Gift of the Bambino Prologue
It all began with the ball. And Grandpa. That ball is the stuff of miracles. With it you can hold a dream right in your hands and its magic is so great that it knows not only where you’ve been, but what you want to be. It’s the thread that weaves myth to reality. So much of Grandpa was in it that he was incomplete without it. It was a piece of him that tied his heart to his soul and now it’s a piece of me too. Maybe it’s in all of us.
It was more than a baseball. Much more. Sure, it started out that way, but it was more like a time capsule with incredible powers that transcend days, months and years. Its powers transcend all time and space and it was just sitting there waiting for the right person to come along and fetch it. Exactly how far it travelled no one really knows, but four hundred feet is a pretty good estimate. Maybe it went even further. Unfortunately, there is no accurate record of the distance, but by all accounts it was a blast of gargantuan proportions.
We know it landed in the lake. Or in the bay rather. It was 1914 just when the Great War was breaking out and it had been sitting there on the bottom for more than three-quarters of a century. What ravages water wreaks on a baseball over that length of time I didn’t know. The only thing I knew was that it was there – all that time. Waiting.
It happened so long ago that things were a lot different than now. The shoreline wasn’t the same. The islands at the foot of the city weren’t nearly as large as today and the game, of course, was better. It was more honest back then. They played for the sheer love of it. They played for the feel of the bat, for the sudden smack when contact is made and for the sight of the ball sailing through the sky. They played for the smell in the air.
>It was almost too late for me when I found out about the ball. If only he had told me earlier I would have known that dreams can exist with reality. He should have told me right at the beginning. When I was a child. I wouldn’t have understood how important it was to him or how it could direct the course of a man’s life, but at least I would have known about the potency of its powers.
I guess I was always destined to retrieve it. It had to be destiny. But still who could have known after all those years? It was a lifetime. He had never mentioned it to me and it was almost by accident that I even found out in the first place. Time didn’t matter for that baseball. It just didn’t. What is a mere three-quarters of a century in the greater scheme of things?
“If you find that ball you can be anything you want to be,” he told me. “It has a magnetism and it’s reaching out to you. You must find it. You have to find it.”
If anyone else had told me such a story I would have thought they were crazy, but it was Grandpa who was telling me, my Grandpa, and because it was him I believed. Because it was him I had faith. Now there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about him. And the baseball. They are my crutch. They give me hope and the will to do what I want to do. They allow me to dream and that’s important because without dreams we are nothing.
I think about them whenever I’m faced with a new obstacle. I think about them whenever I venture to that special place where we used to go, gaze over the water and see nothing but the horizon joining sea and sky and going off in both directions forever.
I can see them so clearly now.
And it’s all because of a baseball. A simple sphere of cork, stitching and skin. But it isn’t of this earth. It is something celestial that belongs in the heavens with the stars, planets and myriad unknowns that make us gnaw away at our brains in the search for discovery. Maybe it’s known to God.
I’m thankful he explained its strength when there was still time to do something about it and savour even a morsel of its infinite capacity for making fantasy come alive. Because of the bond between Grandpa and that ball I have come to learn the true meaning and essence of life and not only his life, but anyone’s. Anyone who believes, that is.
He had never told a soul about it. All those years he hid it from me just as he hid it from everyone – his parents, his wife, his children, even his team-mates when he played the game himself. No one ever knew. No one. Only Grandpa, me and him, of course. The big guy. Just the three of us. It was our little secret.
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