Baseball Boys

April 4, 2014: Driving Eli to school, sometimes I get lucky.  Occasionally one or both of Eli’s closest friends will be ambling in the direction of the high school and I can to offer a ride.  I love that moment. These kids are big now, pretty much taller than me, and can be, on any given day, morose or ebullient, dragged down by homework and family or buoyed up by the same and a thousand other things I will never hear about.  But they are good boys, good kids, interesting and able kids.  This is the end of Eli’s junior year of high school, and he has a small group of good friends and a larger group of acquaintances, and then of course family, cousins and histories that ring him and give him his horizon.

They talk about music and sports.  They wear their fancy baseball uniforms with the raised logos and their name on the back. They’re not stoners and none have steady girlfriends--school takes up too much of their night.  It is, in many ways, a very innocent time, a lovely time, though I know not an easy one, despite appearances. One of the boys had his brother die mysteriously last fall—suicide is the guess. They all struggle to do the homework, so much of it meaningless and they know it.  They put up with arbitrary changes to their schedule and try to take pride in what they do.  Their lives are highly ordered and they are lucky.

It wasn’t that long ago, Christmas, I think it was, that Jacqueline and my other boys were untangling themselves from the car and walking into the house on Christmas Eve. Everyone went up on ahead, but Eli hung back, waiting.  The moment we were alone, he burst into tears and pressed his big head into my chest, crying.  “Oh, dad,” he said, “I just can’t forget about it.”  I knew what he meant, the way his friend’s brother died.  It broke my heart, this tough kid still balled up inside.  I put my hands on his head and let him cry.  “I just don’t know how to go in there,” he said, the house bright and Christmas tree in the window.  I told him it would be ok. That he was being a good friend to the family who lost their son and brother. I said other things, expressed in words and in silence.

All three of these kids were hurt by that death.  This is not a simple time for them, despite this generation’s affluence.  There is no clear-cut sense of danger.  It comes from the kids you pass in the hallways (a mother snuck into the school last week to stab a student who was hassling her daughter; the mother was hit with a Taser gun and arrested).  It happens at Fort Worth, with suicides, with car wrecks, with cancer.  In a world that is so heavily ordered, safe and promising, around them is carnage and arbitrary violence.  It is as if we have an autoimmune disease as a culture, our body attacking itself for no good reasons that I can detect.  Maybe it has always been like this.

I stopped the car in front of the high school.  Exquisitely beautiful young black girls were flowing like a flock of exotic birds or flowers down the sidewalks.  None of us noticed. My angular boys got out and stood together for a moment, saying thanks, worrying about first period and physics and slamming the car doors too hard.  It occurred to me I might take their picture; my camera was on the dashboard. Just a moment of them together, seventeen, sixteen years old, shambling in with their backpacks and baseball uniforms along the wet sidewalk.  But I didn’t.  Didn't want to embarrass them. Lying in bed last night, I regretted that missed opportunity, and spent time thinking on my way to sleep of Eli as a baby, a young kid, his sweetness, of his older brother the same way, open heart, how irremediable all those moments are.  

Hearing the wind roar down the valley from far off, my wife asleep, I felt for a moment the delight of fall, the keening feeling that is both joy and loss together.  How you feel everything moving through you without touching.  I should have taken that picture, but that only makes it worse somehow and there is nothing that needs to be stopped. And then I got up early, still thinking about the my kids, all of them, my own five and these others and my students, and have watched rain mix with snow all morning into the woods behind my house as the light comes up, beautiful and completely out of control.