Ground Rules

by Shana Agid

 1.

Summers to Harridge, April 20, 1950: I am writing to inform you of the changes in the Washington ball park. It is rather difficult to explain but I will try to give you a picture.

Maybe you wouldn’t know it from the stands on Opening Day, but the umpires spent the last bits of winter trying to make sure everything was right. After October, they’d get into their cars and make their way to the parks. The one with the meddlesome bat rack, or with the new screen in left center field. The one with a new iron pole standing between the bullpens, bent back out of play at a thirty- degree angle, and painted bright yellow to help with seeing it. To make it possible, or at least slightly more probable, to confirm if the batter-runner should round the bases, touch ’em all, as they say. 

But the umps didn’t say that. The umps had so much more to say, writing long letters on hotel stationery from Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, Detroit. If it had a park, they’d been there, walking the green of the outfield looking for trouble. Circling back on the ground brick and clay of the warning track to the dugouts – more strange surfaces, protrusions, baseball-sized holes all making their jobs that much harder. And making the ground rules a necessity. “If ball goes through wire: 2 bases.” “Bat rack is in play.” A ball hit into the ivy in Chicago is a ground-rule double, unless a fielder reaches in to find it, which makes it a live ball, even if it can’t be found. 

These discoveries – the poles, the angles, the changing location of the press photo box – these had to be accounted for so the leagues could send the batting cards, with the ground rules for each park on the B side, out to the printer in time to get them to the clubs before the start of the season. When conditions changed too late, an order of five hundred cards would have to be destroyed, and five hundred, now corrected, sent in their stead. This all required a great deal of correspondence. Writing and explanation. Sometimes there would need to be a drawing or two, where words would not suffice. Sometimes, what the umpires saw defied representation. There seemed to be, quite simply, no way to tell it. 

Dear Mr. Harridge: I did not try to draw this description as I made an attempted once before and no one understood it but me. Sincerely yours, Charlie Berry.

That sort of thing.

*

After she died, I found a fat file of her records on the side table in their bedroom. Here, it seemed from the date on the pages, was the last CT scan and the text that came with it. The words described the tumors’ growth: they were more and bigger. And though I knew this all to be true, and I knew what it had meant because I’d been here, watching, I looked now at the scan to try to find them. I could infer a lung, maybe two. I saw variation, lines and areas of tissue, I supposed, blacks and whites and greys. And even though I knew because I read the words and had heard the oncologist and because she’d told me: I can feel them, that they are growing back, I couldn’t see them there in the picture. 

I would learn what to look for in the course of a late night, as a guest on an overnight shift in a hospital not far from where she’d been born. Dr. Clayton was looking at the scan of a man who had come into the ER, and who, like my mom, had grown some tissue where it didn’t belong. I learned that what to look for was white. I stood behind the doctor and watched as the scan of the man who did not belong to me, but to a brother and sister my age, came up on the screen. Blacks and whites and greys piled on top of one another – a cross-section of his body, I guessed. But the look on Dr. Clayton’s face made it clearer: something was wrong here. I said: How do you know? And she said: Here, see this here? She pointed to a large white area on the screen, drawing her finger around to indicate its mass. Now it stood out. White, she explained, showed a density of tissue where it shouldn’t be dense, a solid mass where we should see space and variation. So now I knew. I should have been looking for white spots, the white spots would have made the picture legible. The picture, if nothing else. My mom could have told us, too: I attempted a drawing, but no one understood it but me.

*

In the TV dramas, before surgery they are always talking about the margins. They ask: How are the tumor’s margins? I think this means: How likely is it to come out without damaging the necessary stuff around it? I think they mean: What is the margin for error? 

In the American League after the War, 1946 to ’52 brought a great deal of consternation about margins. The umpires and the League President set out each year to clarify in the winter the rules for the spring, and to see if the clubs had lived up to their off-season promises. Some did. Some didn’t. 

In New York, it took two seasons, from ’46 to ’48, to settle the issue of the Yankee Stadium foul poles. A relatively recent innovation that pulled the clear edges of fair territory on the field skyward to aided the umpires in their ability to judge fair from foul on a ball shot up into the seats. To decrease the margin for error. In 1946, the Yankees’ foul poles were in the field of play, rather than in the stands, as was typical and expected. Despite the Yankee staff’s assurances that they would be moved, or at least were being looked into, the poles remained on the field through ’46 and ’47, requiring three extra ground rules and at least one reprinting of the batting order cards, until in the winter of 1948 the Yankees club confirmed this small drama would come to a close the following season. 

The Yankees couldn’t be blamed for having their minds elsewhere, for turning their attention away from the field’s particulars and toward the rough sound of Mr. Babe Ruth, who was dying of throat cancer. On April 24, 1947, Ruth, now retired, stood on the infield grass leaning on a bat belonging to a player from the opposing team, to bring his now broken voice low to the microphone. If the crowd thought he sounded bad, he assured them, the cancer – though one wouldn’t have actually said the word (cancer) in such a public way back then – the cancer felt just as bad. Mr. Ruth said goodbye to what he took the time to call the best sport, the only one. So, we can see now why the foul poles might have been forgotten. Why they were left to be addressed by the ground rules, which were malleable enough. 

Still, other concerns remained on the field. Three days after Mr. Ruth’s short address, Umpire William Summers sent the first of many letters regarding the irksome bat racks in the Yankee Stadium dugouts to the League office. In drawing after drawing, he tried to explain to Mr. Harridge how a ball hitting a bat stored in one of these racks might bounce fair in the course of a game. Mr. Harridge asked, if the dugout was out of play, and the rack was separated from the front of the dugout by a six-inch piece of wood (as represented in Mr. Summers’ drawings), how could a ball hitting it be in play? Mr. Summers responded: Look at the drawing this way. From my desk at the research library, I tried to look at it Mr. Summers’ way, but I also could not see it as he did. Unless what he was saying was, instead: Not even we can see everything, when the ball, when everything, moves so quickly at game time.

Compare this to Boston, though, where, in ’52, the umpires wrote in sparse language, but loving detail, about the iron pole separating the bullpens behind the center-field fence at Fenway Park. Here, they reported that what before would have required a telescope to see, now was plain as day. McGowan: It either hits or it doesn’t. Honochick: In the past the iron railing (post) was straight up & down (vertical). At the present time the post is bent in toward the bull pens or bleachers. If a ball should strike same I feel certain the ball would not bound back to the playing field. Duffy: Umpires McKinley, Soar, and myself inspected the bull pen prior to the start of the Sunday game. The iron rail dividing the bull pen has been slanted inward and is painted yellow to avoid confusion. 

The umpires had no choice but to assert, to know. A finger shot up, left or right, or twirling in a tight circle to indicate the home run. And sometimes an argument, nose-to-nose with the manager who saw things differently. These small details mattered. So, while Boston might have lost Ruth those many years before, now the Yankees had lost him, too, and at least by ’52 Boston’s field was clean-edged and ready for play.

*

My mom’s diagnosis came on the eve of the baseball season. By early March, players had long since reported to spring training and while the games are a little dull and they don’t count for anything, all the speculation and hope has begun. The year of my mom’s cancer was R.A. Dickey’s Cy Young Award year. The Mets, my mom’s team, lost often, but Dickey had his knuckleball working. He won by keeping hitters off balance, throwing butterflies, balls that floated unpredictably toward home plate, swept along by the air which moved them any which way – no spin, just the strange friction of air on leather and string. Usually, the thing about a knuckleball is that it either works or it doesn’t and you have to have your feel for it and also you have to have a short memory. For Dickey, God was how he handled this. He tried his best when it was his start, and sometimes it didn’t go his way and he would give it up to God and work his bullpen session and try again five days later. My mom loved Dickey, but not God, so she loved him by “skipping over the Jesus stuff,” and watching every start televised on the West Coast.

 I signed my mom up for a subscription that allowed her to watch these far away games, half of them played a few miles from my house but three thousand miles from hers, on her computer. When the season was well over, deep into a long December, the renewal notice came through as we sat at her kitchen counter. She said, looking me square in the eye, so I could be sure: We probably should cancel. I’d love to be around to watch next spring, but I don’t know that I will be. When the Mets traded Dickey that winter, she was so angry, I think she might have threatened not to watch them anyway, if she thought she could follow through.

In Dickey’s Cy Young year, my mom and I might have talked baseball more than we did chemo regimens, CT scans, radiation. I listened to the Mets broadcasters at home and learned the nuances of a game I had not played with my own body. I memorized the details as I saw them unfold: base-running, footwork, timing at the plate, the jump on the ball from the outfield. These were the simple inevitabilities of baseball, the lessons of over a century of practice and observation, debate and demonstration. How, here, everything was within the realm of experience and, also, anything could happen. You can come to the ballpark everyday, Gary, and you never know what you’re going to see! The pleasure in that, as counterweight. As reminder. My mom and I watched, on our coasts, and sent text messages. What a play! And, Oh, crap. What was he thinking?! 

In this way, the relative predictability of nine innings, five to six days a week stood in for the relative predictability of three days of chemo followed by a week of exhaustion and then a week of something better, but still not great. Baseball stood in for what couldn’t be predicted, too. A shutout. A slump. Fluid in the lungs. A day of energy. The dogs, the garden, what’s for dinner. Taking your spot in the rotation, getting set in the batter’s box, a double off the wall. Baseball was an echo of the simple regularity of cancer, and a reminder of what maybe we wanted to think about less, or just on our own. Triumph, for example. Defeat. These were private feelings, and we didn’t always see them the same way or have them at the same time. We controlled what we could, but there wasn’t much of it, most days. And some of what my mom knew, she couldn’t share. Look at the picture this way. It wasn’t the rest of us who were dying.

*
My mom let me make the morning toast. Two pieces for me, one for her, one for the puppy, who wasn’t really a puppy anymore. Sometimes my stepdad, Bob, also had toast. The older dog did not. The toast, warm still, would get buttered, and the puppy’s was cut into satisfying one-inch squares. I noticed how all of us, my mom, Bob, and me, knew an inch without measuring, from what we did with our hands otherwise: cook, build, print. One inch was like the period at the end of a sentence. it was clear, obvious, an already understood, and therefore imaginable, formable shape. 

I would ask: Do you want toast? Eggs? And she would answer: That sounds great, honey. Or: Not today, I don’t think I can. What I wanted was a way to fix everything, and the closest I could come was to ask and to listen, because most days this was just one of many decisions to be made. This is what Molly, our palliative care nurse practitioner, reminded me afterwards. That most of us don’t know exactly how it is that we make decisions. Just regular ones, on a regular day. Now, she will sit you down and ask you to think: Are you the type to talk things over? To go off on your own? Because now you have to make some decisions. She asks: How do you make decisions in your life?

We value the danger of the split-second choice and the forbearance of careful deliberation. The difficulty, of course, is that sometimes there is no right decision to be made, only a best guess, best effort. Dr. Clayton and Molly tell me separately: Sometimes, I just have a feeling. Heebie jeebies, one says. A feeling that you are going to die, that you’re not going to live on the long end of the prognosis, says the other. They can’t tell us those things – not most of us, at least – but it’s like knowing the feel of an inch of toast, or the path of a ball off the bat. It’s practice, attention, discipline. Guesswork.

2.

Neil Walker, Mets second baseman, to reporter: This game will push your head under water and make you gasp for air.

My mom sat on the small grey couch in the living room and told me that when she was a teenager, she and her father made an annual trip north from Charlottesville to Detroit, where a friend owned a car lot. Each year, just the two of them would drive from the agricultural South to the industrial North to trade in the old model for something new. In the tightly-gathered cities of the Midwest, they’d make their way to Tiger Stadium, Wrigley Field, and Comiskey Park to take in baseball games. Sometimes, on the drive home, a fog would roll in across the two-lane highway. Once, she said, her father couldn’t see a thing and asked her to guide him. She stepped out of the car and crossed to the driver’s side, put her hand on the hood, and walked along as he drove slowly, on account of that fog. She cut her own blue eyes into the dense white, looking to see what might be coming toward her, becoming the car’s exoskeleton, her father’s eyes, the headlights. 

I think about this often. That he asked her to stand in the road. That she tried to see for both of them. That she was outside and he was in. I wonder now if she thought about baseball, about watching Nellie Fox, her favorite White Sox player, maybe her favorite player ever, turn a double play at Comiskey Park without looking, the ball gone from his throwing hand and his feet already in the air before the runner slid fast into second base. What Nellie could see coming when he wasn’t looking. I wonder how far she walked like this. I wonder if she felt the fog on her skin. If she felt helpful, necessary, or angry.

 From the couch, my mom invited me to ask her things. She said: After my father died, there were so many things I wished I’d asked him. She may as well have said: Shana, after I die there will be so many things you will wish you had asked me. Maybe she’d forgotten by then, all those years later, that it’s not that you forget to ask, it’s that you don’t know what to ask until it’s too late. 

*

The body, I learned, is soft. Pliable, through and through. What penetrates you works its way out from the inside, like an onion smell in sweat. Or in from the outside, like a splinter. Most days, once she was sick, it was that soft body she had for living. And all the things I’ve read and seen on TV were more or less true: she got bonier and smaller, she lost energy. I also noticed what didn’t change much: she was in charge of herself, and of the kitchen. She could still wield a knife to cut the fat from a pork roast, and had the focus to imagine and apply the right rub before wrapping it tight in plastic to rest. She taught Bob and me how to make her recipe for croutons, getting aggravated by the oxygen cord when it caught on the cabinet as she tried to get to the jalapeño powder. There were those days, and then there were others, when she was too tired to cook, and she watched me take her place in the kitchen and smiled at me from the couch across the wide burgundy countertop, going in and out of sleep.

Two nights before she died, after getting up in the middle of the night, she refused to lie down again. My mom’s stubborn, solid body returned then. Rather than have me help her get into bed, as she could no longer lie down on her own, she sat. Never mind that just hours before we’d negotiated her torso and my arms and her ankles and my wrists to lift-swing her into the most comfortable position we could manage. Now, at 3 a.m., she just wanted to sit. And so I sat next to her. I put my arm around her shoulder to make sure she didn’t fall back. For hours, she went in and out of sleep and I felt her muscles work. How they unwound as she began to fall asleep and wrapped themselves back up when she woke. I did not sleep, and so I also felt my back and shoulder become her muscles’ surrogate; my grip tightened around her, then let go, simple and repetitive, almost graceful. 

Sometimes, when I watch the things ballplayers do – the 360-degree turn and throw, the reaction to a ball off a fast infield hop, the vertical leap that brings an outfielder’s glove over the fence in an effort to steal away a home run – I think, despite myself, I have always wanted to do something remarkable with my body. Maybe this was it. Just muscle learning, simple repetition in unpredictable circumstances. Finding oneself in the right place at the right time. When my mom woke, she turned her head toward me to look me in the eye as maybe she realized all at once what had happened, and she said: You’re so patient. I thought she sounded almost incredulous, surprised and just a little baffled as she always was about my willingness to sit still, to talk calmly to the satellite TV company representative when the game would not come on, to walk the dogs in the rain, like she didn’t know how I could stand it, all that holding her up while she slept. 

3.

Joey Votto, Reds first baseman, to reporter: It’s a humbling game, man. If you know yourself, and you know what you can and can’t do, it solves a lot of problems.

It is said that Judge Roy Hofheinz had what would become the country’s post-war vision for indoor baseball, a game protected from weather and air, from all but the kind of chance endemic to the game itself, while standing at the Colosseum on a 1955 trip to Italy for the World Council of Mayors. It is said that he looked at the ancient place and thought: if Emperor Titus could do it, so can I. He learned that the massive, ancient structure would sometimes be covered by a great shade unfurled across the top by slaves to shield those below from the elements, and thought that surely he could build a covered dome for Houston to block out the heat, mosquitoes, and rain. So when the Houston Sports Association approached him to back their pursuit of a Major League baseball team, Hofheinz hired a carpenter to build a model stadium with a fixed plastic roof, and in October 1960 delivered an impassioned sales pitch to representatives of the National League. 

When the meeting ended, Houston had a new team, the Colt .45s, named for the weapon that secured the West for white men in the hands of the Texas Rangers. By the winter of 1964, the team had been renamed the Astros, in honor of a newer power, as the space age gained momentum and the construction of the Houston base for NASA operations began just to the south.

A full understanding of the world’s first indoor ballpark and largest air-conditioned room wouldn’t come all at once. When the newspapers came to see the Astrodome under construction, one reporter tried to explain the mystery and wonder of the place to readers: Roy Hofheinz carries a million unusual facts and figures about the new stadium and can spew them forth like a computing machine. For example: the roof would be made of 4,596 Lucite panels, the same material used in bomb bay blisters and jet fighter canopies, sandwiched around an inch and a half of air to let in the light required to grow special Tiffway Bermuda grass and to diffuse that sunlight to prevent shadows on the field; the scoreboard would be 362 feet long and cost two million dollars; the air conditioning system would run around the clock to keep the dome from becoming a greenhouse and to keep the air inside fresh by turning 250,000 cubic feet of air over each minute. Here, spectators would also find a barber shop and hair salon, a bowling alley, themed restaurants, a stag bar, and padded seats in the color-coded stands. 

They played the first day game in the Astrodome on April 10, 1965. The sun shone through the roof and its diffused light became what one player said was like looking at a million suns, making fly balls and pop-ups impossible to locate. During the homestand, outfielders tried wearing helmets to protect them from the balls they could not see and specially-made sunglasses management hoped would make the balls visible again. When this didn’t work, they waited for the team to leave town and painted the roof tiles with a thick white paint, which, as anyone could have guessed, caused the grass to wither and turn brown in unsightly patches the grounds crew would paint green for the rest of that spring and summer. The Astros announced the demise of their outfield with the celebration of a two-phase installation for the 1966 season of a zippered carpet of plastic grass developed by Monsanto and dubbed Astroturf. A joint press release hailed the new surface as a product of chemistry, unparalleled and trail-blazing. 

*

When my mom died, I spent weeks going through her things. At first, it was the regular stuff. We worked through what had to be worked through: clothes, jewelry, papers. But as we ran out of what had to be done, I made finding what could be done still into a kind of habit. A shelf of travel journals, a stack of cookbooks, a utility drawer. Closets were promising. Before opening a door, I could stand for a moment imagining the four or five shelves and the two or three feet by two or three feet of space on each, all potentially filled with new information or old things or evidence. And the time it would take to go through them all. 

In one closet, I found white bankers’ boxes, stacked two high, labeled in my mom’s writing: SRA Office. Between photos of myself at different ages, photos of the dogs, heavy metal ashtrays, I found a black-and-white picture of my mom and Nellie Fox in the Comiskey Park grandstand and a 1959 Nellie Fox baseball card, both in basic frames. In 1959, my mom would have just turned eighteen as the players, having lost the World Series to the Dodgers in six games, moved on to their winter jobs or off-season houses. Here, then, were two stories I didn’t exactly know. I knew she loved Nellie Fox, but I didn’t know why. I knew she was born just outside Chicago, and that she’d been a life-long White Sox fan, but I did not know how she came to prefer the South Siders over the Cubs on the North Side. I knew that she had never forgiven her mother for throwing out her baseball card collection, and didn’t hesitate to differentiate her desires for herself as a mother to me through calling upon this particular act as an example of what she hoped never to do, but I did not know how this one card had survived. So I took them. I looked to Nellie Fox for an explanation.

It’s possible that she loved him like everyone loved him. Like today’s small second basemen: Pedroia, Altuve. In their stature and hustle, these men are somehow spectacular and regular all at once. People called Fox durable, and maybe that is what there was to love about him. But I think it is also likely that my mom’s love of the underdog started young and that she might have been less interested in his durability than in his existence in baseball, his persistence. In the 1950s while the White Sox worked to unseat the Yankees from their dominance and keep their distance from Baltimore and the others, my mom observed a world around her which, mostly, she could not abide. The two memories she shared most often were of her terror at the white violence that accompanied desegregation in her home state of Virginia and of the way she had to practice getting in and out of a car with a poodle skirt on, neither showing too much skin nor appearing clumsy. I think it’s possible my mom looked away from Fox’s political leanings (he once asked if a young man had long hair before he would give him a referral for a job), and toward the way he made use of his body, unconventionally, as a model for getting things done. But I didn’t know for sure.

Later, at the research library, in Box 46, I found Nellie Fox again. This time, I turned the page of a 1964 Texas Parade article and was surprised to see him there, posing next to a ragged stake driven into the ground at the approximate site of second base in a half-built Astrodome. I wondered how that compact man with the giant chaw in his cheek, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with my mom when she was still a teenager, went from a grandstand on the South Side to this strange new place. 

I learned that Fox, aging by baseball standards, was traded by the White Sox to Houston during the winter of 1963. He was good now for some pictures, and for coaching the up-and-comers, and for a pinch-hit walk-off RBI single in the twelfth inning of the Astros’ very first game in the Astrodome in the year he would finally retire. For Fox, when it was over, and he returned to his bowling alley and a life at home, the feeling was not the nostalgia of the fan or invoked by the business of baseball, it was accompanied instead by a more evasive question, the one asked by the thirty-five-year old player who can’t move as he once did. Or by the person now confined to the couch. Or by the one who goes on living. It was not nostalgia, but loss. It was asking yourself, now that I’ve known this one thing so well, what do I do? What could possibly come next? 

In Houston, with the space race at full tilt and just down the road, the future of baseball and the future of the country got tangled up in each other. The very sciences that made both Mr. Hofheinz’s and President Kennedy’s dreams possible--chemistry and engineering, among others--had their equivalents labs and hospital wards in Bethesda, Boston, Baltimore, New York, and beyond. Researchers and clinicians moved toward what Mary Lasker of the American Cancer Society called “inner space,” to initiate the old story of war on still new landscapes, the body and the cancer cell.

No sooner did a booted foot set down on the moon to plant a US flag in soil unknown and uninhabitable, than the members of the American Cancer Society asked for their own moonshot, for the money and resources to out-maneuver cancer, to ruin it with science and the tenacity of strong chemicals, strategically applied. Science, they argued, could finally make cancer reveal itself and become subject to some kind of control, because it had been relentless up to now. They took to the newspapers and the wires with the ingenuity of ad men. They used whatever sway they had with elected officials, which was, it turns out, considerable, to argue for an equivalency, to make a deal: if all that money and time spent to outwit matter and gravity themselves could fast-track the H-Bomb and put a person in orbit, then imagine what it could do for cancer. Perhaps they did not think through all of the ramifications – the suffering, the horror, the sheer brute force of split atoms. Of more war. Or of running lines of mustard gas through thin plastic tubes into people’s fragile veins as they sat back in otherwise comfortable-looking recliners and watched the poison come through and hoped it would do damage to only some cells and not everything in its path. Maybe they’d all declared war because war was what they were used to.

This is how my mom would lose Nellie Fox, to a cancer that finally refused to be treated and instead spread around his body until it was time to tell the baseball men and others who’d loved him that this was likely it. (Whether she knew this or not is another now unanswerable question.) They came to see him in his hospital bed, or if they couldn’t come – some too concerned about what they might see in Fox or what he might see in them – they called or sent a note. Nellie received them all, until he grew too tired and was ready to be left more or less alone, just his family and the nurses, and there was nothing left to be done but treat whatever pain he might have felt, and that was that.

*

By the 1980s, the players and the writers began to notice things about the covered stadiums, which had sprung up everywhere just as Hofheinz predicted. The turf, set down over concrete, may have eliminated the bad hop but had created the high bounce, and it was also taking its toll on players’ legs. Some wondered if protection from elements in general caused fans to come to games well-dressed and without caps, making the look of the game, and the crowd, irrevocably changed. Dan Meyer, a first baseman with the Seattle Mariners, who played in a lumbering concrete dome with low-hanging amplifiers and left- and right-field lines so much shorter than promised by the County that the team sued to have them changed, thought maybe it was that fans couldn’t smoke. There are a lot of restrictions indoors, he said, maybe that’s an inhibiting factor. And so the Astrodome, the domes in general, had eventually to claim another purpose or be replaced. While Seattle’s Kingdome, for example, was imploded just after the turn of the century, spreading a fine covering of dust for miles around the downtown area as Mount St. Helens had over two decades before, the Astrodome’s post-baseball life saw it remain the beloved site of other things, like the famous final concert of the Tejano music star Selena, who, in 1995 broke the Dome’s already impressive record for attendance, performing as her opening number a seven minute disco medley in a purple pantsuit of her own design as she spanned Black, gay, and Tejano influences, and wrested the land from the Colt .45s and the Texas Rangers and even Mr. Hofheinz for a few hours.

Molly tells me that it’s only just changing now, that the oncologists have only just begun to acknowledge that winning isn’t everything, or that it might look different in different circumstances. That “giving up” and “fighting on” might be rhetorical devices, calls to battle, where there is not much to recommend them. That death is, in fact, sometimes what is coming. That to consider it, to imagine how one might want to live in the face of that knowledge or to do the dying itself is not the same, no matter what the doctors or our families and friends might sometimes say, as “accepting defeat.”

In our last meeting with the oncologist, as my mom weighed her options, she said to him: What would you do? Molly tells me now that she wondered if he would answer or if he would defer. That when he answered, she was relieved, since answering such a question – regardless of the answer itself – is not necessarily the thing he would have been trained to do. He said: I would stop. And that was that. To me, my mom’s relief is the thing I remember flooding what little space was left in the room, filled as it was with my mom, Dr. Rosales, Bob, Molly, me, and the kind of quiet, carefully considered words, and sadness you’d expect.

After, I noticed the choices we’d made for her. When we had to leave the island house for the hospital, and then for the city, a few nights after New Year’s Day, I made sure the dogs were in the car, and then grabbed her medications, the cuticle cream I’d given her, but not her lighter. On his trip back to the house, Bob brought gifts from me: an especially soft stuffed animal with a wire-edged ribbon for a scarf, a new t-shirt she would never be able to wear. But he didn’t bring the things he’d given her, except two small crystal figures from the collection he added to each winter: one a pair of bears, the other, this year’s brown dog. And then there were the decisions she made for herself: how much treatment to do and based on what information, when she would eat, that Bob would move the couch out into the living room when she could no longer get up and down the stairs, that I would give her her morphine, that she would stop reading books or watching shows that were what she called too emotional, when it was time to die.

*

The day I turned six months old, the Yankees invited the US Army to celebrate its 200th anniversary at Shea Stadium, where the Bronx team was sharing space with the Mets for a couple of years while their own ballpark got renovated. Soldiers opened the pre-game ceremony with a 21-gun salute, promptly blowing a hole in the centerfield fence with their cannon, setting the wooden panels on fire, and delaying the game’s start time by forty-two minutes as the grounds crew rushed to reestablish the perimeter and make the field safe for play.

Across the river, in Manhattan, I was inconsolable. In a journal my mom kept for me, recommended by her obstetrician as a way to help me when I had children of my own, she wrote other words, too: unbearable, howling, trapped. My mom wrote: I guess it’s just a bad day for you. And since I don’t understand what’s wrong when you’re inconsolable, it makes for a very bad day for me, too. She wrote: Well, all my plans for the day are shot and so on we go from here.

Sources

• Umpire letters, archival image descriptions, and news accounts from the collection of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame Giamati Library and the Chicago Public Library

• Dickey, R.A., with Wayne Coffey. Everywhere I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball. New York: Blue Rider Press/Penguin House, 2012.

• Gast, James. The Astrodome: Building an American Spectacle. Boston: Aspinwall Press, 2014.

• Gough, David, and Jim Bard. Little Nel: The Nellie Fox Story. Alexandria: D.L. Megbec Publishing, 2000.

• Lowry, Philip J. Green Cathedrals. New York: Walker & Company, 2006.

• Mukherjee, Siddhartha. Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. New York: Scribner, 2010.

• Paredez, Deborah. Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

• Palacios, Oscar, Eric Robin, and STATS, Inc. Ballpark Sourcebook: Diamond Diagrams. Skokie: STATS Publishing, 1998.

• Weber, Bruce. As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.

• And many conversations with generous experts in medicine and baseball

A portion of this essay previously appeared in Hobart (hobartpulp.com).

Shana Agid is an artist, designer, writer, and Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Agid's artist's books and prints have been shown at The New York Center for Book Arts, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, and other venues. Agid's artist's books are in the collections of the Walker Art Center, New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress, among others.