Jay, 7, to MomScribe: Do you know that song, Proud to be an American?
MomScribe: Yes.
Jay: Can you sing it for me?
MomScribe: No.
Jay: Why not?
MomScribe: Because I have a terrible singing voice, and I don’t know the words.
Me, from downstairs: Ha ha ha ha ha!
Jay: Why is he laughing at you?
MomScribe: Because I’m funny.
He’ll stand soon enough. Until then, at least he hasn’t ruled it out forever.
I can’t.
Yes, you can.
He makes that sound, the one between a whine and a groan. He’s sitting down, but he somehow manages to flounce where he sits before screwing up his face and his gumption and yelling:
No. I. CAN’T.
Yes. Yes, you can.
But kids know, don’t they? They know their limitations, or their imagined limitations. Something, instinct maybe, holds them back when they approach that thin, red line. They know that on the other side of the line they’ll find frustration and tears and – probably – pain.
Maybe it’s because of the fresh, if subconscious, memory of those first, halting steps as a toddler and of the many falls that followed. Maybe it’s because all they’ve known since they exited the womb was long stretches of failure, punctuated by incremental moments of triumph that almost immediately were relegated to the foothills of achievement that crouch in the shadow of the mountain of What Else You Got?
Dad or Alive: Confessions of an Unexpected Stay-at-Home Dad. Wirtten by my friend Adrian Kulp. It launches Tuesday!
I met Adrian Kulp at a karaoke bar among a big group of parent bloggers in Houston on the first night of the Dad 2.0 Summit this past winter. I was a little drunk on whiskey and adrenaline. Adrian and I bonded over baseball.
He told me he has been a die-hard Phillies fan since the days of Schmidt, Rose and Carlton. I told him my dad was a Phillies fan when I was growing up, and that the first major-league stadium I visited was the old Vet in (I think) 1976. I might have mentioned my former job, and he might have mentioned that – oh, yeah – he had this book coming out in the spring based on his blog, Dad or Alive.
The book is entitled (appropriately enough) Dad or Alive: Confessions of an Unexpected Stay-at-Home Dad. It launches Tuesday (tomorrow), and I could not be more pleased to tell you that it is every bit as entertaining and insightful as I had hoped it would be. (And, frankly, expected it to be.)
Adrian sang something at that karaoke bar that night. I can’t remember what. Might’ve been Pearl Jam, or it might’ve been the Doors. Maybe Nine Inch Nails. I don’t know. The whiskey and the intoxicating company of so many fellow parents/writers/bloggers on that concentrated, transformative night and weekend made the details a bit blurry. I just know that I didn’t sing and I bugged out sometime before 1 a.m., because – like Adrian, as I learned from the story in his book of a post-fatherhood bachelor party – I have always had this internal alarm bell that sounded when my body knew I had had enough and it was time to slink back home. I also knew I’d need my wits about me for the next day’s full slate of panels and speeches and interactions with fellow bloggers and brand representatives, because that’s what it was about.
I saw Adrian a few more times over the weekend, and each time I reminded him I wanted to get that book to review. I’m glad I did, for many reasons.
It is always gratifying to be entrusted with writing about something like this. I have never written a book (more on that pitiful factoid below), but I can imagine how grueling the whole process can be. Talent and a story to tell are only part of it. You always have to have the will and energy to see the project through to fruition, and the savvy to be its shepherd and advocate once it has published. Here’s the thing about Adrian’s book – the stories in it might soon be coming to a TV screen near you: Adrian’s blog bio mentions a potential deal with Sony Pictures Television and Happy Madison Productions on a possible scripted TV show. Oh, and his wife, Jen, is listed as an EP on a forthcoming A&E reality show called Modern Dads (about – hey, where have we heard this before? – life as a stay-at-home dad). He clearly worked hard to put this together, and even though I envy him the title “published author,” I would like to think I can rise above my own petty self-esteem issues and get past the shameful fact that I have never summoned the gumption to actually see a book through to the end.
(Ahem. Where were we? Oh, yes. I was being magnanimous.)
I also love the idea of a fellow dad blogger contributing to the ongoing education of the general public about what it means to be a dad in the 21st century. He does this without resorting to “Mr. Mom” or “Three Men and a Baby” tricks. The truth is funny enough without the lame gags tossed in. This is the story of a stay-at-home dad who has tasted the big-time career track on a big-time stage, only to step away from that big-time job and devote his time and energy to a “non-traditional” role. He once rubbed elbows with show-biz hot shots. Then, that was over, and he found himself spending his days with a baby daughter (there is now a son, as well). As someone who lost his job shortly after the birth of a second son and stayed home for 19 months before returning to the full-time workforce, I can absolutely empathize with Adrian’s tales that reveal his and his wife’s occasional (and more than occasionally funny) struggles with adjusting to their respective roles.
There’s a lot of honesty in this book, right down to the witheringly funny dialogue between Adrian and Jen. Adrian’s reverse-psychology argument in favor of finding a sacred place to store (and … fondle?) his collection of wine corks, LEGO mini figures, and other miscellaneous toys collector’s items was at once pathetic and touching. What parent doesn’t long for an inner sanctum, a warm burrow to nestle in, an oasis for deep contemplation and reflection? And if that place is packed with PEZ dispensers and vintage 1980s GI Joe figures, so much the better.
I’ll leave it with this, from Adrian himself, toward the end of his freshly minted book. It sums things up for this (and just about any) stay-at-home dad nicely, I think:
“It took me a minute to come around, but this is my dream job and I consider myself extremely lucky to have it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
Am I worried about what people think of me?
I shouldn’t be. I’m doing one of the most important jobs there is.
I don’t need to be the breadwinner to know that I’m leaving my mark.
While I lost a job, I gained a lot more. I gained perspective. I gained a best friend.
My daughter.”
_________________________________________
I received a copy of the book, Dad or Alive: Confessions of an Unexpected Stay-at-Home Dad for review purposes. Opinions expressed are my own. If I ever remember what song Adrian sang at the karaoke bar, I might try to update. Otherwise, pretend it was Pearl Jam. Let’s say … Jeremy? Yeah. Sounds about right.
“Dad, are angels real?”
Not what I expected to hear tonight as I tossed supper onto the stove. I waited a beat, turned toward the kitchen table.
“Why do you ask, Jay?”
“Because I don’t know.”
Fair enough. But I wasn’t quite ready to give him my answer. So …
“Well, what do you think?”
He pointed toward the ceiling.
“Are they up there?”
“On the ceiling?”
“No,” he said. “The place on the clouds. What’s on the clouds?”
“Rain?”
“NO,” he said. “Heaven.”
“How do you know that’s heaven?”
He has read it somewhere, or seen it on a TV show or a movie. Or perhaps he heard it at school or at his after-school center. We’ve not had many conversations of a religious nature yet with the boys. We don’t go to church, but the idea is to give our sons a grounding in spirituality and right and wrong, as well as we can. Then we’ll let the boys make their own decisions about religious beliefs when they’re old enough. Not saying that’s the way it ought to be done, necessarily, but it’s right for us, and that’s how we’re going to do it.
Meanwhile, back in the clouds …
Jay told me he read about heaven in a book on the Civil War. Someone was hungry and scared, and they prayed to the angels for food and protection. I can imagine why a kid — anyone, really — would want to know if that works.
Hence, the question.
“So, what do you think, buddy? Are angels real?”
“Well, I don’t actually know,” he said. “But do you think they’re real?”
“I don’t actually know, either,” I said.
“No one knows,” he said.
“No one knows?”
“No one.”
No one.
So … DadCentric. Cool.
I mean it. I was blown away when I got invited to read from this blog at the Dad 2.0 Summit in February, and I’m equally stunned to find myself in the company of giants at the dad blog rated No. 4 overall in 2012 by Babble and No. 1 among group blogs.
So, my plan for world domination is proceeding as I have foreseen.
I wrote my introductory piece and posted it on DadCentric. Of course, it followed an incredible piece by Two Busy about the aftermath of the Boston Marathon. I waited as long as I could before posting, because what? My first post has to follow that act? Didn’t matter, though. As I wrote over there, it would’ve had to follow something brilliant, no matter how long I waited.
That’s one reason I’m so stoked to joined DadCentric. Put simply: Those SOBs can really write. Every one of them. I’ve linked to most of them in posts before, but here’s a Twitter list I created that includes them all (I think; If I forgot anyone, take it out of my next paycheck, Jason Avant).
But what about DadScribe? Well, this will still happen. In fact, here’s something: the first (pretty terrible) draft of my DadCentric intro post. Only loyal readers of DadScribe, all three or four of you (hi, Grandma!) will get this version. Call it a thank you gift for all of you, the DadScribe readership. I mean that sincerely. (Although, don’t take any of what follows seriously. Please. Don’t.)
_________________________
We don’t have much time, so I’ll keep this short. All that stuff I wrote in my DadCentric bio was BS. I mean, I was a sportswriter, but I didn’t cost the Cubs a spot in the 2003 World Series. I didn’t open a tombstone business in Key West. My family and I don’t live in a shack in the swamp outside of Micanopy, Florida. I wrote all that under duress. Somebody needs to call the police. Now.
OK, the swamp thing is true.
But the rest is fiction. See, like Michael Bublé under the cold, hard glare of bully boy Jon Hamm in that SNL skit about a restaurant that only served sparkling wine and pork products, I am not a free man.
Call the police. Seriously.
The perp is this rugby player, this Jason “Pet Cobra” Avant, the Snake Plissken of dad bloggers. It started innocently enough, a brief encounter over drinks at a karaoke bar in Houston. We were in town for the lawn mower convention. When I met him, I could tell he was pretty drunk.
“I like your blog,” I said.
“Who the hell are you?” he said.
Oh, that wily cobra. He had me at “Who.” Long story short, he asked me if I liked money, and then mumbled something about trying to tell the difference between Father Muskrat and college sports reporter Andy Staples of SI.com. Then somebody threw a sack over my head and dragged me away. Next thing I know, I wake up here with one ankle chained to this radiator in the basement of some deaf-mute’s home in Edmonton (I think; I’m pretty sure I’m somewhere in Canada). Now, he’s got me scribbling gibberish for DadCentric. He pops in at odd moments to make sure I’m still working. I’m paid in snark and “exposure.” He’s a sick twist, that Avant.
Listen, I don’t have long. He or one of his minions could be back any second now. Forget the cops. Tell my family I’m alive, and I love them, and to read my personal blog if they start to miss me too much. Now, go! Save yourself. You don’t want him to catch you here. I think he might still be “recruiting.”
_________________________
So, yeah. Reaching a little, I know. Why do you think I re-wrote it? But seriously. Click on the Twitter links I included in the first draft up there. The Muskrat and Andy Staples of Sports Illustrated — separated at birth.
So, that’s about it. I write for DadCentric now. Pretty cool, yeah? Yeah. Pretty cool.
I envy published authors. They just make me want to toss my laptop into the dumpster. But published authors who can also BUILD A SWING SET FROM SCRATCH IN THEIR BACK YARDS?
There’s a special place in the purgatory of the smug set aside just for them.
I’m joking, of course.
Even if I wanted to despise Mike Adamick because of his many successes (which I don’t), I couldn’t. He’s just too darn nice. So what if he was named the No. 1 dad blogger in Babble’s inaugural top 50 list in 2011? And so what if he proved he is the handy dad of all time by compiling and publishing the Dad’s Book of Awesome Projects, which publishes May 18 and is available now for order on Amazon? Does all of that make him a smug jerk?
Nope. Absolutely not. In fact, quite the opposite. I met him only briefly in early February at the Dad 2.0 Summit in Houston, but — like so many fellow bloggers there — he came off as extraordinarily nice. I already knew he was extraordinarily talented. I also knew that, like me, his background was in newspapers.
When I found out he was on the verge of publishing his book, I made sure I got in line to receive a review copy. For one thing, I knew it would be a well-written book. For another, selfishly, I couldn’t wait to do some of these projects with the boys.
We flipped through the pages together and found one — Crayon Shapes, Page 39 — that we could do after school. And bonus: The neighbor kids arrived home just in time to join us.
Now, because I knew we would be doing this project today, and because I wanted this to be the coolest version of Crayon Shapes ever performed, I went to the mall on my lunch break and bought some Star Wars cookie cutters. We weren’t going to settle for your hearts and stars and Teddy bears. We wanted the Millenium Falcon, the Death Star, an X-wing fighter and Darth Vader’s very own TIE fighter.
Oh, yes.
Here, then, is how the project progressed, in photos. Bear in mind that I am as crafty and handy as a plastic bag of pine bark. So, any shortcomings in the final result were entirely my fault. Also, we varied from Mike’s instructions a bit. I used a medium-sized baking pan instead of a muffin tin. And I cooked the crayons at 275 degrees, rather than the prescribed 250. Perhaps the results would have been more in keeping with the spirit of AWESOMENESS that pervades the book if I had followed the instructions to the letter. But I like to think part of what Mike’s book is about is branching out, adventuring, learning with your kids and, ultimately, having fun.
Which we did. And actually, when you look at the backs of our chocolate-cookie-looking Star Wars shapes, you see the aurora borealis. As my seven-year-old son observed, it was quite beautiful.
Maybe soon we can try the Homemade Goo Slime, the Super Hero Capes or the Wooden Sword. I don’t see me building a swing set in the back yard any time soon, but at least now I know it can be done, and this awesome book tells me how to do it.
First, we peeled crayons. We peeled a lot of crayons.
What craft couldn’t use a little touch of Star Wars?
Crayons! In a baking pan!
We cooked crayons. Let me just repeat that, so there’s no confusion: We cooked crayons. Crayon soup!
OK, so maybe we should’ve stuck with the muffin tins. We got a chocolaty goo, rather than the rainbow wax batter we should’ve gotten. Still, though, these look cool. Oh, and be sure to use cooking spray on the cookie molds. Our poor Death Star was a casualty because I forgot that important step!
Here they are, freed from their chocolaty bonds. Make sure, no matter what, that you tell the four-year-old in your house NOT TO TRY TO EAT THE CRAYON COOKIES.
Turn them over, and … all the colors of the northern lights. So, so cool.
The Basin – San Francisco.
On a crisp, bright morning in San Francisco, as I stood apart from the semi-circular line of tourists who waited to board the cable car at the Powell/Mason turntable, I saw a young woman exit a black car that had stopped in the Market Street bicycle lane. She got out of the car and walked toward me.
I saw her piercings as she walked – black studs in her nose and lower lip, a small gold hoop in the corner of her left eye. Short, dark hair, black t-shirt, stained denim skirt, black Chuck Taylor high-tops. Pasty white skin, thick black eye shadow.
Staring straight into my eyes, she walked in my direction. She didn’t stop, though. As she passed – close enough to whisper – she looked me in the eyes and told me in a low, clear voice:
“You don’t love us.”
She broke eye contact and walked on. I stood there and watched her melt into the crowd of tourists, past the cable car turntable, up Powell Street, on toward Union Square and back into her Gothic oblivion.
It didn’t even occur to me to try to contradict her.
_______________________
She was right, though. I didn’t love her.
Yet, over the years, a decade and more, I have replayed that scene in my mind so many times that even the memory flickers, like an old film exposed far too often to the projector’s hot light. It’s not my most vivid memory, or anywhere near my most relevant.
Those would be things like, you know, our wedding in Boston, the births of our two sons, waking up healthy after emergency angioplasty … life-altering or live-saving events. My Memories, with a capital M.
Yet, that moment in San Francisco has stayed with me. There was no reason for that particular young woman or her peculiar declaration to stand out in a four-decade-long swirl of memories. You don’t love us, she said. But …
I am her. And so are you. And so is everyone you know, and everyone you ever have known or ever will know. And she is you. She is my wife, my sons, my mother and father, everything I have ever loved or ever will love. She is every word I’ve ever written or will write or will read, every tear I’ve shed and every smile I’ve smiled. She is my everything and she is your everything, too. You don’t have to love someone, or even know their name – or even know they are alive a decade after a fleeting encounter on a bright cool morning – for all of that to be true.
This is empathy.
It is remembering every detail about the girl on the street who looked into your soul and walked right on past and disappeared forever into the crowd. It is four words – you don’t love us – carved into your cortex like a hieroglyph on a temple wall, taunting you with its complex simplicity.
Empathy.
It’s the visceral response we feel toward a grieving father when we see photographs of his smiling little boy, gone now, carefully holding up with just the tips of his fingers a hand-lettered sign that reads, “No more hurting people. Peace.” It’s the overwhelming urge to weep, the unavoidable shudder, the inexorable need to make physical contact with our small children after we read or hear accounts of a deadly day on the first-grade wing of an elementary school in Connecticut.
It’s running toward the bomb blast to see if there’s anything you can do to help those who were in it. It’s the physical inability to sit through a movie because some people you never met were gunned down during the midnight premier in a theater a thousand miles away.
Empathy.
It’s the spark and flutter of what I guess scientists these days are calling mirror neurons, which fire off signals that make us unconsciously reproduce emotions we witness – or imagine we witness – being expressed by someone else.
Evidently, some of us have more active mirror neurons than others.
_______________________
Did you know that the word empathy didn’t enter the English language until the early 1900s? It was introduced by psychologist (and Oxford man) Edward B. Titchener as a translation of the German term einfühlung (“in” the “feeling”), which itself was a loose translation of the Greek term empatheia (“in” “pathos”), having to do with art appreciation. I didn’t know any of that, either, until I looked it up.
Empathy. It’s the unspoken recognition of the knowledge that we’re all going to die. It’s the shared, and the sharing. It’s the point in space and time where “we” intersect “they.”
It’s the truth behind you don’t love us.
And that truth is this …
Even now, so many years later, I want to run after that Goth girl in San Francisco and catch up to her in the crowd, and tell her that she’s right, that I don’t love her or anyone else in her life. But so what? I don’t have to love you. You still matter to me because the part of you inside that makes you human is inside me, too, and I love that part of both of us and all of us because that’s what life is. It’s what being alive is.
Empathy is life itself, acknowledging its presence and luminosity in the other.
_______________________
This is the latest entry in the Word of the Week series. For details and earlier entries, click here. And please, if you like, take a moment to share in the comments section what the word empathy means to you.
During the five-minute drive home from after-school care Wednesday, there came a small voice from the backseat of my car.
“Dad?” said my seven-year-old son. “Can we go to Target? Pleeeeassse?”
I glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
“No. Why?”
“Because. I want to get (inaudible) and I have some extra money.”
“You want to get a what? And wait … extra money? How much? Where’d you get it?”
In my mirror, I saw him hold up two one-dollar bills.
“Two dollars,” he said. “Gretchen gave it to me on the playground.”
I had never heard him mention Gretchen (name changed).
“She … who? Why’d she give you money?”
What would President Washington have done if a first-grade girl had given him $3 for no apparent reason? (Pictured: One of the actual dollar bills gifted to my son by an admirer.)
He lowered the bills, sensing from my increasingly agitated and alarmed tone of voice that they would not be his to spend much longer.
“I don’t know,” he said.
But he knew, all right. Or, his tone told me he thought he knew. He just didn’t want to say. I couldn’t blame him.
“Come on, now,” I said. “Why did she give you money?”
Then something occurred to me. I actually had heard her name before. In fact, I had heard it just ONE DAY before.
“Wait,” I said. “Is she the one who gave you that coin yesterday?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think … I think she just wants to be my friend.”
The coin was one of those brass-colored presidential dollars. You know, the ones that pay homage to all the unknown presidents ever to hold office. The coins you get back in change at the zoo and practically no place else on Earth. He’d mentioned the coin on Tuesday. I asked him that afternoon why she gave him the coin, and he just said she wanted him to have it. Then I immediately asked him what he had done with that coin.
“I bought a snack with it,” he had said.
Fair enough. It was only a dollar. Probably had Millard Fillmore on it. No big deal.
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By Wednesday afternoon, though, the same first-grade girl had given our first-grade son three dollars in two days, for no apparent reason. And he had accepted that generous gift with no questions asked, apparently. I presume he asked no questions, anyway, because when I pressed him for a reason why she gave him three dollars, he repeated his theory that she just wanted to be his friend. So, he clearly had no Earthly idea. Or if he did, he wasn’t ready to tell me.
His four-year-old brother had another hypothesis.
“She wanted to kiss you,” said the four-year-old.
“NO!” answered the seven-year-old.
“But listen,” I started. “Why would she … ?”
I stopped pressing, because … well, sometimes even little kids just need space. Sometimes, little kids, especially, need space.
Yet, because it is wrong to accept unearned, unsolicited money from little girls on the school playground, we convinced our first-grader to give it all back, all three dollars, the next time he saw her. We emphasized that he shouldn’t be conspicuous.
“What’s conspic … conspicu … ?” he said.
We emphasized that he shouldn’t make a big deal out of it in front of a bunch of other kids, that he should just tell her, nicely, that Mommy and Daddy don’t allow him to take money from others. Then, give it back to her. Be kind, we said. Don’t hurt her feelings.
We didn’t ask him to tell her that friendship can’t be bought. We didn’t even ask him to tell her that he would be her friend, money or no money. If he wants to be friends with her, fine. If not, fine.
__________________________________
Sure, it crossed my mind. What if he stole it?
No. No chance. I felt sick just considering the possibility. He is honest to a fault, as honest as the family dog, as straight as uncooked spaghetti. He knows right from wrong.
But … what if it was a playground protection payoff? What if our seven-year-old son had, without our knowledge, broken into our Sopranos DVD set and learned the art of the shakedown from Tony and Paulie and Silvio?
What if she was paying him to quit bugging the hell out of her? Or what if he had done her homework for her, and this was the fee?
He accepted her money, whatever her reason for giving it. He clearly knew he hadn’t earned it. What kind of monster are we raising?!?
OK. Not a monster. A shark. He knows a sweet deal when he sees one. He saw the angle, which was free money from a girl at school, and he played it.
The “why” of it didn’t matter much. Besides, it’s probably exactly what it looks like.
It’s the age-old story. Girl meets boy. Girl likes boy. Girl pays boy cold, hard cash. Indifferent boy buys a snack and begs unsuccessfully for a trip to Target to spend that cash just as fast as he possibly can. Boy grudgingly gives cash back to girl. A classic tale of young love denied.
It’s a mommy, a daddy and the kids. And their pets. They live under the same roof and do everything together.
That’s what my seven-year-old son says family means. Then I ask him about Mimi and Granddaddy, Pop and Grandma Judy, the great-grandmas and aunts and uncles, the cousins – and all their pets, all their roofs.
They’re all family, too, he says.
And all their friends?
And the people who came before, the great-great-grandparents and the nameless faces that stare back at us from 100-year-old black and white photographs? The ones who came before that? The men, women and children who lived lives we never consider from day to day, but whose every action in life helped shape who we are? Or who we think we are?
Yes. They’re all family, too.
The Britons? The Romans? The Greeks? The Gauls? The Egyptians? The Syrians? The Algerians? The Mongols? Were they family? When does it end? Where, and with whom? How? Or does it end at all?
Take it all the way back. The biological thread stretches backward, unbroken across eons. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years ago … someone (many someones) walked the planet then who carried around the very essence of you.
They could not conceive that you would one day exist, any more than you can envision their lives or deaths. Those long-ago people were family.
But what if we’re adopted?
Um. Family is as family does. Momma always said family is like a box of chocolates.
There are other kinds of family.
La famiglia. La Cosa Nostra. The Godfather. The Sopranos. Every time I think I’m out …
I’ve heard members of certain athletic teams call themselves a member of a family. They did not mean this literally. Although other members of certain athletic teams seemed always to be growing their families, one paternity suit at a time. What did family mean to them? That, I can’t fathom.
There are others.
The church, the synagogue, the temple, the mosque, the congregation, the flock — the family.
Between order and genus, there is family. It’s like this: life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. It’s all very scientific.
What is family?
It is blood, sure. But it also is the group of people, or the person, or the animal companion that make you who you are, and give you comfort when it can be found nowhere else. That same group of people, or that same person, or that same animal companion can rend your heart and piss you off at depths no one else can understand. Maddening, isn’t it?
They’re close, you see?
Family is close. Even when they aren’t. And there’s this.
Your Mongolian or Celtic ancestor carried within her the spark of you. You carry within you the germ of a germ of an idea of what could one day be a family member who will never know you existed. If you procreate, of course. There’s that.
Which brings us back to:
It’s a mommy, a daddy and the kids. And their pets. They live under the same roof and do everything together.
Yes. That’s good enough for our family. That’s good enough for now.
Family.
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This is the first installment of my new series, the ASCO Word of the Week. Once a week (or thereabouts), I’ll wax poetic on the meaning of a particular word, a la the famous Essay that not long ago was a mainstay in the admissions process for the revered All Souls College, Oxford. This is not that, but it’s my way of paying homage to that quirky, fantastic tradition.
The rotunda at Tropicana Field is a bright, welcoming portal. It’s the front porch of the big, old, dusty (but always pleasant) dome.
Once again, I found myself at Tropicana Field on Tuesday afternoon, blinking away the memories. I thought it might get easier the more often I went, the more time and space I put between myself and my former self. But no. It’s not easier. It’s the same. Mostly.
Only …
This time, I didn’t gaze quite so often down toward the press box, trying to discern with my weakening eyes who was sitting in my seat. No. It’s not mine. Not anymore.
And …
I found myself more engaged in conversation with those around me in the Bobby Doerr Suite than enraptured by the action on the field. Make no mistake – I watched David Price pitch against the Orioles Tuesday, and I saw Evan Longoria make Gold Glove play after Gold Glove play. I saw, too, Jake McGee’s agony in a five-run Orioles seventh. When I did watch, my mind clicked back into the old habit of looking for every minute detail of every play, seeking the differentiator, the true turning point, looking beyond the obvious for the interesting and the eternal. When I wrote about baseball, I used to watch for those moments like a cat watches a bouncing feather tied to a stick – not mesmerized, exactly, but poised to snatch it and make that moment my own.
The view from the Bobby Doerr Suite at Tropicana Field.
But …
We left, my fellow parent blogger and I, in the eighth inning. We left bearing gifts after an enjoyable Opening Day afternoon. I was accompanied by Scotty Schrier, writer and publisher of DadsWhoChangeDiapers.com, and we were there as guests of the Tampa Bay Rays. Which also was … odd … for me. Odd, but pretty cool, too. And we left before the game was done, because we could, and because it was time for us to go. We came, we saw, we enjoyed, and we tried to beat the rush hour traffic across the Howard Frankland Bridge and home to our families.
So …
We come to it, the reason why it HAS to be different now for me, why my old way of thinking about this ball club and this stadium no longer applies. I used to cover this team for a newspaper. Now, thanks to an out-of-the-blue email from the Rays’ marketing department, I am one of several Tampa Bay area bloggers who are part of something entirely new in Major League Baseball – a local blogger outreach program with an eye toward telling stories about the fan experience at Tropicana Field, as well as the emotional connection the fans share with the team.
The Rays touch tank, just beyond the right-center field fence.
It starts with this year’s theme: Welcome Home. I understood the idea behind it the minute I saw the campaign reported in the Tampa Bay Times. Remember, this was a team that finished last in attendance in 2012, but finished eighth in MLB in terms of TV viewership. There is an obvious connection between the Rays and their fans, a connection that never has been reflected in the average attendance. The Rays, beginning their 16th season, now feel like the home team. A generation of kids have grown up with them. To those kids, no matter where life takes them, the Rays will always mean home.
It has taken a while for that to happen. I was there in the bad old days, when a “crowd” of 4,000 people was announced as 8,500 routinely. When 100-loss seasons were routine. When you could sit on press row and distinctly make out spoken conversations between fans sitting behind either dugout. When the Devil was in details of the organization, as well as in the name.
2012 AL Cy Young Award winner David Price celebrates after a strikeout. The first 20,000 fans at Saturday’s game between the Rays and the Indians receive a pretty cool figurine based on this photo. (Image courtesy of the Tampa Bay Rays)
I also was there for the early days of the Stu Sternberg-Matt Silverman-Andrew Friedman-Joe Maddon transition. I had a lot of conversations with all four of them back then about how they intended to fix what they had inherited. I didn’t always share their vision. But then … I’m me – a laid-off baseball scribe working now in Internet marketing – and they are the Fantastic Four who shaped what has become the most respected organization in baseball.
And … this: I guess some might call me a shill. I did accept the team’s invitation, after all, to spend the afternoon in the Bobby Doerr Suite. To partake of their chicken fingers and diet soda. To grab the bag of April giveaways on my way out.
Doesn’t matter. I know where I stand now. It might always be weird for me to go back to the Trop. But I wonder. When is it not a little weird going back to the old places? When are the ghosts ever exorcised?
Joe Maddon gnome, Price figurine, Astro bobblehead dog. Guess which one my sons want to break … I mean, play with first? Once again, Cy Price is overshadowed by the dog.
I’m pretty sure now that’ll never happen for me, not completely. I can never be a fan, really, because I spent too many years zealously honing and guarding my objectivity. It’s ingrained now. I could no more root for the Rays than I could hit Price’s fastball. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate what the Rays have become. In fact, it might even strengthen any argument I might make in favor of the experience of being a Rays fan — if I say it or write it, you know I mean it. I never pulled punches when I covered the team, and I don’t intend to start now.
Yet, I’m still learning how to do this. This is a different role for me. It’s enough for me to know now that I can look at this organization through a fresh set of eyes, the eyes of a father of two sons who already have begun to form an allegiance with this team that I’ll never enjoy, but will encourage in them with all of my might.
One day, maybe my sons will focus in on the game situation in a given moment, try to guess along with the batter, anticipate the hit-and-run, appreciate a well-executed sacrifice bunt, attempt to interpret the intricacies of the unwritten rules that govern player behavior on and off the field. Maybe they will love the game like I do.
Only, they’ll do so through the prism of Rays fanhood. That’s something I can absolutely get behind, and if they invite me back, I’ll surely go. It might feel weird, but then, isn’t it always when you go home again?
Just a couple of Rays fans, excited about Opening Day.
