Bringing the Heat

Right around this time nine years ago, my wife shared the news that she was pregnant with our first child. And though there was joy (much, much joy), there was also something else. Something I had to keep swallowing lest it spew from every pore of my body.

Fear. I was scared. So scared, in fact, that it nearly shook my soul.

Not that I didn’t feel I was ready to be a father. My wife and I had stable incomes, our own home, and money in the bank; it was as good a time as any. No, the fear was something else. Something deeper.

Kids tend to see their parents as some sort of superhero/sage hybrid. I know I saw my parents as that. My father was the strongest, bravest, toughest man in the world. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. That image of him lasted nearly thirteen years until it shattered one July afternoon.

We were playing ball the way we always did in the backyard where we always did it—me standing with bat in hand in front of the maple tree, him twenty or so feet away near the clothesline. We tossed me batting practice for thirty minutes, lobbing baseball after baseball, until there was only one left in the bucket.

Gonna bring it, he said. He always said that before throwing the last ball. It meant no lobbing. No easy pitch. It was instead extra heat, a blur of white and an angry hiss I could never catch. He always dared me to hit it and I always dreaded him throwing it. Because that heat scared me. It was cowhide-stitched death.

I never protested. The heat scared me, but I would never admit it. Not to him. And he would never let that last ball go without every ounce of his strength behind it. There are few rituals in modern life, but that was one for us. It served as a sacrament of manhood for the both of us. It was a daily reminder to me that fear was something every man felt but could overcome, and it reminded him that though his years were wearing long, he could still outduel both youth and time. He was still his own master.

But everything changed that day.

Because when my father brought the heat and that blur and hiss escaped his hand, I saw it. I saw the rotation of the cowhide-stitched death. Saw where and when it would cross the plate.

And in that split second I knew this horrible, wonderful, undeniable truth—I could hit it. Not foul it off, not bloop it over the garden. Hit it. Far.

I didn’t.

I kept my bat on my shoulder and let the ball fly past. Didn’t see it, did you? he asked. No, I answered. And he smiled.

The game was over, I supposed in more ways than one. I knew the facts about my father. He was neither superhero nor sage, he was just a man. A man bound by time and fear and a struggle to remain a hero to his children, even if it was a mere costume he put over the nakedness of his mortality.

I remembered that long-ago day the day my wife told me I was about to be a father.

I remembered the guilt I felt. It was a truth I found without looking but was destined to find anyway. A truth we all must find—that we are not just parents, but mere reflections of the grander people we wish we were but can’t seem to be.

Every child is baptized into life the moment he realizes his parents are in fact just as fragile as he is.

And the misguided and vain truth was this—I didn’t want my kids to have that baptism.

Things are different now in some ways. That one child came and another followed. Both see me as a superhero sage. And I gladly wear that costume, though even now it’s beginning to fray around the edges. What they see in me is not the truth, but a rippling reflection of it. The real facts will come out soon. It hurts now and it will hurt then, but the wheel of life must keep turning. I’m okay with that. I think.

My kids just came upstairs. They want me to take them into the backyard to play ball. I’m okay with that, too. I’ll pitch, they’ll hit.

And I’ll bring the heat while I can.

Photo by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Billy Coffey.