Peanuts and Crackerjacks

Excitement is in the air. It’s the 110th opening season for the Cardinals and whatever other baseball teams may be out there. Let’s be honest here. When you live this close to St. Louis, you don’t pay much attention to the other teams unless the Cards are having a really, lousy season.

I can’t say I’m much of a sports fan, but I do like the Cards and have been persuaded to watch them in person or on TV from time to time. I do not like hockey—too violent, don’t understand soccer—but like the agility of the players and their cute knees, don’t understand football—all that fuss over a weird shaped ball and a few yards of territory, seems like war games, and I find golf boring—unless I’m one of the players. I do understand and like basketball, but the only professional team I’ve rooted for is the Arizona Mercury team, for the obvious reason that they play very well and I think there should be more celebration, and better compensation, for women in sports.

When I was growing up, we rarely, if ever, made it out to the ball field to watch the Cardinals in action and we didn’t have a TV for many of my early years, but the booming voice of Harry Caray kept us up with the game as he gave a play-by-play description of the action on our radio. I was thrilled by the excitement of the World Series games the year I graduated from high school. We won, but I was still in mourning over losing Stan ‘the man’ Musial from the lineup. Two years later, I was the proud owner of a ticket stub from their first game in the new Busch stadium and still have pictures of the park in all its glory, taken, I might add, weeks before it was actually open to the public.

I can never think about baseball without thinking of my younger brother and the strange and wondrous workings of his mind. We had just returned to our hometown from a four year, experimental exile in a neighboring state. My dad’s mother came over to visit, bearing some of the cheapest gifts she could find. She loved to buy us presents from W. T. Grants, a turn of the century, dime store loaded with cheap merchandise, predecessor of today’s dollar stores.

Anyway, Grandma gave my brother this metal baseball game that probably cost all of fifty cents or a dollar. It was a little trinket that any child with half a brain would have been bored to tears by in no time flat. My brother, however, possessing more than the average amount of brain power, used it as the basis of an extremely complicated game! Ignoring the little spinner attached to its surface that gave the player the options of a single, double, triple, homerun or out, he used dice to determine each pitch, run and catch. He devised teams, scores, playoffs, in fact everything a league would do and he kept itemized records of their stats.

My brother was like that. If there was an easy way to play a game, he’d figure out a more complicated way to play it and win. I’d teach him a game and he’d learn how to beat me at it. Until our younger brother came along, we were sole playmates for over seven years, and I have to tell you, it’s hard on your ego to have your little brother beat you at everything, although I’m still not sure if he was 100% honest as the banker in Monopoly.

I’ve always had great admiration for my brother and felt he could have done anything in this world he set his mind to. I thought it was a great loss when he didn’t get to go to college and become a great lawyer or teacher or politician, but maybe the world is safer without that.

My brother and I have been very close and very distant. I have been a pampered guest in most of the homes he’s had throughout his travels. We were rivals as kids for our parents’ affection. He got mom and I got dad. We quarreled over backseat territory, and any number of silly things. He was the one who actually helped me learn to drive and took me to a junkyard to show me the underpinnings and workings of a car. He introduced me to my childhood/teenage sweetheart, and he was the only one of my siblings that I didn’t help to raise like one of my own children.

His sense of humor is as warped and weird as mine. His writing about trips and family is brilliant. I still think he could do anything he set his mind to, and right now I see that he has found the love, happiness, adventure, success and contentment that eluded him in his youth.

We had a falling out years back, and though he recently sent me a message that he was tired of being angry with me about it, we have yet to reconnect as we had before. I miss him and hope that one day he’ll love me again as he used to, call me and visit before we get too old to recognize each other. I know his life is very full without me, but mine has a hole in it where his jokes and stories and laughter should be.

I hope people realize how fleeting life is and how it doesn’t help to say I’m sorry after the person is gone. I often wish I could tell my mom I’m sorry I was such a brat, and ask her more questions about her life and feelings and that I'd spent a little more time with her to let her know how much I loved her.

Time marches on. Sometimes we hit a homerun and hear the cheers of the crowd. Sometimes we strike out and go home to try to figure out what went wrong. Sometimes, when we’re lucky, we’re loved no matter what we do. Some days I’m very lucky and some days I’m not. I miss my brother, and that's all I can say.