Fenway and memories

Fenway and memories
Originally uploaded by buckshot.jones

Last year my brother asked if I wanted to go on a road trip to Boston. The “official” purpose of the trip was to help our other brother with the drive- he was picking up his step children after a summer with their father. From my perspective the trip was a hard sell. I travel all the time on business and was reluctant to take time away from home. Mark persisted, first hitting on my love of road trips, then waving Fenway tickets in front of me. He closed the deal when he said the Old Man was coming along too. Now I couldn’t pass up all of that.

The trip started out as a mad dash across Ontario and upstate New York at night. We rolled into Boston early in the morning with enough time to get a few hours sleep before a tour of the town and then the ballgame. My Dad does not get along well these days and needed some help getting to his seat. With all the pain I think just being with his boys made it worth the struggle. Between the feel of the ballpark and my Dad’s condition I was hit with a sharp tide of emotion and memories of old Tiger Stadium and my kid brothers’ first major league game.

Roughly 30 years earlier I had taken my brothers to their first major league game. I can’t recall the exact year; all I know is Mark “The Bird” Fidrych was pitching for the Tigers. The Tigers were in one of their periodic dark periods, but The Bird was filling the stands with his antics on the mound. Dad gave me a few bucks and told me to buy some tickets, I was lucky enough to fetch four seats out in left field, row M. That I remember the seats were in row M is essential to this story.

It was a cool night, as I recall. I must have been 17 or 18 at the time and my brothers were something like 8 and 10. Just a couple little guys. The three of us amble up to our seats, hot dogs and pops in hand, when I noticed a bunch of guys sitting in our seats. I should say a bunch of scruffy looking guys in our seats. I told the guy sitting nearest me that they are in our seats. He looked me up and down and spied the two little guys in tow and says, “These are our seats, dude. Seat 25 row M.” As he waved his ticket in my face.

I said, “I think your seats must be row MM. Because mine say row M.”

Looking angry and completely un- intimidated by me and the boys, he said, “No way, man. You must be in row MM. We ain’t movin’.” He turned to his buddies with a bully like smirk and they all had a good laugh at our expense.

About this time the Old Man comes shuffling up the aisle. It is roughly 50 degrees out and he is wearing a tee shirt with his tree stump like arms straining the fabric. The three of us were standing there, looking a bit confused. He asked why we weren’t in our seats. I explained, pointing to my newly found nemesis, that those guys are in our seats. He walks over to the tough guy at the end of the row, points one of his meaty fingers in his chest. Looking him square in the eye he says, “Then they better move. Right now.” Like that the smirk was replaced with a look of pure panic. They tumbled out of their seats into the row behind them, looking over their shoulders, hoping this gorilla of a man was not in pursuit. The boys and I had a good laugh.

I told a friend of mine, “You know when you were a little boy and you’d get in fight with one of your friends? Sometimes the fight breaks down to a war of words that ends with one of you saying, ‘Oh yeah! Well my Dad can beat up your Dad‘.” I laughed, “My Dad was really that guy.“ The Old Man was a big guy, a physical man, but really a gentle teddy bear. He was always the person we leaned on when we were in trouble. Wheeling him through the corridors at Fenway I see that he has learned to lean on us, his sons and daughters. He taught us well. The measure of character and love is whether those close to you can lean on you, depend on you when life has thrown you a curve ball you just can’t reach.

Thanks, Dad.