Catch and Release. Repeat

Spring Training—Evanston, Illinois, 1964

I walk up close as I can to stare at the mortar between the bricks, close enough to pick at the flakes of an old warehouse advertisement that once covered the entire wall. My father and his brother played a sort of toss-and-bounce-back baseball here, back when this wall was the boundary to their yard, back when this ground even was a yard. I can't imagine grass, really, just hard pan and the split tufts of reedy growth, perhaps a clothesline, a pea gravel path to the alley behind. I am nine, my father's age when this was his family's home during the onset of the Great Depression.

Above it all looms this four-story wall. ALLIED COLD STORAGE. A mural that once played to a passing opulence: "Ladies! Summer Storage For Your Fine Furs! Bonded! Fire Proof!" Because it is February, and because where their house once stood is now an asphalt lot for a church's overflow of cars, maybe even because there's a fine misting sleet beginning to sting my ears, I have to pretend really hard to hear the thwap and wumple of a rubber Spaldeen, the high running fastballs of my father dimpling the hem of a lady in mink.

My dad has taken me along on a service call, a Sunday afternoon in late winter-early spring when an anytime rain along this southern stretch of Lake Michigan can turn to ice, and the wind from the east off the water lays down an elegant glaze of misery. It's the time of the year when people try to finick and coax their boilers and gravity furnaces through one more season, one last snap of cold. And this is the sort of busy that keeps my dad's shop flush and our home phone a constant interruption most evenings and weekends. I have just watched him wheedle an apartment's aging behemoth back to the living, with what looked like a nimble whispering from where I stood off shyly in the damp against a shuttered flume for coal.

My father has brought me here to show me the house where he once lived. Instead, we are walking around this parking lot beside a church and across Chicago Avenue from the raised tracks where the North Shore Line used to run. As my dad paces off steps from the wall, I am slowly tracing a strike zone on the bricks, one mitten off, and I am thinking, this spot, here, back then and now it is now, and now me. We turn and face each other. My father pantomimes a gangly wind up to a pitch, bluffing a tip off to his high-and-tight heater. I place my wrists together, close my eyes, and pretend to wiggle a bat I do not hold.

We go on this day to two more lots, all of them former sites of houses where my father used to live. All of them asphalt or gravel now. By the last, even he doesn't seem surprised and we don't even get out of the car. We sit in the stuttering yellow Falcon, the sound of the sleet revealing the tin economy of its make, the vinyl bench seats turning cold and stiff where our bodies cannot warm them. He smokes his Luckies, and I work on a peppermint I've found in the shelf that serves as a glove box.

Decades later, now in my fifties, I imagine hovering high above that small plot of Evanston, circling those vacant lots with penciled lines like the at-bats of a scorecard, a constellation to mark the source and direction of his life, maybe even my own. At each stop on that day's circuit of calls, there were things that could be fixed and things that you just had to imagine. Those boilers and burners were real and took well to wrenches. But my father's childhood, tucked in the rhythms of family and trains, the play-ball cadence of one-pitch-two-strike-three was difficult...