It’s my late stepfather’s birthday today, and while we were at the antipodes, I think, when it came to societal questions, we were on the same page when it came to sports, to baseball, squash, and tennis in particular.
In a letter once, thanking him for taking my part at critical moments in my life, and for letting me go my own way, unredeemed as I may have been in his eyes, I committed a cardinal lapse, inasmuch as I forgot to mention, among those things I was grateful to him for, that he’d taught me — further testimony to his forbearance — how to play squash.
I was from an early age a horrid sport, and still am, so much so that someone watching a men’s 70s doubles final at East Hampton Indoor Tennis in which I played two years ago said he was going to write a letter to The Star’s editor saying what a bad sport its sportswriter was.
But back to my dad, an upstanding member of “the greatest generation,” who played catch and hit balls to me — he pitched straight overhand and wore a gnarly glove — until the sun went down, and who took me to weekend games at Forbes Field, where he had seen the Waner brothers play and where we watched the surpassingly graceful Clemente play — a most welcome sight given the team’s almost-unsurpassed mediocrity in the years before he came.
And who with great patience taught me, profane and churlish even at the age of 12, how to play squash, a heart-rate-quickening game that can leave you utterly spent within a half-hour.
Alas, that sport has passed me by, though tennis, which is less taxing, has not. I doubt I’ll ever run out of partners, as he eventually did. It was at Mary’s suggestion that we gave him a metal Prince racket on one of his birthdays, which, once he — not one to eagerly embrace change — tried it, delighted him no end.
Churchill was his modern hero, Washington his favorite president. A Calvinist by temperament, he didn’t cut people much slack, though I, who had been “Irradiated by The New York Times,” somehow escaped opprobrium.
And did I say he loved to sail? Visits to the Eastern Shore and to Ahmic Lake in Ontario being among his happiest times.
And did I say he, an often stern devotee of rectitude, loved? My mother, with whom he became reacquainted at 40, being salvific in that regard.
I think of her, too, on his birthday — and of Mary also, for that matter — for she saved him, just as he, as best he could, opened his heart to me.