Pink Buckets and Reds' Opening Day

Traditions worth holding on to.

SPECIAL EDITION

I still have the pink bucket, duct-taped at its base. Once, the bucket contained baseballs and a few raggedy tennis balls. Now, pruning shears and stiff gardening gloves take up residence inside.

The bucket appeared perennially in spring, toted out of the garage by a young kid with a “number two” clipper guard cut. The pinkness was set beside a bare cottonwood tree growing in the heart of our backlot. It was designated pitcher’s mound, the tree always in the way until a windstorm knocked it off its perch. The bucket’s arrival signaled the start of backyard baseball season. And the start of something else.

I drag it out now. The bucket has become a repository for dead wood lopped off the rose bushes as I get ready to celebrate another Opening Day on our patio where the parade marches past.

But the bucket’s original promise was a different sort of opening day. Opening up our bodies after winter crouching. Opening up to new horizons as a single parent and son. New adventures for the kid, his nickname “The Stick” Wick.

I’ve written about my Opening Days in the many forms it’s taken over the years. First, as a new resident of Cincinnati, as an employee of a local bank and tech consultancy, as a wife, a niece, a wife again. And a resident of Over-the-Rhine, where the Findlay Market Opening Day parade always begins, blocks from my home, and glides on past, me always missing the Wapakoneta Optimist Precision Lawn Mower Drill Team. None of those ever replaced the opening days that happened in my heart for me with the kid. We weren’t exactly Griffey Senior and Junior, but the game tied us together, mostly because of the time period in which we shared in it.

As a young girl, I didn’t have many sports options open to me. Early spring, we signed up for summer softball leagues, waited to hear what team called our names. Sometimes, an older sibling dictated your next move, but age brackets didn’t always work out so. One year, I landed on the Jumpers team and could hardly believe my luck. My dad could dye my Cons the same eggplant color as the team. Softball, and it’s sibling, baseball, might have been synonymous with summer. What I liked most was the game’s ability to fill time. The same most people, including me, abhor about it today. The schedule marked out my days, I could plan around games and work. The innings marked out minutes where I felt worthy of a larger stage.

I didn’t play the sport in high school. That didn’t stop me from loving the game in my college years, and liking a few baseball players too (that’s for my ex-roomie Jill and I to know about).

After college, I followed my older sister to Cincinnati. We were Indians fans (Guardians, excuse me) but the Reds were baseball’s oldest team. That was something to celebrate. We’d skip work, catch the end of the parade, hit up Flanagans before the game along with everyone. And after the game, at the end the night, we danced at Caddies because we were young. And we could. Soon, Devin joined in the mix.

Still early in our marriage, Devin and I moved Oregon. While I didn’t know the Wick family well, I felt the baseball fever pulse through his extended family, including Aunt Lynne, who might be voted most fervent fan. And voted most likely to ensure I haven’t forgotten too.

We came back to Cincinnati. After all those parades observed and beers consumed and red t-shirts secured, returning home after a few years of living in Oregon was like bringing back tradition. Spring arrived when Opening Day hit.

At the time, I didn’t know coming home also meant leaving. Devin, leaving. The job fell to me to help the kid experience baseball as his father would have, as the Wicks did. One was easier and cheaper than the other. 

Coincidentally, the first Monday of every April of the kid’s primary and secondary school education, he fell ill. With excitement. Yes, I was the ringleader in encouraging him to skip school, for the parade and the game. For the sake of tradition. How could I deny a kid whose first word was “ball” and and who learned to read by scanning the box scores from the games the night before. Whole reams of paper were devoted to my writing his funny quotes about Barry Larkin. And his never ending love for Aaron Boone, Sean Casey, and Austin Kearns.

However, his most beloved player remained Griffey. The father-son link gets to him, as it does to me. When we lived out west, the first baseball game he attended was the Mariners v. the Indians (to which he’d say, Nice try, Mom). He watched Junior play again, three years later, in Seattle when were were gifted tickets before his dad’s bone marrow transplant.

Magically, when we came home to Cincinnati, Junior did too. 

The kid and I have marked Opening Days with his friends, with new siblings and stepdad, with Aunt B, with Auntie Laura, and a variety of Wicks. The last time I saw all of the Wick uncles (including Davis’ grandfather together was Opening Day, 2013. The most memorable Opening Day with the Wicks took place in 2005. The Reds were down 6-4. I left the game early, Aunt Lynne and the kid at my side. Joe Randa, newly-signed to the Reds, hit a walk off home run. I promised Lynne I would never leave the stadium early again. (As a Reds’ fan, I’ve broken that promise and you can’t blame me).

Maybe baseball isn’t so much about the promise of what’s yet to come, as we like to think about Spring. But a marker of how time has passed. (We have plenty of time during a baseball game to think about how slow time really can move).

Those were long days of posting up with the kid on a sidewalk, muddling through very long parade lines, eating cookies and hot dogs, sitting at the game in the sun, in the snow, in the rain. And when returning home, the kid still dragging out the pink bucket to say, “Mommy, can you pitch to me?”

Opening Day is a reminder. We’ve wintered too long. Open the windows, the minds, the hearts. Dig out whatever is in that long-forgotten bucket, including the memories. Give them a little fresh air too. Remember how much we need each other—along with a Reds win or two.

Read below for one of my favorite writings on baseball.

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Pennant Material

For Davis, from Mom, on your 5^th birthday

September 11, 2001

Before I can string together a cohesive thought, let alone words this morning, I hear  a “not so sweet at 6:30 a.m.”  voice imploring, “What team should I be today, the Reds or the Cubs? Should I wear blue? Or is my Larkin or Casey shirt clean? Why not?  I should probably not wear my Larkin shirt, he can’t play, he’s on the BLT [sic]. So, where’s my blue shirt?”

Prying my eyes open finally, I answer my thisclosetofiveyearold boy, “It’s in your drawer on the left side.” “Which side is left?”  “Well, where does Dmitri Young play?”  “Left field.” “Then the blue shirt is in left field.”

Just last night I recall my son reciting his nightly prayers as thus, “Dear God, please bless Daddy, Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Larkin, Pete Harnish, and all the rest of the injured Reds.” He’ll  then wake in the morning, check the box scores, and simply declare,  “Mommy, I think the Reds need me now, they can’t ever beat the Cardinals.”  Though the Reds are not pennant material this season, he believes more in the Reds than in Santa Claus.

After the events of our summer past observed in memory of father and husband – celebrations of love and life, it is refreshing, though quickly becoming redundant, to wake to the strains of “Take me out to the ball game”, accompanied by the “Mommy, who do the Reds play today?” melody.

Davis follows me around the bedroom.   “Anyways, the Reds have Adam Dunn now, they’re really hot.” And a memory flashes through my mind. We are walking in stride on the campus of Ashland University where his uncle is a math professor. Davis reaches for my right hand with his left. “Mommy, my hand is almost as big as yours.” 

“Well, someday you’ll quit holding my hand anyway.”   “No, I won’t. I’ll hold it forever.”  Forever to Davis is that “in a minute” he waits constantly for me, in anticipation of snacks, movie time, or reading him the news. Yet forever does not pass by big people so quickly.

My hand has already been replaced by the Ken Griffey Jr. special edition black vinyl glove, with its “not intended for athletic use” disclaimer, acquired one night, by signing up for a Reds credit card. At bedtime, the glove is his comfort, vital to his routine.  No blanket, no stuffed animals anymore.  Next time I string the glove, I’ll likely stitch it onto his hand.  

“Let’s go home”, I tell him during that walk on campus, “Yeah, let’s go home, mommy.”  And our traveling ends abruptly as it began.  We spent the summer, he and I, learning to throw a heater, how to slide, how to spit properly without drooling.

Surely, more than once, I yearned for my tools, as he toiled with his. An eyeliner pencil once sufficed for me, as I scratched an occasional itch. I chose deliberately  to not let the pen be my respirator, but to breathe again on my own, to experience life through my son and my senses, not through black words or blank pages, staring reprehensibly back at me.

Rejecting the control that writing gives, we bathed in the chaos of summer. Schedules, time, and mind were in disarray, yet we chose to do nothing, because simply there was nothing to do. Occasionally I was forcibly removed from the hammock to be “all-time” pitcher for backyard ball, or to fetch snacks for the home team, but otherwise stood firm, and found through that nothingness, no clocks, no races, no end to the days.

“What was the Reds score last night, Mommy? Did you stay up late and finish watching the game?”  “Brewers 6, Reds 4”, rolls off my tongue, “but, son, you must know, they’ve lost 8 in a row.”  “Well, that’s OK, at least they scored 4 runs.”  Four runs makes for a good morning, particularly before my first cup of coffee.

“What will you do when the season ends?”, I am often asked. My response is thus,  “There’s always spring training, right? We may have to switch teams to find a winner, or at least one that trains near a beach!”

“Mommy, I’ve changed my mind, I want to be a Reds player when I grow up. When will I be BIG like Sean Casey?”

Ahhh…the power to dream is not within the game’s greatest players, for their dreams have already sailed on the winds of a fast ball,  disappeared o’er the green monster in left field, or left scattered in sand around home plate.

We turn our attention to reviewing our “game” from last night, not the major league one, but the real one, played in the driveway, with bases drawn in colored chalk. First base was blue, second drawn a little too close to first, pitcher’s mound washed away from an early morning sprinkle. Even the neighbors without children want to play, ask to play. I read columns about baseball fading and think, no, not this year, not on my street.

Davis wouldn’t look at a bat last year, let alone hurl a ball.  It is difficult to pinpoint the beginning this obsession, but he has now been christened “The Stick” Wick, a little boy’s entrée into the gang. He’s joined by Reedo Speedo, Cole Bear, and Kevin from Heaven.

“Mom, we’ve got a game tonight. We’re playing at our house on the driveway, and guess who’s pitching? Mom, the Bomb.”  Dare I add, I have too been inducted into this neighborhood game of fame.

“And here’s the rest of the schedule, Miss Annette”,  Reedo Speedo excitedly shares.  It reads, “Monday 6:30 pm , Wensday 3:30 pm, Friday 7:00 pm, Mon. 1:00 pm, Wens. 3:00 pm,  look on back if win all games.”  The backside reads, turnoment 1 Mon. Sep 1, turnoment 2 Tue. Sep 4, turnoment 3 Wens. Sep 6.”

At our house, baseball, real baseball, lives on in the games’ greatest fans, who pick their teams according to age - big people vs. little people, schedule their games during my prime time, and adjust the bases according to the size of the runner. Here, baseball is the favorite pastime, in the hearts and gloves of all who pass time in the nothingness of summer present.