Hashtag throwback Thursday. Last night the Chicago Cubs won the World Series ending a 108-year drought. That is generations of time. I watched it, old man that I am, and was brought back again and again as the game got late. This is what old men do while watching baseball. They go back into their memory and remember the past. They remember their own dirt lot pickup games. The shuffling around in the dust waiting to get picked, and then picked punching their glove, spitting into it to make the leather supple and shine. They remember the lot itself. The scrubby parcel of unused land transformed by the possibilities of youth into a World Series stadium. Always game seven, bottom of the ninth, two out. Then to the glove itself, the one that sits in my father’s closet and has a story all its own, and then to my father who I imagined already asleep on his chair in the bottom of the sixth. Himself, I’m sure having thought about games of catch with his son on a black tar driveway. But back again, to the lineups. To the bartender’s son and mechanics sons and postal worker’s son. To the girls who watched at a distance, knowing the sides to be uneven because they could count and who waited to be called, and then when called mimicked the kick and spit and scratch of us before the seriousness of the game began. The loudest one, the most beautiful one, is the girl I secretly liked. All at once then, in the rain delay, there she is again on the field before the game hitting grounders to us. Calling to us and hitting pop-flies that we caught and caught and caught. The loudest and funniest. The unafraid. She slid into second in shorts and scraped her knee and threw dirt on it, clapping the dust off of her. When I watch the World Series, I go back to when I was in it, on a patch of garbage lot on the east side of Buffalo, New York. I see my mother and father. My brothers and my sister. My red-haired friend and our associates. I see my secret crush. I see them all. I imagine them not as they are now, in the midst of divorce, or checking their bank accounts, or eating dinner with their aged parents, I see them as they were. I feel the leather and spit. The choking of the dust. The yelling and jeering. I see them in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two outs. We are down by two. The count is full and our team’s girl is up. My not so secret crush. We all cheer her on, and that cheer echoes over time from Buffalo to Dallas to North Carolina and Cleveland and Chicago. It’s the cheer that whispers you got this, and you can do it, and we all believe in you. This is what comes to the old men watching the World Series and it doesn’t matter if their team wins or loses, it’s the moment of reflection on time and its connection to all of the most beautiful things in your life that counts.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday, circa 1980 to the sweet streets of Buffalo's east side. Here I am smoking a cigarette I had pilfered from the purse of my lovely Aunt Laura who kept a canary that was yellower than the turtleneck I relentlessly wore. My Aunt lived above her sister in a spotless apartment. She smoked several packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes a day and she kept a yellow canary, that sang sweetly, in a cage. She also kept a covered glass dish on her coffee table full of Hershey’s Kisses. There was something about lifting the lid to grab a kiss that made the chocolate seem finer than the mass produced piece it was. But enough of that. Though I didn’t know it at the time, in regard to love, I was some lesser, but no less important, Antoine Doinel. I am with my gaggle of goons. We had been wandering around the neighborhood as we were wont to do in those days, laughing, riding handmade skateboards, playing stickball, gambling, and lighting small things on fire, generally before the street lights came on. This was in the time of tube socks, banana seats, and pay telephones. I was clearly delighted with myself, having just held the sweaty hand of my first love who momentously took her hand from mine to wipe the sweat onto her Jordache jeans before entwining her fingers into mine again. It was then that I realized all things were possible. We broke up a day later via a note passed in music class where my joy of being next in line to play the xylophone was greatly diminished by the words "i’m sorry” with a broken heart in place of the dot over the lowercase i on a sheet of snow white paper folded into eighths. She had found another. The first of many such experiences in my young life. But this was before that note. We were walking our familiar streets. There the barber. There the butcher. There the lot where we played hockey. We were untamed, bodily, and brutal. We laughed with our mouths open, we spit and swore, stumbling towards the things of adulthood. The holding of hands, the kissing and touching. The overwhelming beating of our hearts in our fine, thin, chests that we ignored by making sarcastic remarks or setting small things on fire that belied our true feelings. Those feelings that we felt when we held the hand of the girl in the perfectly blue jeans or when we heard the sound of that bright bird cut through the silence, or lifted the lid of a glass bowl to reveal the treasure of a tinfoil wrapped kiss.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. I was leafing through photographs last night, you know just going through moments in my mind like I do on any given evening and was struck by this photograph of my brother Michael and myself circa 1979. It is significant for many reasons. One reason is that this is the only known photograph of the famed banana whiffle ball bat that is central to many early Gianadda boyhood stories, culminating in its destruction by gasoline and a match from a box stolen from my Aunt Laura, who, you might remember from earlier recollections, smoked several packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes a day. I hit a record 362 home runs pretending I was the great New York Yankee, Thurman Munson, with that bat. This photograph is also significant in that this is the only known photograph of my brother Michael between the years 1972 and 1989 where he is not wearing a black leather jacket. This was in the time of tube socks and showing your love by beating someone up with your fists. For instance, some many years before this photograph was taken a bully poked me and poked me and poked me in the chest with his big dirty finger and said "wah, wah, did I break your lil’ chicken bone chest lil’ chicken baby," and then poked me again with his grubby finger and pretended to cry like a baby hoping it would solicit in me a rush of tears like the great cataract that is Niagara, “wah wah.” We had been standing alone by the funeral home on the corner. I was 3. I was given the task to go buy cigarettes for my mother who was cooking gnocchi, but had been waylaid by the brutalness of language that was transmitted from the stench of the mouth of the bully. Out of the blue, my brothers, who had been setting small things on fire on the train tracks came over and waved their fists at the bully. They said, "you got something to say?" and then they waved their fists again and demanded the bully say it. They said: "say it!, say it!," but the bully cried and ran away. This was known as love. In any case, this photograph is also significant because it shows the first car my brother owned. Many girls liked my brother because he was well known around the neighborhood for the enormous amount of love that poured out of him and into the faces of bullies. He took up for the underdog and was also polite to the elderly which earned him the moniker "suchagoodboy" by many of the mothers of the girls that followed him around doe-eyed. I believe he kissed many of these girls behind our garage. But on this day, in 1979, which I remember with a clarity reserved for photographs, Karen Brzenczyszczykiewicz and Donna Kleszczynska (names have been changed to protect the innocent) were hanging around as he fiddled with his car. They were whispering about his hair, and buttocks, and making signs of the crosses on themselves as if that would help. It would not. He would kiss both of them before the end of the summer. One of them he would kiss directly inside that holiest of places in our neighborhood, the church. But this day, he talked to them softly, The love pouring out of him in a different way. It was so different in fact that it left an indelible mark on me. Karen had had her Kodak Brownie camera strapped around her neck that day, and he said "why dont you take a picture of me and my little brother?" She lifted the camera, focused, and snapped, and that is really why this photograph is significant. It is significant because instead of fists he used words to tell me he thought I mattered and was proud that I was his brother.