Category / Commentary

by Brian E. Holbrook

Something Like a War

It was forty years ago, this year, that I fell in love with baseball: October 1982 and I was nine years old. My team, the St. Louis Cardinals, were in the hunt for the World Series title, facing off against the Milwaukee Brewers. We we considered the underdogs, and I was glued to the TV nearly-nightly during that magical fall, determined to do my bit as a fan to make sure we won. The whole region was crazy with Cardinal Fever that Autumn and it made everything feel electrified and cheerful, almost like a second Christmas.

Baseball fandom was nearly mandatory where I grew up. From the first pitch of Spring Training to the last (usually) heartbreaking out of the season, nearly everyone was following the Cardinals game. It was almost impossible to ignore. From TV’s and car stereos, shop radios to store PA systems, repair shops, gas stations, car dealerships, pawn shops, music stores, everyone had the game playing in some form or fashion.

The Christmas before, my Aunt Shirley (aware of my budding baseball interest) had given me a pendant she’d purchased from Avon: a small, pewter baseball-mitt with a golden baseball in its center, hanging on a silver chain.

Early in the season, I had taken to wearing the pendant while watching the games on TV or listening to them on the radio. During crucial plays, I’d rub the baseball in the center of the mitt with feverish thumbs, closing my eyes and whispering guilty prayers to baseball gods I still only-sort-of-don’t believe in.

By the time my Cardinals made it to the World Series in October of ’82, I was convinced that thing was magic. Every time I rubbed the now-worn pendant and Ozzie made the catch, or Willie knocked one over the wall, it confirmed my faith. Every time it failed, I berated myself as a heretic, unworthy of being a fan–certain that my trip to the bathroom or lapse in concentration had failed both the team and the talisman.

In every other aspect of my life, I am a cold realist, but when it comes to baseball, I believe in miracles.

A little over a week ago, I was placed on hospice care.

Now, I’m not superstitious enough to think that there’s anything that the baseball gods can do about that, but there’s part of me that can’t help but notice that both my teams, the Cardinals and the Mariners, are surging in their divisions, and wouldn’t it be something if they defied the odds and met, in the last World Series I may ever see?

Only a baseball fan could believe in such a thing.

Baseball fans know the outlandish happens every day in the season. From April through October, 30 teams play 162 games nearly every day on the calendar, and nearly none of them go by without some Hollywood moment: some rookie gets a hit in his first at-bat in front of the hometown crowd; the retiring slugger drills one over the wall on his last at bat; the no-hitter happens; the underdog wins; the dynasty continues–they all happen every single day, somewhere, in front of some amazed crowd.

That’s what makes it so easy to believe. If you watch enough of those games every year, year in and out, you’ll have seen the impossible happen, repeatedly. It makes you believe in magic.

I believe that’s what initially attracted Americans to the game: they’re both built on the magical belief that you can win it all, despite overwhelming statistical evidence that you can’t.

You can’t be a baseball fan for any length of time and not know how to lose. Good teams still lose forty percent of their games; the very best hitters fail to reach base seventy percent of the time. Many seasons your team’s win/loss ratio will hover somewhere around fifty-fifty for a period long enough to become worisome. Some years teams can lose nearly half of their games and still win the World Series. The margins are that thin.

Failure is built into the game, and if you can’t come to terms with that, you’re going to have a bad time.

Again, a lot like being American.

But is excellence possible?

Absolutely! You see it every day! A lot of talent, a lot of hard work, a little luck, and…who knows? Maybe magic can happen.

I’ve seen it happen enough that I have hope.

For the country and the game.

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by Brian E. Holbrook

The Cat’s in the Cradle

My son (who is no longer on Facebook and thus can’t be embarrassed by this anecdote) is not overly-affectionate. As a child, he was a hugger, but by adolescence, a side-armed squeeze of the shoulder was the most I could expect as the Christmas party or hospital visit wound down.

I make this observation not as a criticism, but rather as an acknowledgement that people process emotion differently. Did I miss the little boy who would climb into my lap and wrap his arms around my neck, holding me in his embrace until my heart had re-filled with love? Yes, of course. But I wouldn’t trade him for the insatiably curious, determined, good-hearted young man he has grown into.

That said, about six months ago, after my last serious hospitalization, his hugs began gripping tighter and lasting longer.
Today he came to see me for his final visit before returning to college.

We’re both determined to see one another when he returns for Christmas break at the end of this year–but planned this visit ‘just-in-case.’

He sat down next to me on the bed and wrapped his arm somewhat uneasily around my shoulder. I was so stunned by the unusual gesture that I didn’t know what to do. For a moment, two decades dropped away, and I was certain that–were I to turn and look at him–I would see the churubic face he wore as a toddler instead of the guarded but angularly handsome face that is his now.

His arm on my shoulder made me feel so warm and complete and full of love and I’d just begun to move my hand upward to grasp his when, overcome with the weirdness of it all, he withdrew his arm as I stared at my shoes, too stunned by unfamiliarity to react in a meaningful way.

We talked for a couple hours afterward. It was a good visit. He’s a good man and a good person.

But the whole time I couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like had I managed to reach up and clasp his hand in time.

You have to act in the moments. They’re all we have.

by Brian E. Holbrook

Miracle Baby

I was born at about 10:30 P.M. on January 21st, 1973 –less than 24 hours before the United States Supreme Court handed down their landmark decision on the case of Roe vs. Wade.

No one knew I was a miracle baby there. No one prayed over me, or prophesied over me, or spoke in strange tongues while grasping my scalp with hot, sweaty palms. I was just a weird kid who liked Phil Collins and Motown when everyone else liked Def Leppard and the Beastie Boys, and I found that was easier to live with. My mom wasn’t ready to let me leave the church, however –at least not as long as I lived under her roof. So I struggled through thrice-weekly services –once on Wednesday, twice on Sunday– for a couple of years.

I was three months premature, weighed just over three pounds, and was less than a foot long. I’d been a breech baby –meaning I was born feet-first– and the umbilical cord had been wrapped around my neck, cutting off my oxygen supply for quite some time. The doctors told my parents that I had very little chance at survival, and cautioned that if I did, I would certainly be special needs, severely brain damaged, and would require life-long care. To make matters worse, a feeding tube was incorrectly inserted into my lung instead of my stomach, so for the first few weeks of my young life I battled pneumonia.

My parents ignored the doctor’s dire predictions and prognoses and fought to make sure that I got the best care available to me in St Louis, Missouri in 1973.

And I pulled through.

I was the second of my mother’s children to do so.

My older sister, born in June of ’71, was also three months premature, just under three pounds, and faced similar health challenges. She also pulled through.

Not long after we were born, my parents moved several hours south to a little town called Poplar Bluff, near the Missouri/Arkansas border, around where they had both grown up and where they had been married. There, my mother found a church whose congregation couldn’t seem to get enough of the story of her miracle babies.

My sister and I were enrolled in the Christian school that our church ran, and soon all of the teachers knew our story. I don’t really remember a time that we weren’t held up as an example of God’s love and mercy. Teachers would tell my story to other kids in class while I squirmed uncomfortably at my desk. My sister and I would be called before church congregations and school assemblies to have people laud us and prophesy over over us and speak in tongues and exclaim about the big plans God had in store for us, and enumerate all the reasons he’d saved us.

In the late 70’s and very early 80’s, I don’t recall this ever being more than run-of-the-mill evangelism –“Come look at the Miracle Babies, saved by the Lord of Hosts!”– but something began to happen in the mid-80’s, after Reagan’s second term: abortion became a very big deal in the Evangelical church, and our story came to represent something very different to people, and they weren’t shy about telling me so.

I remember being used as an object lesson in front of a class.

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by Brian E. Holbrook

Divine Indifference

When I was a kid, I could be assured of several sources or reading material in my parent’s bathroom: The Reader’s Digest, The National Enquirer, several catalogs, and –later– a volume of essays and short stories by Mark Twain. He was a hero in my home state of Missouri, and I recall vividly when my family made a pilgrimage to his boyhood home in Hannibal.

The book showed up sometime after I was ten and stayed until I was in high school. I don’t know why the book stayed there so long –my dad (the least religious person in the house back then), hated it. He called it sacrilegious and blasphemous. But it sat there just the same, calling to me.

I would crack it open and feel a rush of guilt as intense (if less salacious) as that I’d feel when perusing the lingerie section of the Montgomery Ward catalog.

I loved his unapologetic, withering critiques of religion and religiosity; his courageous and unbending attacks on social and religious norms. The things that horrified my dad thrilled me and made me question my surroundings and upbringing.

Some people love Mark Twain because they know him for Tow Sawyer and schmaltzy Americana.

I love Mark Twain because he was the first atheist I ever read, and he lit a fire in me. Some people’s Mark Twain is an inoffensive tale-teller, spinning yarns about jumping frogs and painting fences and pirate treasure and river rafts.

My Mark Twain? He’s punk rock. He said “It’s all bullshit, and we should tear it down.”

If there was ever a man who endorsed a wall of separation between Church and State, it was him.

“So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: ‘Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor’s religion is.’ Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.”
-Mark Twain

by Brian E. Holbrook

Lock and Load

The first mass shooting I remember happened in 1984, at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California. It was far from the first mass shooting in America, it is simply the first one that I remember clearly. I remember being so distressed by the news coverage that I felt nauseated and near tears. The shooter, 41-year-old James Huberty, killed 21 people and wounded 19. I recall trying, in vain, to relate to my mother how deeply it distressed me. Years later, in 1995, when I was attending the U.S. Army Airborne School, at Fort Benning, Georgia, we would sing a cadence about that particular massacre that made light of the dead children. I always felt grubby and ashamed, chanting along to those verses that turned a heartbreaking and distinctly American tragedy into a joke that its troops used as a marching song.

The second mass shooting I remember happened in Stockton, California, in 1989, just before my 16th birthday. I’m sure that, America being what it is, there was at least one more mass shooting in between the two, but Stockton is simply the next one that I recall vividly. Patrick Purdy shot and killed 5 children and wounded 32 others at Cleveland Elementary School. For years, I couldn’t hear “Stockton” without thinking of the tragedy.

Somewhere in between the two, I began to have a recurring nightmare that plagued me for years. In the dream, I was standing on the cement pad that had passed as a playground behind the Christian school I attended. Somewhere beyond the chain-link fence that surrounded the lot, a gunman would open fire, and I would watch in horror as kids and teachers were mowed down around me. In some versions of the dream, I was able to make it to a dumpster in the corner of the lot, behind which I would cower. In other versions, I could only stand, leaden-footed, on the spot as people were cut down around me. The dream became so pervasive that I would often daydream about it while I sat on the playground where I dreamed about it happening.

Even after I left school, I would have the dream at least a few times a month, startling myself awake when it became too intense and terrifying for my sleeping brain to handle. I might have been able to leave the dream behind, but America kept providing fuel for the nighttime fire: Luby’s Restaurant in Killeen, Texas in 1991; The Long Island Railroad shooting in 1993; the Fairchild Air Force Base shootings in Spokane, Washington, in 1994 –to name but a very few that I remember well.

I suppose I might have continued having the dream had I not been assigned to the 4th Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment after I left Airborne school. I arrived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in August of 1995, not long after the unit had returned from a deployment to the Sinai. My platoon leader was still telling stories about a paratrooper he’d had in his platoon that he called “Crazy Kreutzer”. I’d never met him, but I remember my PL finishing a story one day with the words “If I had to vote for the most likely guy to shoot up a McDonald’s, it would be Kreutzer.”

He was far from the only person with this opinion.

As it turned out, it wasn’t a McDonald’s, it was a football field, and it was scarily similar to my dream.

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by Brian E. Holbrook

Hair-Trigger Nation

The End of the Beginning

Like most of America, thirty years ago, I fell in love with the Ken Burns documentary, The Civil War.

I’d been a weird history kid my whole life. In elementary school, my mom bought me a monthly subscription to these collectable index cards called Story of America. They had descriptions of historic events on one side and a depiction of the event (or a photo of something related to it) on the other

They were color-coded into different categories that you would organize in the included flip-top file box. Every month you got ten new cards on some significant event or person in American history. They’re how I learned about The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and The Sand Creek Massacre, and the Tweed Machine. They were great. I still recall many of the illustrations.

In second grade, I was enthralled by Dick Cavett’s Remember When on HBO, and Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War on PBS. I was probably the only kid in class who was genuinely excited to watch old black-and-white episodes of Biography when they rolled in the projector.

Which is why, thirty years ago, I was happy to be sitting cross-legged in the orange shag carpet of my parents’ living room, watching PBS.

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