Prologue
Another October. Baseball playoffs compete with football on crisp Sunday afternoons. Wearing a ragged Braves tee-shirt, I curl up in a corner of the sofa and watch the game. But for so many years, baseball has been more than a game. . . . The playoffs will end. And next year, all the old memories will come flooding back. . .
World Series and World’s End. . .
On opening night this year or next--the first Tuesday in April, more or less--baseball teams will spit and scratch through their first game. Some good ol’ boy will "whup" some other boy's ass; the Braves will lose. And either Mom will call me, or I'll pick up the phone.
"So whaddya think?" one of us will ask.
What my kids think--the boys anyway--is that I'm nuts. A grown woman, going berserk when the game's not on? Fighting over the channel—for baseball? Wearing a tee-shirt with holes front and back, because it was the Braves first winning year?
They try, I guess. I explained some of baseball and me; they listened. They know that I was 11 the year the Braves moved to Atlanta, that their grandmother calls me up to discuss the game. At least, they reason, she's old, eccentric, and in Tampa. Baseball clubs train there and stuff.
And stuff. They'll never understand why baseball means what it does to me. I've tried to explain. I was a Georgian before I was a Texan. My mom drove me three hundred miles to see a Braves game for my 12th birthday. It was Fans' Photo Day, but I was shy, so I left my camera at home and pretended I forgot it. That way, Mom wouldn't force me to get up close to players I liked and take bad pictures. If I had, of course I might have had real collector items--Hank Aaron in his horrible "pajama" uniform--but a twelve-year old doesn't know.
Some of my other memories are tied to what twelve-year olds shouldn't know at all, ever…wanting to get out, away from the house. Hearing the ball game outside, the whoops and cheers of the neighborhood kids and brothers and sisters. Wanting to walk out in the sun, to feel safe enough, clean enough, good enough to play ball. . .hating. No twelve-year old should hate. It mars even Georgiasummers, baseball games. . . I guess I started caring whether the Braves won or lost only because he was always above baseball—or said he was.
My boys know they had an uncle named Greg--one of my sons is named for him. Gregory and I followed the Braves, the Reds. . .Pete Rose. The year my brother was killed, he was training for a spring tryout with the Reds. Whether or not he would have made it is immaterial: he wanted to. And because it meant so much to him, I knew then that he would have made the team.
He probably hated, too, for reasons unlike mine--he was always the klutz, the stubborn one, the one who could have but didn't. He didn't need baseball for others--he needed it for himself. My father died four months before he did--maybe by spring, the need would have gone; I don't know. But baseball ties me to him, as it does to my mom. . .and if the boys don't know, maybe that's better.
The girls, though. . . . Sure, they laugh at their Mom-the-Jock. Forty, overweight, out of shape. They don't follow the Braves as avidly as I do--but mostly, they're there. Jamie thinks the guys look good in their uniforms--I once wrote love poetry to an obscure second baseman. Ties deepen with time. Maybe Lee's interest is passing--but she does the play-by-play for me when I miss a game. They know things the boys don't.
When we opened the amusement park in Greenville, an ex-con used to come around. He had an orange Duster. Did wheelies. He worked in a factory and wanted to marry me. He hated the Braves, though. Sometimes I wonder: what if I'd gone off with him? Couldn't have been worse, really, could it?--but there was always the Braves thing.
The girls pretend they understand that the Atlanta Braves are part of who I used to be--when I didn't know the word "gringa," and believed absolutely in marriage, motherhood, and possibility. They frown now, when I doubt. I assure them that motherhood's still pretty cool. Mostly. But a lot of the teenager who followed the Braves, the young woman who followed the Braves--a lot of her is gone; she needs whatever is left.
The world officially ended in 1995; mom and I know that. She, my brother and I always held that the world would end when Atlanta won the World Series. That life goes on unchanged, teenagers still hate, pre-teens learn to hate--that all is much as it was is hardly the point. Much as the Braves went from one losing season to another because "there's always next year," so we go on. There is always another day, year, life. Another season of losing--but even then, teams take the field every April; Moms call. Eventually, losers win. . . losing teams become dynasties. Seasons begin, end. . .begin. There’s a certain amount of pride in having hung on, through so many seasons. . .on being here for the next. . . somehow, it always matters again.
