Things About Jack

It is Sunday night. The Dodgers are getting pounded by the Phillies and I am watching it all from the flat screen inside the bedroom I grew up in.

My children want to know why grandma and grandpa let me have a television in my room and I won’t do it for them. I laugh and tell them that when I was their age we didn’t have a color TV. It was a small 19″ black and white unit that came with those rabbit ears we used for antennae. Not to mention no remote, DVR or DVD player.

Haven’t lived here in decades. Feels strange to say that, but it is true. The room that I grew up is no more. The furniture, posters, books and trophies that helped make this room mine are long gone. It has been painted and there is a new wood floor.

All that remains are the memories of what once happened inside this place. A thousand memories of my childhood are wrapped up inside. Enough things happened inside here that even though it serves as my mother’s office I haven’t any trouble picturing what used to be.

My bed was positioned against almost every wall except the one that I am facing now. It has a desk against it, with the television just above it. It is too small for a bed, but the desk works just fine, in fact this is where mine once was.

I turn to the right and I see a big window. The blinds are drawn upon it but I know exactly what is outside. I don’t have to open it to see the neighbors den or to remember how at night I would watch television with them.

During the winter when the windows were closed I couldn’t hear a thing, all I could do was guess at what was being said. But not during summer. Summer nights they’d open the window and I’d open mine. If I closed the bedroom door no one would know what I was doing or more importantly what I was seeing.

The neighbors had daughters who were about seven and ten years older than I am. I remember one night when I was around ten or so being given a show by the oldest and the guy who eventually married her. Since the lights were out in my room they had no idea that I was in there. And I suppose since that room didn’t face the street it didn’t occur to them that pulling the blinds would be wise.

I saw a number of things that night that alternately interested and horrified me. I couldn’t understand why she moaned and wondered if she was being hurt. I remember considering getting out of bed to ask my parents if we should call the police to help her.

I decided against it because she didn’t yell for help. To ten year-old Jack that was important, not crying for help meant that she was ok. Besides I had a million sisters and knew that girls were weird so why ruin the show. This was the only time that I had ever seen this, most of the time it was television with her parents. There was no doubt in my mind if I told my parents that would kill future opportunities to watch late night television.

Later on as a teenager the memories made me more cautious about my own interaction with girls. I always made sure to draw the blinds or find some privacy somewhere.

Hard to believe that some of these memories are more than 30 years old and yet it is easy. The echoes of the past almost make it feel like the present yet at the same time it is clear that those days are gone. Watching the Dodgers get routed makes me miss those days.  I remember the championships from ’77 and ’78 when we beat the Phillies to win the pennant..

Davey Lopes is here, but he is coaching for the enemy now. Mike Schmidt isn’t anchoring third for the Phils and Ron Cey isn’t representing the boys in blue. Dusty Baker isn’t roaming the outfield with Reggie Smith and I am not begging to stay up late on a school night.

Not much more time to reminisce. I am here because I have to pick the folks up from the airport. They’re enjoying retired life and traveling to points unknown with some regularity. They live closer to the airport than I do so I figured that I’d swing by, use their treadmill, shower and then head out to pick them up.

Oh, did I mention that I am going to pick them up using dad’s car. It makes me laugh.  A big chunk of years ago it would have bothered me to admit that I am going to be driving daddy’s car, but I could care less now.

Besides I need to make a stop at Home Depot and his car is bigger than mine.  See you all later.

One day the dark haired beauty is going to be a big girl and she is going to have a lot of questions to ask me about my life. That is not to say that her big brother won’t, but his will be different. I know that she isn’t always going to be the cute five year-old who climbs into my lap and stares at me.

She won’t always be the little girl who likes to hug and kiss me. The girl who squeals with delight when I pick her up and run around the house will one day be too big for that game. The dark haired beauty who insists that I sit so that she can read me stories already shows a few signs of the girl she is turning into and the woman she’ll become..

So I know that one day she will sit me down and demand that I answer a few questions about who I am and who I was before I became her daddy. And I rather suspect that one of them will be something along the lines of, “tell me about your first love.”

And when that day comes I am going to smile and play this song for her.

Baseball was my first love. I’ll tell her about a five year-old boy who grew up last century thinking that he was going to play in the major leagues. She’ll hear about how I used to sleep with my glove and how much fun it was to just play catch.

I’ll tell her about the triumphs and the tragedies. She’ll learn about how I cried when I made the last out in the championship game when I was nine. I’ll talk about how I led the league in home runs when I was 12.

The stories of the Dodgers of the 70s will be a part of that. The anger I felt in the ’78 series when Reggie Jackson wasn’t called out for interfering with a throw and the redemption of the ’81 season.

I’ll tell her about how good I once was and how life got in the way of my dreams. We’ll talk about whether I would have come close to making it, had things gone a different way. I’ll be honest and say that there is no way to say that I would have made it. I stopped playing so long ago that I can’t say that my skills would have been close.

In some respects I can lay claim to having been forced to retire at the top of my game. It is not an exaggeration to say that in my league there wasn’t anyone better than I was, maybe equal, but not better. It is a nice memory, but it is just that.

The death of that dream doesn’t bother me much anymore. It is so far away, not to mention that it is highly questionable whether it could have translated from my head to reality.

But in that conversation or another I’ll talk to my girl about dreams. I’ll tell her what I really think. I’ll let her know that I think that dreams are critical to being happy and that sometimes they don’t have to remain just a dream.

Because I really do believe that life is meant to be lived. I don’t want to live a life in which I fill the empty places with dreams of what could be. I want to live those dreams and that is a lesson worth passing along.