Memories of My Son, the Baseball Player

 

Van Gogh, "Starry Night over the Rhone"

Sports Saturday

I hope I may be excused for revisiting a poem I have posted on before, along with some of my previous observations about it.  It is a sports poem that brings to mind my oldest son, who died 11 years ago on this day.  The poem is out of season—it’s about football—and Justin’s sport was baseball.  Nevertheless I feel awash in sadness and sweet memory when I read it.

This is true even though there is much about it that I don’t understand.  Or perhaps it works its magic upon me because I don’t entirely understand it.  The poem may be about a mother and father listening to their son’s football game on the radio.  It may be about the son, years later, remembering a game and imagining his parents listening to it.  At any rate, a distance has opened up between child and parents.  Someone has faded “back into memory.”

For me, the poem captures how certain glistening moments of Justin’s sports career help keep him from fading away altogether into the darkness that hangs above us. Here it is:

Ties

By Dabney Stuart

When I faded back to pass
Late in the game, as one
Who has been away some time
Fades back into memory,
My father, who had been nodding
At home by the radio,
Would wake, asking
My mother, who had not
Been listening, “What’s the score?”
And she would answer, “Tied,”
While the pass I threw
Hung high in the brilliant air
Beneath the dark, like a star.

I remember Justin racing in from centerfield and diving to catch a rapidly sinking line drive in a junior-level (13-year-olds) All Star game.  Even more vividly, I remember him that same season hitting a game-tying double in the final inning of a game and of the ball inscribing a parabola through the night air.  Justin may be fading—sometimes I am like those drowsy parents and don’t think of him for days—but then a memory will seize my mind and  I will see him, as I see that ball, hanging suspended in the night.  The air around shimmers.

Late Addition –

Julia, my wife, just this morning wrote the following poem in commemoration of Justin.  It gets at a deep and reassuring truth, that the loss we suffered can become a force for good in the world.  Or as Julia far more eloquently puts it, “This place in my heart/That was all his/Is now everyone’s”:

I wear this sorrow
Like familiar old clothes
Faded, patched, comfortable
No binding, no chafing
I cook, clean, garden
They move with me
In warmth, soft and reassuring
We are here
Where he is

We cannot say
But these dreams I have
That he is in the midst of
The dying, the forlorn, the lost
Are not all imagination
What he would have done
For this weary old world
He does do
In some mysterious way
A daughter in Peru
A son in Africa
Any child in my arms is his
Any young man in all his power
Is him
Any word from a kind friend
Are his words
And this place in my heart
That was all his
Is now everyone’s
A broken heart
Spills light
Into darkness
Warmth into cold
Compassion into grief
‘Til every cup runneth over
And life is full again.


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