Earlier this summer, on the final day of school, my daughter Ella brought home her year-end art portfolio, a collection of paintings, drawings, and collages she’d created in first grade. As she showed me her art, piece by piece at the dinner table, I recalled a sensation from my own childhood, when after the final days of school, I felt that something inimitable had ended, and that I was growing up.
Perhaps Ella sensed something similar. She was clearly happy and proud, yet her pictures, which proved her own industriousness, perhaps even her talent, also seemed to evoke a note of melancholy, a feeling I also knew from my childhood, whenever I was confronted with a view of the passage of time.
“I made this so long ago,” Ella said several times. “I can’t believe it.”
A school year had lapsed, after all, nine whole months. Putting my head down, to my dinner, I thought, as I often do, pointlessly, how nine months for Ella represents a good chunk of life — about 10%. For me, the same percentage accounts for four years. What had I been up to four years before — mid-June 2015? Owen had just been born, and I still had a full head of hair, though the grey had started to show, and my life —
“Seth,” my wife, Karen, said now. “Look.”
When I looked up I found myself facing Karen, who was staring at me with undisguised disappointment, if not outright hostility.
“Daddy,” Ella said. “Look.”
She was trying to show me her “favorite” picture, a recent drawing of a “landscape,” as she called it, of a house on a hill, its red roof and chimney jutting into the sky, surrounded by a few roses and a tree, foregrounded by two more trees, and more roses, sparse in the colorless ground, and high above in a hazed sky the dots of distant stars.
It was my favorite, too, partly because it inspired Ella, and partly because looking at, as I did then and over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve felt somehow closer to Ella, to the thoughts and feelings of this time in her life: the end of school; the beginning of summer.
Ella’s grade school experience has inspired a few such moments, when I’ve felt transported to childhood, to the impressionistic memories of first, second, and third grade, or to the all-embracing memories of fourth and fifth grade, around the time of my parents’ divorce.
What surprises me about these moments, whether they conjure simple pleasures or profound anxieties, is the satisfaction of remembering. This satisfaction, I think, is partly bound to Ella, and partly to my own sense of self. As I share Ella’s journey, the countless hours and days of her young life, I recall in these opportune moments the immensity of childhood — what Denis Johnson describes (in his wonderful novel, The Name of the World) as “that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities.”
In this way, watching Ella grow up has changed my view of my childhood. For some thirty years, I’ve told myself my parents’ divorce cleaved my life in two, effectively ending my childhood. But this is just a story I’ve created, to explain myself to myself. Far more real, I think, are thoughts of feelings of childhood, both momentous and mundane, that return to me now, decades later, intimating possibilities.
Sensing these possibilities, even if ever so briefly, as I glance at my daughter’s art, or when I enter her empty classroom, with its primary colors, the gleaming metal pegs where she hangs her backpack, the low chairs, the smell of crayons and pencil shavings and books, is to understand a simple truth of growing up: The past is forever retold, in countless iterations, and one’s childhood never really ends.
As a child of seven, Ella’s age now, until the age of eleven, when my parents divorced, my sense of possibility was almost entirely bound to baseball. During the season, I fell asleep each night envisioning my swing. Mornings, I read the box scores. Off-season, I collected baseball cards, usually by the pack, or ever so often, when Dad took us to Don’s Card Shop in Strasburg, PA, by the card.
A ’73 Topps Mike Schmidt rookie. An ’83 Fleer Tony Gwynn rookie. An’84 Topps Mattingly rookie.
At the time, I would’ve traded my soul for these cards. I’d been hooked since eight, when I opened my first pack, releasing the sweet bubblegum smell, and discovered, to my older brother Scott’s chagrin, the most valuable card: a Dwight Gooden rookie. For the length of that season and next, I lived and died by Gooden’s E.R.A.
By the time Gooden’s Mets beat the Red Sox to win the World Series in October 1986, I had memorized the statistics on the back of each of the 792 cards of the 1985 Topps set.
I also played baseball, and it is to the diamond I often return when remembering my own childhood. It was a silent mid-morning Saturday in the early summer of 1987 when my father took me to hit balls for the first and last time. I relished the time with Dad, yet I felt uneasy: The outing, a divergence from my Saturday morning routine of cartoons and Honey Nut Cheerios, hinted at future, unwelcome divergences.
When we arrived at the field, Joe Johnson was in the batting cage, clocking pitches from his scruffy father, Joe Johnson Sr. Junior was a fierce, spindly kid known for mammoth homers that cleared the outfield grass, landing in neighbors’ lawns. As a pitcher, he beaned kids.
After two years at Bucher Elementary, the local public school, I still navigated the world with the tender air of a child of the Waldorf School, which I’d attended from pre-school to second grade. I presumed I was the type of kid Joe Johnson liked to bean. I was not afraid of him — not necessarily. But he was my enemy. Joe Johnson liked Ashley Hamilton, the girl I loved, and she liked him.
“He’s here to hit,” Dad announced.
Joe’s father stood on the mound, a bucket of seasoned balls at his feet. Joe stood at the plate, expressionless under his ballcap, his weight supported by the knob of his wooden bat. I looked to the outfield, to the balls dotting the grass. We’d brought one ball, a glove, an aluminum bat.
“You want to hit?” Joe asked.
His voice surprised me: sharp and shrill, the sound of puberty — the strikingly early puberty of a ten-year old.
“I think,” I said, clutching my aluminum bat. “Can I?”
“Here,” Joe said, handing me his bat. “Wood’s better.”
I positioned myself over the plate, compact yet wavering, my stance less Rickey Henderson than a failed gymnast, as if I had executed a straddle jump and botched the landing.
“Straighten that stance,” Joe’s father said.
I arched my back. The first pitch whizzed past me, clanging the backstop’s chain link.
“Eye on the ball,” Joe’s father said.
“That was fast,” I murmured.
I was a groundball hitter, with speedy legs. That season in third grade I’d batted .516: 16 for 31, all singles.
“Straighten that stance,” Joe’s father said.
I hit a nubber down the right field line. Joe stood behind the cage, his fingers clutching the chain link. Dad stood next to him. I managed a grounder to short, a squibber to left. I missed more. After the sixth pitch, Joe rattled the chain link.
“Get angry,” he said. “Growl.”
A fastball whizzed by, clanging the cage.
“Eye on the ball,” Joe’s father said.
I looked to my father, standing with his arms folded, peering with one elevated eyebrow. Not until later did I question whether this moment had been orchestrated. Dad, like Nick in Gatsby, was “inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures” to him. Perhaps on one of the rare occasions he’d attended a game, he met Joe Senior. Perhaps Dad had seen in Joe Johnson an antidote to the solitude in which I dwelled, that lonesome land of baseball cards, action figures, and that summer, As the World Turns.
“Growl,” Joe Johnson demanded.
Dad growled, rousing a fit: Joe and his father and my father all growling to the summer sky — in my memory, dreadfully blue and soaring.
“Ready?” Joe’s father asked.
I growled — and hit a line drive to left.
“Good,” Joe’s father said. “Now shout. Get angry.”
“Ha,” Dad said, the syllable drooping in the air.
I looked back again. Joe Johnson was wobbling the chain link.
“Go deep,” he said. “Clock it.”
A fastball clanged the cage.
“Eyes on the ball!” Joe’s father shouted. “Get angry.”
Reared on the fables and myths of Waldorf, I presumed, with all my nine-year-old being, that I would never give in to anger. Even my parents’ recent quarrels had not instigated a commiserate fury. I felt, instead, a bone deep sorrow that propelled me to the daytime evasion of soap operas. Discovering me on the couch one recent afternoon, Scott had demanded, with the might of his brotherly scorn, “What is wrong with you?”
I looked back to Joe’s father, deadly-serious in his wind-up, sneering as he heaved a fastball. Growling, I hit the ball high and long, clean over the left field grass. There was a moment of still, silent reverence, then wild shouts of “Yes!” and “Wow!” as the ball cleared the street, and landed, with a tiny ceremonious bounce, on a neighboring lawn.
“Seth!” Dad drawled.
I can hear his applause now, each slap booming across the empty field. And I can see Joe Johnson, my new friend, looking not at me, but like his father, to the ball on the green sloping lawn. The moment stirred me, changed me as a ballplayer. I became a true hitter in 4th and 5th grades — a home run hitter. Yet I never again cleared the grass. When my parents divorced, after fifth grade, I quit baseball. That hit stands as my best: a life-changing “boom time,” as Scott calls all home runs.
It was noon when we walked away from the field, down a path to an empty playground, and the sight of a girl sitting cross-legged on the blazing macadam drowned the day in glorious awkwardness. I stopped, stood completely still.
“C’mon,” Dad said, tugging my arm.
Like Joe Johnson, Ashley Hamilton had sprouted early. Lean and leggy with coarse blond hair and severe bangs that obscured half her face, she dwarfed most boys by a foot or more. The following school year, in fourth grade, I sat beside her at the back of a dim room as a film projector whirred dusty light onto a shimmering screen. We sat on the floor, our legs before us, our arms behind us, our palms catching the nubby carpet, and when her fingers ventured to touch my own, I felt a new life blazing within me: the denouement of a romance that had commenced, when, walking by with my father, I asked, “Did you see my hit?”
In the months that followed, in my parents’ ceaseless fights, I witnessed the perverse power that anger bestowed — how, when weaponized, anger worked to make one’s thrashing grief unassailable. Yet even before that, on the ball field, I learned that anger, like Popeye’s spinach, granted muscles to the timid of body and heart.
“Did you see it?” I asked again.
Ashley Hamilton looked at my father, then me. In the dusty air, I tasted the smack of confidence.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “I saw.”
As a young married man, and then later as a young parent, with renewed intensity, I’ve told myself again and again: I will never get divorced. This declaration has little to do with my children, for whom I wish only the happiest of lives, and perhaps even less to do with the love I feel for my wife of fourteen years, my high school sweetheart.
This declaration is bound, I think, to my relationship with my childhood family: Mom and Dad, Scott, and my younger sister, Katie. When I declare, “I will never get divorced,” I wish, selfishly, to change the past — I wish for the happiness of this family of long ago.
As I’ve evolved into parenthood, however, I’ve glimpsed a semblance of the truth of those distant days. I see the complexity of my emotions, the variety of my thoughts and feelings, which were only partly tethered to my parents’ life. Much more potent was my life, hope and sadness, confidence and doubt, love and hate, and anger, plenty of anger — a life I now see before me, in Ella’s experience.
For most of her life, I’ve felt a duty to shield Ella from the woes. Yet Ella does not require this sort of protection. I know she must live independent of my protection, and I know, increasingly, she will grow and thrive independent of my wishes for her, even if I wish only happiness. Perhaps I simply need to feel myself protecting her. Perhaps the best I can do is stand back, with my arms folded, and simply watch.
