by William Cracraft
Oct 15, 2002
Now I'm Dad: of baseball and wood chopping
From a Jordache jeans wearing, Kawi 750LTD-riding, rock band-emceeing Young Turk, I have changed into…my father, and it was triggered by the Giants-Angels World Series.
Sunday was a beautiful autumn afternoon and I was ensconced in my office waiting for game two of the Series to start. Right off the bat, so to speak, I knew something was different. I watched most of game one, but I haven't waited for a pro ball game to start since Fran Tarkington lost the Vikings' fourth Super Bowl in nine years back in the late 1970s. I had forty minutes before the game started, so I went outside to chop some wood.
Ever since PG&E got hornswoggled by Texas power companies and passed the expense on to us, I've tried to reduce our electrical bill by building fires in the big cast iron stove in the living room. This week, I finally bought the firewood reduction tools I learned to use as a teenager: a single bladed ax, an eight-lb sledgehammer and an iron wedge. I got a 40 percent discount on the ax because it had obviously been used around the store for a while.
The sledgehammer had a flawed handle, so I got a new handle for free, but I'm not going to put in on until the flawed handle breaks, assuming I survive the incident. I only mention this because my old man used to pull over and run across six lanes of traffic to collect golf balls that had dribbled off a near-by golf course.
So there I am, whirling my ax and cracking logs and I suddenly pictured myself watching the game, having a beer. Another thing I never do is drink beer in front of the television. I went on gathered wood chips, loaded a box with kindling and went inside, just as I'd seen my dad do hundreds of times.
I settled into my chair, fired up the game and actually cracked open a cold one. As the Angels took the field, I was swamped by nostalgia. I have the most pleasant memories of the old man out back by the garage, baggy cotton pants-he never wore jeans back then-and tee shirt, ax chunking into the chopping block, the drone of the Twins game coming from the radio on the windowsill.
There is nothing quite like having the game on the radio on a warm summer afternoon, announcer's small talk and the subdued hum of the crowd suddenly punctuated by the crack of wood against horsehide. The crowd roars and the announcer's voice rises as he retails the choreography on the field. Sitting in the house, I'd cock an ear, even though I couldn't hear exactly what was happening, and Dad's ax would go to parade rest while he listened. Maybe it was Harmon Killebrew whacking another one towards the second deck bleachers, or Tony Oliva turning a single into a double.
After an hour or two chopping wood, dad would come inside, crack open a frosty Hamm's and settle down on the couch to watch the rest of the game on TV. There he'd stay, surrounded by the remains of the Saturday newspaper, until the game was over or dinner was on. He took us to a lot of games, the old man did, Knothole games, where kids got in for fifty cents or some such ridiculous sum.
He coached my summer league teams in high school, too. Baseball and the old man were part and parcel of my summers until I moved to California in 1979 and started my adult life. Twenty-three years later, I'm not entirely sure what's motivating me to watch the games--I didn't watch the Bay Series in '89--unless I'm withdrawing from the crappy economic times and the threat of war. I just know that for almost four hours Sunday night, my old man was watching the game from two places, his couch in Minnesota and my heart in Pacifica.###