As my memory has it, I was standing at the plate during Little League practice, when I saw someone unexpected on the other side of the chain-link fence.
It was my father.
The surprise at him being there wasn't because my parents had split up and he was never around -- they've been married 42 years -- but because I figured he'd be sleeping or not long out of bed that Saturday morning. A steel fabricator, he had gotten a night-shift job not that long before.
It wasn't the greatest, especially since my brother and I mostly saw him right after we got home from school, but it was during the recession of the early 1980s, and he had already been laid off a couple times, so if a night-shift job was what it had to be, a night-shift job was what it had to be.
Except he had just quit, tired of never being around, so there he was at my practice. Fortunately, he found another job not much later.
It was a point of pride for my parents to come to my brother's and my ballgames, plays, concerts or whatever. I remember them talking with a combination of bewilderment and disdain about parents who just dropped their kids off and left when it was over. As I think about it, maybe those parents couldn't come because of work or some other reason, but what I knew what that my parents were always around.
As I got older, it sometimes bugged my baseball coaches (and I have to say, not completely without reason) when after an at-bat I'd walk over to where my father was standing to dissect what had just happened. After all, he wasn't my coach, but he knew more about my swing than anyone else.
He actually know more about all of my game than anyone else, since he taught me most of it. The house I grew up in had a small front yard, site of countless rounds of pitch-and-catch during childhood and the constant reminders to aim for the chest and that a bad throw made a good play useless and a bad one worse. (Also, if someone can't hit a pitch, keep throwing it until he does, and if a pitcher is having a good game, leave him in.)
If I wasn't hitting very well, he'd take me to the vacant field across the street, or sometimes the Little League field itself, to pitch batting practice.
Once in a while, I'd change things up and play wide receiver, even though football wasn't his thing. The size of the yard made pretty much anything other than down-and-in patterns a challenge, and the tree next to the house made for a fearsome strong safety.
Today's my father's birthday. He's 63. Although he once answered a question about when he would retire by saying, "When they put my a-- in the ground, he actually stopped working exactly a year ago, and he's still on this side of the grass. For the previous year, whenever the phone calls on Sunday nights came around the 19th, he would count down another month toward retirement.
Dad doesn't watch a ton of baseball any more, to the point where I sometimes forget how much he knows about it. His main sport is NASCAR, which makes up a large part of our Sunday talks.
When I first started following NASCAR, I became a Dale Earnhardt fan ... mainly because he was.
Happy birthday.
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