can be sick to death of
the personalities of some of the players, but the game is always beautiful.
“My Dad played for Cincinnati in the thirties,” he told
me.
“They were still the Redlegs then,” I stated, letting him
know I knew a little history too.
“That’s right. He was
a catcher.”
My son Dan was a little league catcher. I gained a whole new appreciation for the
position after seeing what he went through.
There’s no wonder they make the best managers. They see the whole field, they know pitchers
and hitters intimately. The old man said
his father hadn’t stuck with it. There
wasn’t much money to be made in baseball then and it was considered kind of a
low-class occupation to be a ballplayer. He continued, “My son, he was a catcher, too. Drafted by the Mets. He was at Tidewater when he got the call, his
wife was going into labor. He asked to
be allowed to attend the birth of his child.
They told him ‘no’. He quit
baseball that very day.”
He fished in his pocket for a phone. Figuring the conversation with this stranger
was over, I started making my way back to where my wife and daughter were
standing. The old man raised his voice
to make sure I heard him. He was waving
his phone at me. It showed a young man
with an even younger boy. “He was a good
Dad,” he asserted and, indeed, there seemed to be real affection in the eyes of
the man and the boy. “We lost him, my
son, ten years ago. Lymphoma. I begged him to come up here, I said, ‘Son,
the people at u of M Hospital are great’ but he insisted he was getting good
care. Maybe he was. Anyway…”
But there’s really nowhere to go after that, is there? It is a violation of natural law for a parent
to see their child die. But he
continued. “I speak to my grandson nearly
every day. He’s in the Marines. He tells
me, ‘Grampa, you don’t have to worry about me.’ But…well, you know what I’m talking about.”
And I did. I did know
what he was talking about.
The sound of air brakes made us look up as the grey dog came
around the corner. The old man cleared
his throat and stuck out his hand. “It
was nice talking with you. I gotta get
moving because I need to sit near the front.
I don’t get around so good.” His
bag was already at the curb and soon he was too. I turned and Lucy was there. I had burned up all the time between our
arrival and her departure, ostensibly talking baseball with the old man. I hugged her and told her I loved her and
then all too quickly she was on the bus as well.
There was plenty of time when Kath and I got home to do
anything I wanted. But I didn’t
nap. I didn’t even doze. Suddenly, it seemed like a pleasure to be
awake and alive, watching from a distance as my child made steps towards her
major league dreams.
