Baseball in the dark

My dad would be 108 this year.

One vivid memory I have of him is not vivid at all, because it was in the dark. For months of the year, every night, he would sit in the back screened verandah, and listen to the Expos game on the radio, staring into the darkness of our yard and the field beyond. 

The verandah was connected to my bedroom, as in: you had to go through my room to get to it (or even to get into the backyard, which was awkward). At the start of the season, it can still be full-on winter in Ottawa, so he’d wear a massive wool coat and sit out as long as he could stand the cold, while the Expos made plays in Florida. In summer, the bedroom-verandah door was wide open, and I could hear the game a little too.

He’d have a beer and a scotch and soda, listening to Dave Van Horne and Duke Snyder, along with crickets, and watch the fireflies’ erratic sparks. The games were on tv too, but he imagined them perfectly well. 

What did he think about? Baseball, a little, probably. I think this time and darkness was a refuge, away from the crowd that made up his family, whom he loved, but he also needed his solitude. 

As a kid, I would sometimes join him for a while, and sit/lie on the uncomfortable “chaise lounge.” By day, the chaise’s dense rectangular cushion was enveloped in brown and gold flowers that tucked into brittle white plastic piping. By night, you’d find it by bumping your shin on it. But I’d ask him questions about the game, and got some useful lingo out of that and, then, he’d often start up a singalong. 

His sister Ann was an anxious soul, a decades-long agoraphobe who maintained an all-day beer buzz to keep herself calm enough. He always wanted to get her interested in something, and his solution was baseball. “Just try it,” he’d say. He’d phone her, “There’s a game tonight,” etc, his suggestions became nagging, he hoped one of his prods would land, and have her focus on something outside herself, something calming, reliable, something you can listen to in the dark. Baseball.