Apparently, I was not the only one who thought this way. The line at Cold Stone was long and slow-moving, but unlike most lines I get stuck in, not impatient. No huffs of indignation or lizard-like sighs from any of its participants, no muttered obscenities under anyone's breath (including mine...). Though there were times when the teenagers behind the counter seemed more intent on gabbing with customers and each other than serving ice cream (or taking time out from prep to sing whenever they received a tip; always a cringe-worthy gimmick), nobody seemed to care how fast or slow the line moved. Everyone was just happy to be there, in the moment, alive on this particular night, with ice cream in their immediate future.
That is, with the exception of the harried woman directly in front of me. She had two children with her, ages 9 or 10. Both were donned in red baseball caps and jerseys sporting the word 'Braves'; both had mud smears on the knees of their piped nylon pants; one had black and white plastic cleats tied together by the laces and slung over his shoulder; the other was still wearing his, and wherever he stepped on Cold Stone's lobby linoleum, he left behind a little scuffy offering of dirt and grass. It was obvious they had just come from a Little League game, and were being treated by their mother for winning...or perhaps consoled for losing.
At least, I'm reasonably sure she was 'mother' to both of them. At first I naturally assumed they were mere teammates. They seemed too close in age to be brothers, and on the surface did not really look alike. One had fair skin, red hair and freckles, very much like the woman who had brought them there, the other was darker all around - slightly darker skin, hair closer to brown than red, freckles evident but less pronounced. But the longer I watched, the more obvious it became that they were brothers. Embedded deep in their little countenances were physical traits demarcated by their parents' individual genetic contributions but sharing an unmistakable common make-up. They were built the same and even moved the same, walked and pantomimed alike, unconsciously replicating each other, and their mother.
I could be wrong about this, but I like thinking it was the case. I like thinking our heredity reveals truths about our identity without the need for words.
In any case, they were ecstatic to be there, and quite a handful, jumping, dancing, pushing, laughing and shouting as they waited in line, driving the woman crazy. Locked in a shoulder to shoulder jostle, they pressed their faces up against the glass case, announcing loudly the myriad ingredients they planned to have mixed into their ice cream. Sadly, reality fell short of their bluster, when the woman - as much to rein in their unwittingly obnoxious enthusiasm as to establish limits for their own good - informed them they could only choose one. The red-headed boy looked positively bereft to learn he would have to choose between gummy bears and peanut butter cups. I felt his pain in no small measure. Sucks being a kid, having limitations in a place like Cold Stone Creamery.
Peanut butter cups, I urged silently. Choose peanut butter cups!
Gummy bears - gummy anything - have no business being allowed to play with ice cream. When I saw he was flirting with this option (staring at them through the glass, crinkling his nose in heavy deliberation) I was moved to intervene, but too late. He chose the gummies - not even gummy bears, but gummy worms! Unchewable, undigestible, tasteless... - and had them mixed into cake batter flavored ice cream...!
A flavor profile from hell is every child's inalienable right, I guess.
Maybe limitations are a good thing after all.
While the first kid watched his monstrosity get blended before his eyes, his brother (who, much to his credit, was eyeing Oreo cookies and peanut butter ice cream...now that kid's gonna be the frigging President someday!) kept staring at me, taking off his baseball cap and putting it back on, and looking away whenever our eyes met.
"You win tonight?" I asked him, unnerved a little by the persistence of his stare and its rabbit-like retreat.
My question surprised him. His eyes widened, and he responded with a tentative nod of his head.
"That's cool," I nodded back. "I played for the Braves, too." I motioned to the team logo across his diminutive chest.
"My Braves?" he asked quietly.
"No, another Braves. A long time ago."
His response to this was silence, followed a moment later by total disinterest as the woman hurriedly instructed him to tell the girl behind the counter what he wanted.
"Come on, Colin, you're holding the line up!," she barked, louder and more brusquely than I think she intended to. "Colin! You're holding the line up!"
Now I felt her pain in no small measure. I do not miss the never-ending fight to keep the line - any line - moving, which makes up much of parenthood.
Colin and I said nothing else to each other, but he left me thinking, unexpectedly, about the Braves. Not only the Little League team for which I played in the summers of 1983, '84 and '85, but the major league franchise in Atlanta. Both entities were once inextricably linked to my existence. Colin and his brother were not even a thought yet, and though they'll probably never be able to understand this, their mother, maybe a year or two older than I, was likely unable to imagine them as part of her life one day, or that their father would be anyone other than Simon LeBon, perhaps. Or Ralph Macchio.
When combing through my vast store of childhood memories, my Little League years don't readily spring forth. Probably because when they were over, I let it all go. I became too cool for team sports, walking away from a promising career in Senior League over the harassment I took from the older kids my rookie year. One night in June 1986, after enduring ridicule for a) flubbing an otherwise a routine pop fly to right field and b) responding to a little chin music from an older pitcher on an opposing team with a spasticness that everyone seemed to think was hilarious, I crept up the coach's walkway and stuffed my uniform into his mail box, tendering my resignation in an act of unspoken defiance. Hell with baseball, I'd decided; it was time to grow my hair long and start thinking everything sucked.
In spite of my spate of self-styled insolence (which would consume the next four or five years of my life), my three years in Little League spawned an interest in the sport that has endured. My assignation to the 'Braves' (amongst eight other Little League teams, with names like Pirates, Yankees, Red Sox, et cetera) at age 11 was completely arbitrary, but fortuitous. As it happened, the cable service in my town carried WTBS, Ted Turner's 'super station' from Atlanta, which back then broadcasted every Atlanta Braves game throughout the season. Because of this, the Atlanta Braves became my team, and remain so to this day.
I must here confess having felt a certain ecstasy throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, when the Braves simply couldn't have a losing season. In that time: 14 straight division titles (not including 1994, a strike year in which they'd otherwise been headed for dominance), five World Series appearances resulting in one World Championship, and a memorable finish to Game 7 of the 1992 National League championship game against Pittsburgh (seriously, YouTube it....truly one for the record books). Their success was spear-headed by a nuclear arsenal-caliber pitching line-up (Smoltz, Maddux, Avery, Glavine...) and the strong swings of Fred McGriff, David Justice and Terry Pendleton, who was solid for RBIs and making it to scoring position. All of this was coordinated by Bobby Cox, retiring this year as one of the most successful managers ever and richly deserving the post-career accolades he almost certainly will receive.
But the real love affair between me and the Atlanta Braves was back in the early 1980s. Atlanta was in the NL West then and - at the height of my interest - under the management of Joe Torre (who has since pieced together his own storied legacy with the Yankees). Back in the days of Dale Murphy, Bob Horner, Glenn Hubbard, Phil Niekro and Chris Chambliss, with Skip Caray announcing (wasn't until many years later that I realized Skip was Harry's son), there was no better way to spend a summer afternoon than splayed on the living room sofa with an ice cream sandwich and a bottle of Faygo Rock-n-Rye in front of a loudly whirring fan watching the Braves play in Atlanta-Fulton County stadium. I still remember the action-packed bumper music for 'America's Team' then - da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da, da-da, dahhh...! (Er, something like that...)
What I don't remember is them winning a lot of games; certainly there was little sign of the glory decade to come. Their gutter season was '88, when they lost 106 contests; by then my hair was hanging down to my butt and covering my eyes, and I really couldn't have given less of a shit. But even earlier, when I almost never missed a game on WTBS, it always seemed the crowds at Atlanta-Fulton on any given week day in July were painfully thin, rows and rows of center and right field stands empty, balls hit there caught by no one. There were long stretches of losses, and an ever-present morbid tone in Skip Caray's voice. Yet, contrary to this memory, statistics show Atlanta won the NL West pennant in 1982, and placed 2nd in '83 and '84. How is this possible? Perhaps my recollections are muddled. Childhood memories often are.
Or maybe it's the fact that my Braves were, at that time, the losingest team in our town's Little League history...
At least that's what my older brother claimed. He had no stats or figures to back it up, he was just trying to get under my skin (and was good at it); but it was a reliable assertion. In my three years with my Braves, we were never champions, but in the summer of '84 we went 0 for 14 for the season. Didn't win a single damn game, and our 'perfect' record helped foster a reputation as the league's resident losers, which amongst any group of 10 to 13-year-old boys can be a heavy cross to bear. Every morning after a game, I'd pick up the daily newspaper to find a box score at the bottom of the sports page heralding our loss. Occasionally, as space allowed, there was even a little write-up about the game, with certain keywords for my Braves sure to abound: error, strike-out, missed opportunity, fly out, ground out, rally falls short...
Sometimes, just sometimes, with my last name attached to them...
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SUMMER OF '84 - As per rules/etiquette, members of the Ashland, Wisconsin Little League Giants and Braves congratulate each other on a 'good game'. I'm the moppy-haired, fish bellied #4 walking dejectedly. There were no good games for the Braves that season. We went 0-14, the losingest team in league history, or so my older brother enjoyed telling me at the time.
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The worst part of that losing season might just have been our unsatiated post-game thirst. The winning team was allowed to go over to the clubhouse where they stored the equipment and score a free can of soda. The losers, if they had money, had to take the walk of shame down to the corner store and buy something to drown their sorrows in. I did not generally have any money, so my thirst usually led me home, to the hose in my back yard.
Why we were a losing team, the mechanics of our failures, escape me. We had some good players in our dugout, a few who had carved out solid reputations for hitting and fielding in spite of the team they played for. A lot of it had to do with the coach, whom none of us respected and blamed wholly for our inability to win games. The umpires were also frequently in our crosshairs, their bad calls and inattentiveness sealing our fate in more than one game. But who knows? Maybe, collectively, we just sucked. Maybe that's all that needs to be said.
I was one of those who fared better individually. I maintained a pretty respectable .290 batting average two summers in a row, finished with 6 career homers (just 749 behind Hank Aaron, I enjoyed telling myself at the time), even managed to make the All-Star team my final season. I executed a one man double play once, and a 3-2 double play that was poetry in motion between me and the catcher, a kid named Scott: After making the out at first, I fired a perfectly aimed throw toward home to catch a third base runner who got cocky. I must declare, it was a low and to-the-point missile, flawlessly snagged at shin level by Scott, who twisted around and applied a perfectly timed tag to the sliding runner. And it saved the game, to boot. The assemblage of parents, grandparents, older brothers and kid sisters on the aluminum bleachers behind home plate all swept onto their feet at once when that play was called.
Andy Warhol was making a comment about society's rising celebrity culture, but I've always interpreted his 15 minutes of fame comment in a more grassroots way. I believe most people get their 15 minutes of fame in little venues, amidst circumstances that hold little sway in the world, but huge impact on the individual's life. I like to think, even, that people get more than one 15 minutes of fame throughout their life. And I believe that dusky evening in the ball park that to this day I still walk past when I go home for a visit (and true to mythology, really DOES seem much smaller than it did at the time) was one of mine.
Little Colin got me looking back on Little League fondly, but he also unknowingly filled me with regret. Tonight, so many years later, I regret stuffing my uniform in my coach's mailbox. I should have stuck it out, gotten through my rookie year of Senior League, seen where it led me.
I could have; that's more the point. I could have hacked it.
If I had, would I have played three years in Senior League, gone onto high school play, then college, and at this point in my life be ready to retire from the Majors?
No, probably not. But that is decidedly not the point.
I really, really wish I had stuck it out. It is an invaluable lesson sports teaches us, elegantly simple and timeless: You can't quit. You can lose. It's okay to lose. But you can't quit.
Hopefully Colin and his brother learn this, in sports or somewhere else. It is not only an invaluable lesson, it is the one most relevant to a successful life, no matter where that life leads.
