I Found Him in Baseball

He was a catcher, so I went looking for him in baseball.

He was a stranger to me. A flat figure in black and white, eight-by-ten glossy photographs captured by Wrigley Field photographers standing next to the likes of Casey Stengel, Ernie Banks, Yogi Berra, Sandy Koufax, and Frank Robinson. It was the golden age of baseball, and my father was there. These men knew him. Baseball knew him. If I wanted to know him, I would have to go there.

Everything that belonged to him was in a box in my closet. I moved that box around with me, sometimes leaving it behind stored at my mother's house. An occasional yearning would take me to the box. I would retrieve it and look at it apprehensively. Did I dare to open it? What I wanted was not inside that box, but the box was all I had. It contained only a pair of glasses, a Lenoir High School class ring, a deck of playing cards, a butane lighter, strange odds and ends like an empty binocular case, and a surplus of black and white photographs. I would stare at these images, looking at his hands, his eyes, his smile. I would hold the ring sometimes slipping it onto my thumb. I kept thinking these things were infused with some sort of fatherly essence, but I felt nothing. I was trying to gain access to a ghost.

My favorite picture was one of the few color images I had of us together. In the image, we are positioned against the bricks of Wrigley Field along the third base line. I am sitting on his lap, with a bright red handbag around my wrist. The two-year-old me clutches a ball. I am smiling. I look perfectly content there nestled in his arm and against his chest. He seems at ease with me on his lap and is smiling proudly, showing his teeth. His hand rests on my leg anchoring me to him. I have no memory of being there. This is where it ended for me and my father. Six months later he died of leukemia.

I went on to live my life without him.

One afternoon, I was holding my two-year-old on my lap, just like the Wrigley Field photograph in reverse. I felt the weight of my son on my legs, the tickle of his fingers on my arm. The sound of his breath. In the delight of that moment, I felt what it must have been like for my father to let me go. I had always focused on my loss of him, but now, sitting in his spot, I felt his loss. That was the beginning of his metamorphosis from ghost to real man.

I wanted to know him, hear him, smell him, feel his presence. The impossibility of this woven into my deep yearning for him sent me on a three-year quest. An irrational journey fueled by grief that had been lying dormant for forty years. A heroine's journey to discover the most significant man her life.

My father had spent his entire adult life in baseball. He dropped out of high school after trying out and making the Cubs minor league team in Lumberton, North Carolina. He died in 1971 as the pitching coach of the Chicago Cubs under Leo Durocher. The twenty-five years between those events were all spent in baseball. I set out to talk to every person I could from those baseball years. This journey is documented in my memoir, Finding My Father's Voice: A Baseball Love Story, published in 2017. Much to my surprise, there were many stories that found their way to me. Gifts sealed in time capsules waiting for me to find them: a picture of his blue eyes, a recording of his voice and countless stories about his wicked sense of humor. I was sent items that he had given people. A pair of silver dollars he had given a little boy while doing a magic trick. That little boy, now a man in his...