ZZZZZZZTHWACK!
That was the sound of summer to me. ZZZZZZZTHWACK! The sound of my father's blistering plastic fastball transecting the driveway and ploughing into the basement window with something approaching terminal velocity.
ZZZZZZTHWACK.
I crouched down at the side of the house, swinging and flexing my plastic yellow bat in the style of whatever Red Sox player I favored at the time. Restrap my invisible batting gloves, once, twice, three times. Tap my right toe. Tap the left. Touch the plate with the tip of my bat. Squat down low. Circle the bat once. Circle again. Point the bat towards the outfield. Squat, squat, squat.
My father, standing in the driveway, just inside the mailbox, would watch patiently, then cork, turn, and ZZZZZTHWACK.
By the middle of the summer there'd be a nice, brown oval worn in the grass to the right of the basement window. Eventually that brown hole became semi-permanent - a mud-colored monument to ten years of swinging and missing; one that only disappeared when the house expanded and ate it.
I don't know what "normal" father-son relationships look like. I only have the one example. Mine was light on Yoda-esque inspirational platitudes and high on overhead suplexes in the first floor hallway. Living with my dad was like living with a volunteer PhysEd teacher who held no truck with crash mats and kept an overflowing supply of exotic swear combinations close at hand.
Fathers - I've gathered - have a choice to make when they are blessed with the gift of children, and more specifically sons. They can recognize the inherent limitations of children and suppress their own physical capabilities accordingly, so that their young offspring might enjoy a fleeing taste of that sweet nectar known as victory. Or, they can revel in that inequality and spend 14 some odd years massacring their kids in every conceivable way.
My father went in the second direction, and rightfully so. If I'm so lucky as to have children some day, I plan on demolishing them athletically, academically, socially, and financially. I will run faster than them, read faster than them, have more Facebook friends than them, and make more money than them. Every day will be a competition right up until they start being better at things, at which point I will immediately quit, because fuck losing to kids.
My dad wasn't quite as thorough as I plan on being. Besides sports, he was only actively better at having a job and knowing which Three Stooges episodes sucked the most (basically anything with Curly Joe DeRita). He was definitely better than me at a bunch of other stuff, like driving and owning floral ties, but he rarely shoved those things in my face. And really, he didn't need to, such was the magnitude of his dominance in the world of quasi-sports.
He could hit better. He could catch better. He could even do the thing where you throw your frisbee into the ground and skips up, easy as you please. But worst of all, he could throw a goddamn curveball.
There is no more concise, hauntingly powerful metaphor for the frustrating impotence of youth than having a dad who could throw a goddamn curveball.
I struggled to send the ball in anything approaching a straight line. In the interest of fairness and fun, my father always got his turn at bat, which meant that I had to stand out in the driveway and try to hit the basement window with that two ounce sphere of plastic. I could not. And I could certainly not do so with any sort of velocity or movement.
My pitches were ugly, dying things, fluttering hopelessly from my hand to the ground ten to fifteen feet from where my father stood. In order to have any chance at a hit my father was forced to roam the lawn, like an sword-wielding tennis player, taking big cuts at balls that sailed along at eyebrow height or bounced twice before they reached his ankles.
Meanwhile, my dad could make a wiffleball curve at a goddamn 45 degree angle; a whistling fastball that started out a foot off your ass before swooping in at the last second to tag the inside edge of the window pane.
Fuck that fucking curveball.
The cool thing about being a kid is how wrong you get to be about everything. Like, you can literally believe that babies are delivered by storks and the moon is made of cheese and Kevin McHale is better than Michael Jordan and no one gets to slap the taste out of your mouth for being so stupid.
As a kid, I had no real sense of my dad. He worked. He made spaghetti. He said things like "Shit on a shingle." And he threw that goddamn curveball.
I always sort of believed that my dad was a secret super athlete, with no interior life to speak of. This 1) made getting murdered by him in everything much easier to swallow, and 2) excused me from my failure to understand my father as anything more complex than a friendly adult male who has absurdly good at small talk and could hit from both sides of the plate.
Growing up is mainly about two things: the acquisition of unwanted body hair and the decimation of closely held ignorances. It's a tough trade, but a fair one.
I never really got any better at hitting or throwing or catching. My dad could probably still smoke me with a wiffleball (provided he got a note from his doctor ahead of time), and that's fine. Because I have a sense of my father now. I don't know him completely and I doubt I ever will, but a lot of that blank space in between watching wrestling or playing video games together is gone.
Or put it this way: it's hard to appreciate any particular bit of a man who can seemingly do anything. But an imperfect man who always makes you laugh, who always finds the time, who can throw a goddamn curveball? That's something you can treasure. That's something you can appreciate, even if it takes a few decades to figure it out.
