Sing it, Sister (One Sixty-Two: Day 12)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Twelve: Octavio Dotel, Pittsburgh Pirates

It was a beautiful Monday night in May, and the family decided to meet up for dinner. My parents drove up from the Jersey Shore, my brother hopped over the bridge from Brooklyn, and Amy, the girls and I hustled over from central Jersey. Our meeting place was one of New York City’s premier pizzerias: Joe & Pat’s of Staten Island.

We devoured the house salad, with its sprinkling of red peppers and its heavy dose of Italian dressing. We congratulated my brother, Eric, on finishing his master’s degree, and showered Katie with praises for her second-grade report card. After the salad, our waitress brought us two large-cheese pies, with their thin crusts, delightfully sweet sauce, and tender cheese. This is the same pizza we would eat with my grandfather when we’d take him out for lunch in his later years. On this night, the pies were gone before we could finish catching up on one another’s lives.

The night was young enough that we could all drive a couple miles north to Ralph’s Ices, where we’d treat ourselves to some delicious fruit ices at one of the oldest Italian ice shops in New York City. I hopped in Eric’s car for the short trip from Joe & Pat’s to Ralph’s. As we talked, I kept waiting for the conversation to turn to baseball – fantasy leagues, Yankees, anything. But on this night, we had so much more to converse about – summer plans, our own writing, the new job a friend has taken in a Brooklyn school, and the upcoming christening of another friend’s daughter.

It felt rich and rewarding, for all of us to spend this time together and for my brother and I to shift our conversation away from baseball for a night. Of course, as the girls neared the ends of their ices, Eric and I finally broke down. We started talking about Pirates reliever Octavio Dotel, and whether we can rely on him for our joint fantasy baseball team. We gave it about a minute of talk and thought, then moved on to something else. Chelsea wanted Eric to see her new tattoo, and Katie wanted to drive back to our house with her grandparents.

It was time to go. The night had been sweet. And while Octavio Dotel might not know it, his current team once had a theme song some 30 years ago: Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.” The song had a much different context inside the 1979 Pirates locker room than it did for an evening of pizza in 2010. But its overall message – sure, it was just the same.