I got this email from my father the other day, in response to my post on why I”m such a dick (or was, depending on how you feel about me):
It is entirely refreshing and gratifying to read your realization that as a kid you were a dick. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, but us Dads get a chance every now and again. Yours will come 30 years from now.
Now, of course, given both the tone and topic of his email, one might feel entitled to ask: isn’t this just a case of the pot calling the kettle a dick?
But out of sympathy for my father–if I’m a dick isn’t he to blame?–I’ll concede the point and write a little bit about baseball.
As I mentioned earlier this week, JP has begun to take an interest in the national pastime. My plan for the summer, along with playing ball with him, is to take him to a few professional games.
Many of my fondest memories from childhood involve going to Shea and Yankee stadium(s? stadia–copy editor? ) with my father and brother. To an extent these memories even have something to do with baseball itself (I remember a few Reggie Jackson home runs, and I was a huge Dwight Gooden fan), but mostly they had to do with all the treats I got to eat at the ballpark, and not just the proverbial peanuts and cracker jack, neither of which I ever much liked.
This, of course, was in the 1920s when men were men and hot dogs cost two bits (whatever the hell that means), and the tickets were actually free. Not so today. A contemporary outing to Citi Field with JP is going to run into the low six figures, taxes not included, so I will have to be a little judicious in what I spend on food.
Or maybe not. To this day, a major resentment that I hold against my father were his periodic efforts to bring food with him to the ballpark. For a young child there is nothing worse than watching all the other little folk around you sucking down hot dogs and ice cream while you eat a fricking ham and cheese sandwich that has gone mushy from the heat and a poor wrapping. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
And yet here I am contemplating doing the same thing to JP. Sins of the father…