2. Hi Mom!

"The Mississipi's mighty
But it starts in Minnesota,
At a place where you could walk across
With five steps down...."

– Emily Saliers

The beginning is captured in the grainy, flickering images of a home movie taken on Christmas Day. On the shaggy carpet of a family room in Massachusetts, a small Fisher-Price basketball hoop sits across from a two-year-old boy. The plastic basket is perhaps 30 inches in height, with a small lever inside the hoop that triggers a bell whenever the ball finds its home inside the rim. Every successful shot earns a small yelp of approval, sounding like an order ready for pick up at a greasy restaurant. The movie is silent, but the miniature basket's effect on the miniature boy is obvious. As the boy stands waiting approximately four feet from the rim, the father softly places a plastic ball in his son's hands. The little boy, like a bull charging a drunken matador, speeds toward the basket, throwing the ball through the rim with sufficient force to cause the small structure to teeter backwards. As the father reaches out to steady both boy and basket, you can easily imagine the bell.

Ding!

Father and son laugh gleefully, as the father picks up his son and again places him four feet from the basket. The father retrieves the ball and hands it to the son. The boy looks at the ball. He looks at the basket. Again, the bull charges.

Ding!

The battling parties are returned to their starting positions. The father smoothly flicks his wrist, suggesting to the son that perhaps he might want to arc the ball gently towards the wounded basket. The boy smiles. He is not interested in gentle. The bull charges.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

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As this introspection proceeds, just as in the home movie, my father will often have a central role in the picture. He introduced me to the game I would play, the teams I would follow, and the players I would idolize. The influence of my mother will be less often on display, but it is equally essential to the story. Therefore, before going any further, the person behind the camera on that Christmas Day should be recognized.

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In the fall of 1966, a few months after the commencement of their courtship, my father asked my mother what she wanted out of life. Without hesitation or qualification, she responded, “I want to raise good kids and have a good family.”

Like most beginnings, it seemed simple enough at the time.

They became a family of two in June 1967, and my mother probably would’ve been interested in increasing that number immediately. But my father was heading to graduate school in Boston and, after spending her entire life in Virginia, she was going with him. They calculated that a baby would have to wait a couple of years.

The equations of life are quickly altered. Sometimes the heavens fall, sometimes a pen softly falls on paper, and sometimes they combine to erase everything on the page. The Vietnam War had not directly touched my parents’ lives, as my father had been granted a graduate student deferment. But in February 1968, shortly after the Tet Offensive, that exemption was rescinded. Now that my father was eligible for service, my parents traveled to the local draft board to determine his position among potential draftees. The secretary at the office walked to the filing cabinet and asked his name. Receiving that information, she was able to quickly report my father’s position in line: first.

Completion of graduate school would have to wait. The attempts to expand the family would not. By the spring of 1969, my mother learned she was pregnant with her first child, her older sister was pregnant with her second, and her husband had been assigned to an Army base in Texas. During their long drive southwest, she suffered a miscarriage. The hopes of a household of three dissolved into the realization that she would soon be sending her husband to the other side of the world. But the wife of a soldier is a soldier, too – drive on.

After a year in the hallucination-inducing Texas heat, she sent him to Saigon. It is one thing to be patient, another to be stubborn, and entirely another to live with the daily fear that you’ve seen a loved one for the last time. But nine months of uncertainty later, he returned home safely. He completed his graduate work the following year. Finally, she had all of the pieces in place – a good husband, a healthy income, a happy home – and they continued the mission of building a family.

So they tried. She couldn’t conceive. Doctors offered rounds and rounds of tests and procedures, but no answers. Years passed. While she had been traveling on a ping-pong tour of the United States – Virginia to Massachusetts to Virginia to Texas to Virginia to Massachusetts and now to California – each of her sisters had been home in Virginia, each giving birth to two healthy children of their own. Her older sister’s pregnancy from 1969 had ended with a lovely daughter, who was now four years old. She’d been holding on to this dream for seven years since her wedding, and in slightly less intense form for several years before that. I don’t know how many nights she laid awake wondering if she’d ever have the chance to have her own children, but I imagine it was more than a few.

She persevered. After another series of tests, a doctor in California prescribed fertility drugs, which finally allowed her to conceive another child. She went into labor on the west coast while her husband was on a business trip back in Boston, adding a final challenging wrinkle to her odyssey of patience, war, failure, fear and – above all else – hope. After trying so hard for seven years, she finally delivered me.

My experience has been that if you chase a goal over so many years, with so many doubts, and through so many obstacles, it seems to make you cherish it that much more. It may start as a trickle in Minnesota, but by the time it is realized, it is a force of nature.

Do you know what it’s like to be treated like a dream come true? I do.

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When my father and I watched sporting events during my childhood, especially during the1980s, there was an epidemic of male athletes catching the eye of a sideline camera and screaming, “Hi Mom!” My dad used to always ask, “How come nobody ever says, ‘Hi Dad!’”

Part of the reason might have been avoidance of the near-certain guilt trip – once one guy had done it, if another didn’t, the first thing he’d hear when he next visited his mother was, “How come you didn’t say ‘hi’ to me?” Part of the reason may be because some of them didn’t have fathers worth mentioning on national television or they didn’t know their fathers at all. But for the ones with great fathers, I imagine that the fathers and sons had built their relationships by following box scores in the paper, recounting the performances of their favorite players and teams, diagramming plays together in little league contests, and bonding in a thousand other different ways through sports. For the father, the mere participation of the son in the arena of their ambitions was both achievement and acknowledgment.

For the mother, it was mostly just another chance that her baby might get hurt. “Hi Mom!” was, therefore, the easiest means of reassuring the mother that the son was safe and happy, which is the mother’s only measuring stick. She didn’t cook him meals, drive him to practice, console him in sadness and celebrate him in success because she wanted him to be a world-class athlete. She did all of those things because she wanted him to be happy. (It is possible that this is just my mother and not all mothers.) “Hi Mom!” was the necessary nod to the person whose influence was both less obvious and equally important.

Anybody who sees me with my parents for the first time will almost immediately say, “You look just like your father.” It is true and I am proud of it. I walk like him, talk like him, and (try to) think like him. Almost no one looks close enough to see that many of my features actually originate with my mother, both in my appearance – the nose and chin, among others, are hers – and in personality. My father is the model for everything that I am. My mother is the sculptor – and more than a little of the artist’s soul is in her work.

So if any of what you’re about to read indicates fierce perseverance or simple stubbornness, I have two words for you:

Hi Mom!

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