#baseball

He Is Never Going to Say It’s Okay

Posted on by row20blog

Last week, we traveled to Kansas City and Chicago to see some baseball and visit family. On Day Three of the trip, the plan was to catch a day game, then fly from KC to Chicago.

At the game, his third in as many days, my son had a meltdown that may or may not have been nationally televised. I took him out of the seats to a spot where he could “get in a calm body.” (That is what I said, because no matter how much I might have thought it, telling an exhausted four-year-old to get his shit together so I can watch the baseball game would have been very poor parenting.)

We were just starting to get in our calm bodies when I received an expletive-laced text from my husband. It seems he’d gotten a text alert from the airline that our flight was scheduled to leave in 90 minutes. Odd, since it was 2:30pm and the flight he booked departed at 7:30pm.

He came flying out of the stands, most definitely not in his calm body, and the three of us rushed out to our rental car. Actually, rental car is a misnomer here. It was more of a rental behemoth. This thing was a beast, a fact that will soon become relevant. I drove the getaway tank while my husband tried to figure out what was going on with our flight.

As it turned out, the airline canceled our 7:30 pm flight and rebooked us on a 4:00 pm flight. When my husband inquired as to why no one notified him, he was told “We sent you an email.” Evidently, American Airlines is completely unfamiliar with the concept of firewalls, spam filters, etc. Email is a wholly inadequate method of conveying important changes to travel itineraries, but I digress.

It was clear we weren’t going to make the 4:00 flight. We had to return the rental, check bags, wrestle a four-year-old, and get me through security at KCI without an ID (I lost it during the trip).

For the uninitiated, security at Kansas City International Airport is no fucking joke. We log considerable travel miles in our extended family, and we are unanimously agreed that KCI has the most hard-assed security operation of any airport we’ve ever flown out of. This is probably the only issue on which my family can achieve consensus. Getting through a regular airport without an ID would be hard enough. Despite assurances from the delightfully friendly people running both the KCI and the TSA Twitter accounts, I knew it would be damned difficult to get through security in Kansas City with no ID.

(Some of you frequent fliers – you know who you are – may be reading this and smugly thinking, “The abbreviation for Kansas City International Airport is MCI, not KCI.” You are correct. But no one who is actually from the KC area calls it MCI – we call it KCI, period.)

We pulled into a gas station to fill up the rental freighter. I then decided to park in one of the station’s spaces while my husband utilized his considerable technology arsenal to find a means of escape from KC to Chicago.

Because I was driving an absurdly enormous SUV, and I was sitting up higher than I’m used to, I failed to see a cone in the parking spot. In my defense, one could not accurately describe the cone as orange. The cone was past its glorious, conspicuous prime and was now a faded peach color. That said, I still should have seen it, and I didn’t, and I ran that fucker over. Just mowed it down. I tried to back up in a vain effort to free the sad cone, but that just made matters worse.

About the time I realized the cone was wedged up under the suburban attack vehicle, an employee came flying out of the service station. He lit into me about running over the cone.

I’m a Midwesterner. I am deeply uncomfortable with causing any sort of distress or damage to others or their property. Instinctively, I began to apologize, profusely and sincerely. The man was unmoved. He kept yelling at me about the cone. The incredulous, disgusted expression on his face said what little he left unspoken regarding his estimation of my intelligence.

I continued to apologize.

Then my four-year-old piped up from the back seat.

“Mommy, he is never going to say it’s okay.”

I sat back in my seat, caught off guard by the truth that just came out of my son’s mouth.

You know what, kid? You’re right. This man is never, ever going to accept my apologies and say, “It’s okay.” This is a lost cause.

By this time, the man had retrieved his cone. Seeing that it was still intact, I drove away, catching one final glimpse of him shaking his head at me in the rear-view mirror.

I’ve been replaying this incident in my head since it happened. I’ve come to the conclusion that my son was on to something. Sometimes, the other person is never going to say it’s okay. There are some situations, big and small, in which we never get closure.

I’m a big believer in the importance of apologies. If I’ve wronged someone, I believe it’s incumbent upon me to try and fix it. I can’t undo what’s already done, but I can learn and, with a little grace and luck, move on stronger and better than I was before. The same is true if the tables are turned, and I’m the “injured party,” for lack of a better term.

There are times, however, when a thing is so broken it can’t be fixed. Or the other person can’t meet me where I am, even if where I am is far beyond the halfway mark. How do I “get right” with myself and in my spirit when there is no closure? How do I know with certainty the other person is never going to say “It’s okay,” or that I am never going to be able to say “It’s okay” to someone else, and give myself permission to move forward when it means moving away?

I don’t know.

Maybe I’ll ask my kid.

On Baseball

Posted on by row20blog

“More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.”

– Thomas Boswell

Baseball has inspired more than one hundred years of eloquence from a legion of truly great writers. I am not one of them. But the Kansas City Royals just won the World Series, and I have some things to say.

My love affair with baseball did not begin in my childhood, as it does with most fans of the game. I do remember my first baseball game. I was about seven, and my dad took me and my brother to see the Astros play the Cincinnati Reds at the old Astrodome in Houston. Nolan Ryan was pitching, and Pete Rose was “Charlie Hustle,” not the disgraced, bow-tied .gif we saw all over social media during the postseason.

We moved to Kansas City in February, 1986, when I was nine years old. The Royals had just won the World Series and were revered. George Brett and Bret Saberhagen were gods to the kids I grew up with. But I came just a few months too late and missed all that. From the time I arrived in KC until a little more than a year ago, the Royals were…sad. The farm system produced some fantastic players who promptly bailed the second they could cash in. Who could blame them?

So, mired in all that disappointment, how did I turn into a die-hard baseball fan? First and foremost, I married a guy who was eight years old when the Royals won the pennant. That is an age at which allegiances are cemented for life. My husband loves baseball with his heart and soul. As a kid, he tagged along with his grandma’s senior citizens group to baseball games. It was a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride each way, longer if you counted the stop at Furr’s Cafeteria in Olathe on the way home. To this day, if he has to choose a number for any reason, it will always be George Brett’s number 5. Always.

We’d been married about a year when I went to work at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City’s historic 18th & Vine district. AJM shares a building with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and Kauffman Stadium is a short, straight shot up I-70 from the museum complex. Working there, I learned about the history of the game from the Negro Leagues perspective. Buck O’Neil stopped by almost daily. I didn’t know much about baseball back then, but I knew I was in the presence of greatness when I had the privilege of seeing Buck.

My husband and I started going to Royals games together. He would drive to KC from his job in Topeka, pick me up at the museum, and we’d go to the game. Afterward, he would take me back to my car at the museum and we’d drive home separately. We were broke newlyweds and sat in the cheap seats, but it was fun. Tony Pena was the team’s manager, and the slogan that year was “We Believe.” I think I still have the t-shirt I caught between innings.

And so my baseball education began. Baseball has a steep learning curve. One of the best quotes in Bull Durham – a movie full of great quotes – is this gem: “This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”

That’s true, at the most basic level. You cheer when your team catches the ball. You cheer when your team hits the ball. You cheer louder when one of your team’s players crosses home plate. If you stick with the game, though, you start to pick up on all the nuances and strategy. And that’s when baseball really gets fun. People who think baseball is boring and slow just don’t know what they’re watching. Baseball is not a game for stupid people. It requires an encyclopedic knowledge of rules. Anticipation becomes a big part of the experience. The teams are anticipating each others’ moves. As a fan, it’s exciting to try and anticipate how the players, the manager and even the base coaches are going to respond.

Baseball is not a game you can learn quickly. I still feel like a novice most of the time. It isn’t until I explain the game to others that I realize how much I’ve learned. For example, last night during Game 5 of the World Series, a friend messaged to ask why the commentators were saying Wade Davis would only be available for one inning. She wanted to know why he couldn’t pitch more innings. Another friend wanted to know why we cheered at a sacrifice fly. “The batter didn’t get on base. He got out. Why are you cheering?” Because he did his job. He got out, but he advanced the runner. He did what was best for the team, at his own expense.

Which brings me to another thing I love about baseball. Even the best player can’t carry an entire team. Just ask Bryce Harper and the 2015 Nationals. There are no Bryce Harpers on the 2015 Royals. The World Series MVP was Royals catcher Salvador Perez, because he is the heart of that team. He is a cheerful workhorse who took blow after blow and just kept getting up. The Royals won because they were a unified force with extraordinary command of the fundamentals of baseball. The mantra became “Keep the Line Moving.” They played as one.

We have what I jokingly call “dual fanship.” We cheer for the Kansas City Royals and the Washington Nationals. We say it’s okay because we have an American League team and a National League team. It’s only a problem every three years when they play each other in inter-league games, and it would be an issue if they ever met in the World Series. The Royals are nostalgic. The Royals are my childhood. Even though I wasn’t a baseball fan as a kid, the Royals are woven into the fabric of my upbringing. The two are inextricable.

If Kansas City is my hometown, Washington DC is my home. We love it here. The Nationals are a huge part of that. We have season tickets. I’ve stopped going during the week because keeping my son out until 10:30 or later when he needs to be up for school the next morning would be poor parenting. I miss it, though. I love Nats Park, and the wonderful people who work there and have become mainstays in our lives.

My love of baseball is my love of my little family. My husband and I are opposites in many ways, but even if it feels like we have no common ground at a given moment, we always have baseball. Every year before the beginning of the season, he watches Ken Burns’s documentary “Baseball.” It used to be nine innings/hours long; it is now ten. It spans the entire history of the game and is fascinating. After many, many viewings (or at least hearing it playing in the other room), I can practically recite it by heart. My favorite part, by the way, is Buck O’Neil singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which you can (and should) watch here.

My son was born in February, and I was on maternity leave during spring training and the first month of the season. I remember being in that exhausted twilight of new motherhood, watching spring training games on TV. We took our son to his first game at Nationals Park when he was seven weeks old; he went to his first Royals game at Kauffman Stadium when he was ten weeks old. Some people may find that questionable and possibly even irresponsible. Here’s the God’s honest truth: We would have taken him sooner if the season had started any earlier.

Baseball is what we do. It’s who we are. There is order in baseball. Baseball is simple, and it is complicated. Baseball is steeped in tradition and history, for better or worse. Baseball doesn’t try to pretend it’s something it isn’t or ignore its past. Baseball tries to learn from its mistakes, from segregation to steroids. And now our 2015 Royals, with their late-inning magic, are part of that history.

So what now?

In the words of Rogers Hornsby:
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”