Weekends with Dad

Saturday, September 2, 2005

My parents woke me up this morning calling from their cellphone that they never use, from an airport. They are flying today to Denver to visit my sister and her family in their new home, in a new state. This is the "in case we die in a fiery plane crash today, we are calling to tell you we love you" call. Considering they've beaten all death odds with good 'old love, I'd say the likelihood of them crashing today are pretty slim, but I'm touched, considering I'd just talked to them 48 hours ago.

A typical Labor Day weekend at home for me, as a kid, consisted of nothing but helping my father do chores. When I was very young, this entailed knowing what various tools looked like and their one of a dozen locations they might be. There's a hammer, adjustable wrench, flat-head screw driver, Phillips head screw driver, needle nose something, wire, string, and of course cold can of beer. If he needed something...he'd ask me and then time me. "Run Forest Run!" You get the picture.

There was always a ballgame on the radio somewhere and if he took a break to get his own beer, I was in charge of listening to the game and filling him in on what he missed when he returned. One time I told him "DAD, the Tigers retired!" Convinced the Tigers were no longer a team. By the time I was a teen, it was no surprise that I was obsessed and in love with Mark "The Bird" Fidrych. (A lot of you were not even born when this phenomenon pitched for the Detroit Tigers. Google.) My dad took me to the home games that he was scheduled to pitch and bought me anything and everything with his picture on it. I loved him because I thought he was cute and had hair like a Californian surfer, plus, he would get down on his hands and knees and move the dirt of the pitching mound around with such intensity; you couldn't take your eyes off him. While my friends were dreaming about Donny Osmond and the Monkeys, or maybe Shawn and David Cassidy, I was dreaming about kissing Mark behind the dugout and marrying him in a huge baseball themed wedding.

Years later I was flipping through a People magazine and there was a picture of Mark, retired from baseball due to injury, standing up to his knees in mud surrounded by pigs. Mark Fidrych became a pig farmer. This reminds me of a scene in the classic movie "Splendor in the Grass" (1961) when Natalie Wood's character, Deanie, is released from the mental hospital and goes to visit her high school love, Bud, played by Warren Beatty, years later. She should have called first. Bud, the heartthrob in school, is now a farmer, covered in mud (I sort of remember bib overalls with no shirt) and is living in a shack of a home with his barefoot and pregnant wife who is the spitting image of Deanie. That is how I imagined Mark from that point on...Mark as Bud and me as Deanie...never to be.