I have been having a long-play, dark sadness event for a tick, tick, tick hot minute. I should preface even that semi-preface with the following silhouetted, semi-declaration:
I knew it was coming, even though I am an adult white male human life form, and therefore could not possibly have any issues of any kind. Notwithstanding the validity of that public opinion, I am just going to write for a while. Everything does not have to be a political statement, right? We can still talk to each other like we should…like we use to? Maybe we can, maybe we cannot. I personally have no compulsion to voice an opinion about....anything.
So be it all, and either way and regardless and as I said I to I, what is, is whether it’s spoken or not. Internally, obviously (hopefully) you do not think that I said that out loud. Full disclosure, I said exactly that out loud. So be it… I to I, the lunatic said and anyone who knows me will stipulate to that, and that’s okay. BUT that is not what we are here to talk about, and I apologize for the out-of-the-gate digression.
I see and saw it unavoidable, even before “it” saw me. As such, I prepared my fragile human spirt by thinking deeply, hour upon hour and heavily drinking every single night this week to no avail, no productive outcome possible, knowing still I endeavored. Not that I even sought an actual resolution…. maybe just so I could muster the impossible motivation to mitigate the malfeasance of my mind mental exploratory to articulate this imaginary conversation (that clearly no one is having besides me and me).
One cannot resolve the unresolvable.
For me, on a certain level of understanding that we will not get into…’this’ is the equivalent to Pop dying… that is what only I ever called my old man, my homie, my father. It is at least commiserate at a spiritual level to him not being there to see the last basketball season all the way through. I say “last” because let us all be honest, if Bob Stantz did not watch the basketball game, can you really be sure that a basketball game was ever played? I think not.
It is hard to imagine basketball even being a sport without my old man in attendance, you know? It is almost as impossible to believe as it is him not living long enough to witness me finally being the unequaled badass that nobody besides me and him ever thought that I could be. I have wished my father back to life to see whatever the ‘thing’ was more times than I can count, but I’ve never encountered an emotion that wished him and Michael (my mentor) back into existence at the same time, until tonight. They had different tastes, they certainly were from different worlds, but they (at least to this point in my life) are the only two adult male human life forms that believed in me, unconditionally. It would’ve been cool if my Pops had met Michael one time. These two men never crossed paths in the temporal world, but I am confident that now that they’re both gone that they are arguing about college baseball vs college basketball in heaven or whatever and that gives me joy. They would’ve had a lot to talk about, but if it was only once, I wish that time was the moment when Michael “passed the torch” to me. Sadly, neither one of them were alive to see it…Neither one of them were alive to see me, for the first time maybe ever be “me”. That sucks. So be it.
Friday night is historically the official start of the college baseball season, but because of COVID, it moved to Saturday at least for my homies. Not sad about the timing, or that Florida is picked to win the league with State picked third or more, but absolutely devastated that my pseudo-Pops ain’t here to see it. I have been thinking obviously, as said prior before I started writing and devastated is the exact right word. The week of, the night before, the night of and throughout all the subsequent ‘first pitch’ weekend? That was me and Michael time - no different than me and dad the first weekend of March Madness. We’d txt and call hour to hour, anytime day or night. That’s when and where I learned who he really was...expanding exponentially over time. Year over year, it was like some natural process for him to share more about this thing or that through the vehicle of college baseball. Ironically, not natural for him, but like a national geographic type of unavoidable natural metamorphosis....as he trusted me more, the more he let his “tail” grow or whatever, you know? If it was not for college baseball, and the not-so-obvious to the casual observer intense rivalry between UF and Hail State, I don’t know that I would’ve ever known who Michael was...at least not at a core level, and by extension, he would’ve never been able to see me past all my bullshit. And by even further extension, if I hadn’t let Michael into my life, I may have never been able to connect with my old man, even though it wasn’t in the way I wanted, or in a timely manner, or in a way that he could even internalize, because he was the walking dead for the last forever. It was one-sided, for sure, but I made peace with Pops (that doesn’t make it suck less).
They were both simple, complicated, confoundingly unapproachable, but at the same time caring men. It was hard for them to connect with most people on any level other than a superficial one, but it wasn’t because they didn’t want to. Baseball / Basketball was like the air that the rest of us breathe to Michael / Dad, and that I shared that love, at least at a collegiate level changed their mind about “who” I was. That’s not true entirely maybe, but it absolutely softened their hardline worldview enough to see that I wasn’t and could not be constrained by whatever book definition they had of me...maybe even that I had of myself. If they could see me in a different light, maybe I could to. They forced me to believe in myself in their own weirdo way. In architecture terms, baseball / basketball was our public square, our front porch, our main street storefront. Through those conversations, I learned who they were, how to ‘know’ them, you know?
I knew opening day was going to be tough, especially the first one after Michael passed. Even more so because I had planned to take him to Hoover for the SEC championship last year before COVID, and only told him that on his death bed. Not the surprise either of us thought it would be. That was so important to me, because I was never able to take my dad to Assembly Hall in Bloomington. At the end of the day, I never took either of my homies to their sacred places.
I told Michael a lot of things on his death bed…things I didn’t have the
opportunity to tell my own father.
There are more parallels between their two lives than I can write, more
even than I can remember right now. The
one thing that I wasn’t able to tell my father before he died, I made damn sure
to tell Michael – I will protect your legacy.
Just because Pops didn’t hear me say it to him, doesn’t mean he didn’t know
it to be true when he passed. I have and
will continue to chart my own path through this world, but I wouldn’t have ever gotten even close to this point to have that option if these two men hadn’t guided me
here, in their own bizarre way.
I’d give anything to talk to either one of them about Baseball, Basketball, and all the other Things.
Postscript: State won the College World Series this year!! I would've loved talking to y'all about that.
