Day 176 Right and Wrong

This memory came to me while watching a softball game during yard at the Chino reception center.

Right and Wrong

I truly had to have been the shortest kids ever to play Little League. I remember Mr. Lewis, our coach, yelling out “Don’t be afraid of the ball! ” But of course I was afraid of the ball, it was almost as big as my head. Even when I was lucky and the ball smacked dead into my glove, it stung my palm. Otherwise, it always seemed to bounce off my middle finger or my head or a body part. Damn right I was afraid of the ball. The ball hurt.

Blessedly Coach Lewis buried me in the far right field most of the time, requiring a rare display of my quasi-non existent fielding skills. I did better at bat, because I was so short if I crouched just a little it was almost impossible not to walk me. And I was a fairly fast little bugger so I did actually manage to round the bases my share of the time, helping make the Glenora Gators mostly a winning team.

But we were mostly a winning team because of the Lewis boys, Mel and Mike, the sons of the coach. Mel was my very first crush, but he was the first crush of most of Montgomery County. He was an 8-year old Robert Redford, Golden Boy incarnate, replete with that aw-shucks blush that made any woman of any age shift into automatic gush when they laid eyes on his windblown sandy hair, his round baby blues and gee-whiz teeth.

Mel was a natural athlete and sort of shy too. The sort of great-looking shy that meant an awesome personality would be assumed as a reflection of his looks. He didn’t have much of a personality, because he didn’t need one to be effortlessly liked. I would bet that this probably caused him a fair amount of grief later in life. Sometimes great beauty is a terrible gift.

I wanted Mel to be my best friend more than anything, and there were times when I thought I was close to it. I treasured for years the memory of that one Saturday afternoon where we played “Time Tunnel” together. “Time Tunnel” ran on TV for about 2 seasons from 1964-1966. I loved it mostly because James Darren was in it and impossibly handsome, and because of a line in the pilot where his Lt. Colonel boss tells him: “This is 1968!” and it being 1964 or 5 and me being 6 or 7, I couldn’t even imagine that we’d ever get to such an impossibly futuristic date.

Unfortunately, in the stratified rules of pre-adolescence, the difference of a year in age could make friendship between a second and a third grader the equivalent of a mixed marriage. Not that I understood what a mixed marriage was, really. I did understand there was something vaguely taboo about Mel and Mike’s pert blond Mom, Dottie, going on about how she adored Sammy Davis Jr., but I don’t know if that was because he was black or because she was already married. .

My 7-year old brain was still trying to puzzle out the weird world of adult heterosexuality. It was around this time that I tried to kiss my mother on the lips once just because I couldn’t get why doing so on the cheeks and on the lips were both called the same thing but seemed so different. My mother mostly ignored it and of course it was too inherently yucky to even think of again. Usually when we said our good nights she would grab a Kleenex and remove some offending particle from my little snot-nose anyway.

Anyway, Mike, not Mel, was my age, and so he was consigned to the best friend slot. Mike was a perfectly normal cute kid, but he was simply was not the lightning bolt attention-getter Mel was without even trying. And being one year younger than Mel, he was, unsurprisingly, always one year behind athletically, making their rivalry all the more fierce. They used to beat up on each other all the time, which I found bizarre, because my brothers and I never ever hit each other. It was like we were raised in Ghandi’s house or something. It just was not in our vocabulary.

I was far more likely to end up playing with Mike, while secretly pining for the easy nonchalance of Mel, although I couldn’t quite understand why it made me so nervous and excited to be near him. Mike was also more high maintenance, because he had something to prove. He had the quick-temper and dark looks of his West Virginia Dad who’d made good selling insurance.

"My dad’s a millionaire!" Mike exclaimed excitedly one day in the Lewis basement rec-room, just after having obliterated me at a game of pool (we were ping-pong people across the street. ) “Are you sure?” I asked, not wanting to call him a liar, but reasonably certain that there were no millionaires in our neighborhood. (Though now I’m sure the $38,000 house we lived in sells for $750,000, easy).

“Uh-hunh!” Mike insisted affirmatively, as if I’d called him a dirty liar. “He is in the millionaires club! He told my mom and has a certificate and everything!” A certificate! Well that sealed it!

I promptly told my Dad that night, who sighed his real world sigh, probably wondering if he was violating some code of suburbia by enlightening me about his neighbor’s non-existent riches. “What he did, son, was sell a million dollars worth of insurance. That doesn’t make him a millionaire.” Then Dear Old Dad had to try to explain insurance to a 7-year old, which almost made me cry. He pretty much gave up, leaving me confused but also unable to challenge Mike’s assertion. But later I did hear him say, while talking to my mother during their nightly ritual of sipping cocktails as she made dinner (He: Bourbon with a splash of Wink. She: Wink with a splash of Bourbon), “The kid thinks his Dad is a millionaire, and meanwhile his name is up on the board of the Lakewood Country Club on the list of members who can’t pay their dues.” (Not that we were members, but somehow this tidbit had found its way to my father’s ears.)

Soon there was a shiny new Mustang in the Lewis driveway, but I wasn’t to understand later, when it was abruptly repossessed, that Mel Lewis Sr. was living beyond his means. But at the time, between the cool car and the Great Gatsby son , I idolized my coach rather more than the portly birdwatcher with the aging 1959 grey Oldsmobile station wagon who was my Dad. I don’t know whether this was painful for him., but probably it was just one more nail in the coffin of a lifelong struggle with his weight and self-esteem. In high school he was the batboy and the team mascot with the funny middle name: Beebe, his mother’s maiden name. “No Bosco for Beebe” was the taunt that echoed from those painful years, which were punctuated by his father’s suicide.

The last year I played with the Glenora Gators we made it to the championships, spearheaded by the stellar pitching and fielding of the Lewis boys. In the last game, I think I got walked twice and bunted once for a base hit, so didn’t embarrass myself at least.

We were behind at something like 11-10, in the.bottom of the 9th. Golden Mel was on first base and there was a long drive to center field. Mel rounded second and continued past third but too fast. His foot didn’t touch the base. He knew it but we didn’t. In the excitement no one noticed.

Mel caught himself and ran back a step to tag the base, then charged on, just as the ball was thrown home. He slid in, tagged out at the very last second.

In the car, on the way home, I rode in the back seat, listening to the father and son debate.

“But son, no one saw you.”

“But Dad, I missed the plate.”

“But you were right there, you could have made it home.”

“But Dad, I missed the plate!” He wanted to argue, what if the referee had seen him? But I could also tell he didn’t want that to be the reason he needed to tag the plate.

He wanted his Dad to tell him being honest about it was the right thing to do. But his Dad, the Millionaire with the Mustang, felt the sting of second place more than the pride he felt in his son doing the right thing.

After all these years, I truly am unsure what the Coach said to his son. But I’m quite sure what he didn’t say, and that was what his son needed to hear.

And I remember well Mel’s tears, and the disillusionment in his voice.

And yet the next morning on the back porch, I vainly trumpeted Coach Lewis. I tried to tell my Dad about how unfair it was that the Gators had lost, “even though Mel had rounded the plate." It was a good as tagged, wasn’t it?

My Dad refused to engage in such lofty philosophical digressions. He simply handed me his binoculars me and said “Look at that red-winged blackbird out there.”

I almost argued, frustrated that he didn’t understand. But he understood all too well, and was teaching me about what was important in life, and what wasn’t.

And so I took the binoculars and looked through them, and saw this beautiful bird. And in that moment, it felt completely right that he was my father, and I didn’t envy Mel, his golden boy looks or his millionaire Dad.

MCO 2004