This Is Us

            The other day, my wife told me we needed to watch a new TV show together. This is significant, as it will be just the fourth show we’ve watched together this century. Other than The West Wing, Glee and Friday Night Lights, we’ve missed out on this “golden age” of dramatic television. We heard great things about Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, The Sopranos and Homeland to name just a few, but have found ourselves feeling lucky if we’re able to catch an inning of a baseball game or the opening skit of Saturday Night Live.

            The reason for this is very simple: We had our first child in January 2002, and have spent the past 15 years absorbed in that work. It has been the No. 1 priority in our lives, and will remain so for as long as they’re beneath our roof. Even now, as I write these words, I sit in a Starbucks on a Friday evening while our younger daughter plays laser tag at a friend’s birthday party. Sure, it’s prime date-night time or, at the very least, DVR-watching time. But an 11-year-old and 14-year-old need you to make dinner, wash the clothes, clean the house, enforce the technology time and chauffeur them everywhere. We’re Uber-parents, all right, but we work for free.

            The show my wife selected is called This Is Us, and from what I hear lots of people are watching it. After just two episodes, I’m not sure if it’s a bit too melodramatic for me, but I can definitely connect with its depiction of ordinary life in extraordinary ways. The average day of parenting consists of more ordinary moments than I can name, but when viewed through a wide-angle lens it is extraordinary enough to take your breath away.

            Take this past Halloween, for instance. I had to work until 6, and when I got home the girls had decided not to go trick-or-treating but to focus instead on giving candy to the little ones in our neighborhood. Then they changed their minds, painted their faces, and headed into the neighborhood with bags. Then the older one, Katie, changed her mind again after two houses, and they came back with about four pieces of candy. Chelsea, our younger one, held a canvas trick-or-treating bag that had the year and name of every costume she’d every worn written in marker, from Boots the Monkey to Glinda from Wicked. It was kind of sad and depressing to see them bail out on the only thing they’d ever done on Halloween night, but we made the best of it and spent time together until Katie headed up to her room to clean her fish tank.

            Sometime toward the end of the tank cleaning, we heard Katie start to cry. She had filled the tank with water that was too warm, and it had killed the Betta fish. She’d fed and cared for her fish every day for the two months since we’d been given a tank and she had bought the fish, and now this. So at 8:30 on Halloween, I found myself holding a spade in our backyard, digging a hole for Polly the fish. No one else wanted to see me do it, but flushing had been declared out of bounds. So it was just me and Polly, in the darkness of Halloween. I tucked her into the ground, patted the dirt and headed back inside.

            This is us. There’s nothing all that unusual about our domestic life, but at the same time we are making our way through these days together, and when families do this they carry a resiliency and poetry that is hard to believe sometimes. As parents, it feels like we’re in the trenches so much of the time, but at the same time we’re also helping lead a parade of pride and progress.

            We negotiate phone time, beg for clothes to be put away, celebrate improved math scores, discuss friendship choices and encourage their development of identity. We love them madly, but we parent with maddening inconsistency at times, and we find ourselves mad at each other and ourselves when yet another day goes by without any couple time. We bury the fish, tuck away their trick-or-treat bags, and give them a hug. We tell them we love them, and they whisper “Love you too” before we close the door.

             One of these days, Amy and I will watch another episode of this show. The free time will surface eventually, and we’ll cuddle up together. As we watch, we’ll notice the parallels between life and art. We’ve missed a lot of good TV over the years, that’s for sure. But we’ve been busy – writing our own story. 

Frozen in Time

              Considering the fact that I have watched, played and written about sports throughout my life, you’d think I might feel more regret over the reality that I have no sons. But for the past 12 years, I’ve honestly found it fascinating to be a father to daughters. My two girls have brought me on an eye-opening cultural journey that has covered Elmo and Dora, Disney princess dresses, American Girl dolls, pretend-school lessons, pet guinea pigs, and performances of Wicked both on Broadway and in our living room. Katie and Chelsea are not really interested in sitting down to watch a ballgame with me, but they have brought a world of new experiences to my life.

                Lately, their activity has focused on some songs from a movie soundtrack. It is, of course, the soundtrack to Disney’s Frozen – the album that stands behind only Bruce Springsteen’s new record among the best-selling LPs in the nation. For the past month, children and their parents have waltzed out of movie theaters singing the songs from Disney’s latest animated feature, then quickly downloaded the album from iTunes upon their return home. The songs, which sound more Broadway-ready than the typical multiplex fare, are bolstered by the voice of Idina Menzel, the actress who originated the role of Elphaba in Wicked and Maureen in Rent. Menzel’s rendition of the song Let it Go from Frozen is one of the Oscar nominees for Best Original Song.

                In our home, the girls have been blasting the Frozen songs from our little Bose speakers and lip-synching their way through the whole show. In the car, even with no music on, they’ll practice certain lines together. They’ve seen the movie twice, and are clamoring for thirds. When our youngest turned nine three weeks ago, she asked for a cake in the shape of the film’s snowman character.

                Now I’m no cheerleader of Disney’s traditional portrayal of young female characters. The funny thing about this movie, though, is that even though all of the typical princess set pieces are there – the castle, the gowns, the big eyelashes, the handsome love interest – this film is ultimately about none of those things. It’s about two sisters, and their overriding love for each other. It’s about how far you’ll go to protect and save the best friend you have in the world. In our house, that’s a story worth some attention.

                As my girls sing along to the film’s song Do You Want to Build a Snowman?, we hear the story of a younger sister who is being pushed away by her older sister, and can’t understand the reason for it: “We used to be best buddies / And now we're not / I wish you would tell me why.” The younger sister asks once more for some play time, but after being told to go away, she hangs her head and sings, “Okay, bye.” As I hear my girls singing this together, I recognize that we’re getting close to the time when this exact scenario will play out in our home. Katie is 12, and she’s spending more and more time in her room trying on makeup, watching YouTube videos and, yes, texting. At nine, Chelsea is more interested in playing with her older sister than in spending time alone in her room. More often than not, Katie still plays with Chelsea. But those moments of rejection are nearing, like the gathering of dusk before night falls.

                When it comes to music, I find it incredibly annoying to hear the same song over and over. But as my girls sing the Frozen tunes together countless times – and, to be honest, they’ve got a third singer in their group in the form of my wife – I can’t help but feel some relief amid the repetition. Because it seems that Katie and Chelsea have found something that transcends age differences and hormonal swings. They share a love for music and performance, and that love may connect them when other things do not. My brother and I are three years apart, just like my girls are. As kids, we had our stretch of time when I needed my space from him. But we always had our sports, be it a Yankees game on the TV or a 1-on-1 basketball game in the backyard. Even when we shared few words, there was still plenty of communication in the form of a last-second jumper on the patio, or a Dave Winfield home run on the basement TV.

                My brother turns 40 in two weeks; I just turned 43. We talk about a lot of things now, as adult siblings do. But we still have a soft spot for the sports stuff. Years from now, I can see Katie and Chelsea spending an afternoon together, perhaps at one of their apartments, or maybe out shopping. There comes a point when they turn on some music. For fun, they click on the Frozen album. They smile, and start singing. Together. 

               We only have each other / It's just you and me / What are we gonna do? / Do you wanna build a snowman?

No One Mourns the Wicked (One Sixty-Two: Day 106)

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 One Hundred-Six: Kevin Youkilis, Boston Red Sox

We’ve solved the mystery, although it took awhile. We know who planted a pair of red socks where they didn’t belong.

My parents have a metal sign hanging on the fence in their driveway reading “Yankee Fans Parking / Red Sox Fans Go Home.” Sometime during the week, an individual slapped a magnet on this sign. It was a pair of red socks – the unmistakable logo of Boston’s Red Sox.

No longer was it a lazy beach week; someone had declared war. Where will he strike next?

Tonight, my 8-year-old daughter and her 10-year-old cousin performed songs from the musical Wicked for the family, lip-synching to “Popular” and “Defying Gravity” with plenty of energy and emotional gravitas. While Katie and Megan have not seen Wicked on Broadway, they understand the theme to this story – that sometimes it’s hard in life to tell just who the evil people are around us. Is green-faced Elphaba the wicked witch we’ve always known her to be, or is perky Glinda the one with true wickedness inside her? Are there times when a person chooses a questionable path largely because of the ways she’s been mistreated by others? In that case, who’s the real wicked one?

Tonight they meet again: the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have begun a four-game series in the South Bronx with the Red Sox needing wins to keep their season alive. For years, the fans in New England have called New York the “Evil Empire” owing to the seemingly unlimited cash that the Yankees have to spend. But are the Yankees really the evil ones? After all, didn’t this whole string of 27 championships begin because Boston’s owner wanted to sell New York a guy named Babe Ruth? Was that the Yankees’ fault? And how can you blame the Yankees when Mike Torrez helped pitch them to a World Series title in 1977, but then switched to Boston the following year and gave up the division-clinching homer to New York’s Bucky Dent? Didn’t both teams have the guy, after all?

My brother and I didn’t spend our summers lip-synching to show tunes, as my girls have done this year. We were more the baseball and Star Wars-figure types. If we weren’t playing ball outside, we were probably creating stories with our Han Solos and Luke Skywalkers. Sometimes, we’d even mix the two, creating a baseball diamond on the living-room carpet and placing a Star Wars figure at each position. We’d use one of the Ewoks’ cannonballs for a ball, and create a semblance of baseball using Gamorrean guards and Cantina bar customers. Somehow, it all worked.

It was rare that a member of the Evil Empire wound up on top in our fictional ballgames. The guys with the force usually won out. And when we played our baseball games outside, it was always New York sending Boston home with a loss.

And yet, some 250 miles north, it was surely the opposite every day. From Connecticut to Maine, it was the Yankees who secured the Dark Side; those magnetic red socks were a sign of goodness and northeast-American unity.

So really, who’s the wicked one? And how should we feel about the guys on the other side? Should New York fans be cheering because Boston first baseman (and sometime Yankee antagonizer) Kevin Youkilis is out for the season with a torn muscle in his thumb? No one mourns the wicked, right?

Or should we feel sympathy for those on the other side, and search for a way to finally get along? After all, Darth Vader did come back to the Jedis in the end, right?

Yeah, but Elphaba didn’t get all Goodie Two Shoes up on her broom, even if Dorothy did do her in. Rivalries are too much fun to give up, whether you’re battling through ballgames, musicals or action figures.

Oh, and those mysterious magnetic socks? My niece, the one who played Glinda tonight, has a dad who likes to joke around. He confessed to planting the dreaded logo on my parents’ sign. It took days before he came forward, but we finally got his story.

So, Glinda, when you and your family drive home from your vacation tomorrow, look to the western sky as you pass through New York City. You’ll surely see a blimp up there somewhere, defying gravity in order to photograph Yankee Stadium for a nationally televised New York-Boston game. Who, you might ask, is the wicked one on that field?

It depends on how you read my parents’ driveway sign, I guess.