The Boy Who Knew Too Much

by Cathy Byrd

  Following Carol Bowman’s recommendation, I kept track of Christian’s remarks by writing them down in a notebook that I kept on a bookshelf beside his bed. When researching the accuracy of the things he had told us, I was amazed to find that every detail he had shared turned out to be true. The Dodgers were, in fact, based in Brooklyn, New York, prior to moving to Los Angeles in 1957, and the first night game ever played under lights at Yankee Stadium was in 1946, long after Babe Ruth’s retirement from baseball. The consistency and historical accuracy of Christian’s statements led me to believe that there could be something more to this than pure coincidence.

  For the most part, Michael and I went about the business of our daily lives that fall, and I kept quiet about the growing inner conflict I felt between my Christian beliefs and the mounting evidence that our son could truly be accessing a past life. We were not horribly concerned about any of his strange revelations, except when it came to the topic of his lingering grudge toward Babe Ruth. His dislike for the man was so intense that Charlotte soon figured out that the most effective way to upset her little brother was by calling him “Babe Ruth.” After slinging these words, Charlotte would run away and lock herself in the nearest bathroom to avoid Christian’s hair-pulling retaliation. Even Michael, who didn’t normally get too involved in disputes between the kids, thought it was incredibly bizarre that Christian was so deeply affected by the mention of Babe Ruth’s name. It was clear to us this was not an act to get attention because Christian’s emotional upset and tears were very real.

  Michael and I were in agreement that something extremely strange was going on with our son, but we had different opinions on how to handle it. I asked Michael what he thought of Carol Bowman’s idea of showing Christian photos of players from Babe Ruth’s era to see if he could recognize his former self. Even though I wasn’t 100 percent sold on the idea that our son had actually lived a previous life as a “tall baseball player,” I have to admit, the thought of trying to figure out which player he was claiming to be had crossed my mind long before Carol Bowman had suggested it.

  “I bet he’ll stop talking about it all if you just ignore him when he brings it up,” Michael pleaded.

  I, on the other hand, thought that getting our son to open up more would help him let go of his irrational anger toward Babe Ruth. This was the main thing fueling my curiosity.

  Ignoring Michael’s advice, I began my expedition into uncharted territory by searching for photos of baseball teams from Babe Ruth’s era, as Carol had recommended. I printed the black-and-white photos and tucked them into the notebook beside Christian’s bed. As predictable as the setting sun, that evening before bed Christian said out of the blue, “Babe Ruth was not nice, Mommy.”

  On cue, I carefully pulled out a black-and-white photo of the 1927 Yankees team and handed it to Christian without saying a word. Studying it closely, he pointed to Babe Ruth and said, “There’s dumb Babe Ruth.”

  “Do you think there are any players on this team who don’t like Babe Ruth?” I gently asked. Although he had 30 players to choose from, Christian immediately pointed to a stocky guy with big dimples and said with confidence, “Him!”

  Pointing to the same player, I asked, “Do you know him?”

  He looked into my eyes and said, “That’s me.”

  Charlotte giggled, and I hid my astonishment by taking a moment to rustle through the stack of photos. I felt like running out of the room but remembered Carol Bowman’s advice to stay calm. I pulled out a few more team pictures and asked Christian if he could find any other baseball players who didn’t like Babe Ruth. He pointed to the same stocky guy with dimples in every photo.

  As soon as Charlotte and Christian dozed off, I hurried downstairs to my office and Googled: 1927 yankees dimples. My Internet search identified the man who Christian had pointed out in the photos as Lou Gehrig. The only thing I knew about Lou Gehrig, aside from the fact that he had played for the New York Yankees with Babe Ruth, was that he had died of an illness later named after him—Lou Gehrig’s disease—also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. I was already confused enough by my son claiming to be a professional baseball player in a past life, but having him say that he was a player who had died of a horrific, incurable disease was even more incomprehensible.

  Ironically Christian had received three vintage, hand-painted baseball plates for his third birthday two months earlier from my good friend Wendy, and one of them was an image of Lou Gehrig giving his retirement speech at Yankee Stadium. I had tucked the Lou Gehrig plate away for safekeeping, rather than displaying it in Christian’s bedroom, because I found the fact that Lou Gehrig had died such a horrible death somewhat depressing. Now this man who I’d literally put in the closet two months prior had just become the central focus of my investigation to figure out who my son may have been in a former life—despite the fact that I still wasn’t sure if I believed in reincarnation.

  Before heading to bed, I clicked on the Google Images search for Lou Gehrig, and came across several photos of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth hugging. To my relief these photos did not fit with Christian’s theory that the man with the dimples didn’t like Babe Ruth. Perhaps he was making up some of his stories after all. I printed a few photos of the two men together so I could show them to Christian before bed the following evening. Maybe seeing the photos would help him let go of his acrimonious feelings toward Babe Ruth.

  As expected Christian started the dialogue about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig before bed the following evening. I seized the opportunity to introduce the photos of Babe and Lou with their arms around each other. Perhaps this would convince Christian that Babe Ruth wasn’t such a bad guy after all. The first photo I showed him was of Lou Gehrig and another man in a Yankees uniform, who I thought was Babe Ruth. Christian studied the photo and said, “That’s not dumb Babe Ruth. That’s the coach.”

  After looking at the fine print below the photo, I was stunned that Christian was right; the man standing beside Lou Gehrig in the photo was former Yankees skipper Joe McCarthy, not Babe Ruth. Christian could recognize only a few letters at the time and did not know how to read, so I knew there was no chance of him being able to read the fine print. I was starting to think he might actually be recognizing these people, but I still wasn’t sold on the idea that he was Lou Gehrig. Besides being totally outside my realm of thinking, it also didn’t explain Christian’s grudge toward Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig appeared to be quite fond of each other in the photos I had found.

  When the kids fell asleep that night, like clockwork, I resumed my Internet investigation. I wanted to get to the bottom of Christian’s Babe Ruth grudge, so I feverishly Googled: who disliked babe ruth? I came upon a story about Babe Ruth’s long-running battle with Ty Cobb, a man who the article said was universally disliked by his opponents and many of his own teammates. I gathered from the same article that Babe Ruth was not necessarily a “real jerk,” as the people passing by Christian’s emotional outburst at Fenway Park had said, but history had painted him as somewhat of a swashbuckling glutton, prone to a life of excess.

  Then I stumbled across something that sent jolts of electricity through my body and made the hair on my head stand on end. It was an article that perfectly explained Christian’s animosity toward Babe Ruth, if Christian was indeed Lou Gehrig, as he had asserted. I read that, in addition to being teammates and two of the best left-handed hitters of all time, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth were the best of friends until they had a major falling-out. The article reported that Lou and Babe went from being traveling companions, golf partners, and bridge buddies to totally ignoring each other on and off the field, despite playing for the same team day in and day out. I read the first time the two men acknowledged each other in seven years was on July 4, 1939, when Lou Gehrig announced his retirement from baseball at Yankee Stadium.

  The article went on to describe how an entire nation was moved to tears by the inspiring words of a man facing his imminent demise from the
ravaging effects of ALS. While wiping away his own tears, Lou Gehrig said, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. And I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.” The baseball hero took his final breath two years later at the age of 37.

  The article reported that Lou Gehrig’s wife became very angry when Babe Ruth showed up intoxicated to Lou’s funeral. A family friend was quoted as saying of Babe Ruth’s appearance that day, “He certainly wasn’t wanted by the Gehrigs, as there was friction between them for years.”

  This discovery of the feud between the two men was so shocking that I immediately rushed upstairs to tell Michael. I found him sound asleep on the couch with a remote in his hand and a tennis match blaring on the television. I touched Michael’s shoulder to wake him and the startled look on his face matched my emotions at that moment. Without thinking, I blurted out:

  “Michael, I think Christian really was Lou Gehrig.”

  As soon as the words fell out of my mouth, I wanted to take them back. It wasn’t until I heard my words out loud that I realized how irrational I sounded.

  Michael gave me a confused look and said, “Rewind.” I rattled off the details that led me to make this preposterous declaration. I told him how Christian had correctly identified Joe McCarthy as the coach of the Yankees, and about the feud between Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.

  “And then when I showed him a photo of Lou Gehrig,” I took a steadying breath, “Christian pointed to his face and said . . . ‘That’s ME.’”

  Michael looked intrigued by my hypothesis, but then begged, “Let’s go to bed and not talk about this in the morning, okay?”

  So we retired for the night and I tossed and turned, for what seemed like hours, with the image of Christian angrily waving his tiny bat at the towering picture of Babe Ruth flashing through my mind.

  CHAPTER SIX

  FINDING LOU GEHRIG

  “I never heard of [Lou] Gehrig before I came here

  and I always thought Babe Ruth was a cartoon

  character. I really did. I mean, I wasn’t

  born until 1961 and I grew up in Indiana.”

  DON MATTINGLY, YANKEES LEGEND AND MLB MANAGER

  I didn’t bring up the topic with Michael the next morning because I knew he had been half-serious the night before when he had said let’s not talk about it. Michael was as interested in talking about our son’s claims of being Lou Gehrig as he was in talking about anything having to do with baseball—not at all. Ironically, just as I was beginning to believe Christian and wanted to talk about it more, Michael wanted to shut down the conversations.

  After dropping Christian off at preschool, I crossed paths with two of my closest mom-friends in the school parking lot. After a split-second decision, I proceeded to tell them about the stories Christian had shared with us over the past few months. Sarah and Wendy had been my faithful confidantes in the arena of parenting ever since we all met at a mommy-and-me class when our first-born children were still in diapers. I was hoping they might be able to help me navigate the murky waters of uncertainty. Although they were both privy to every other intimate detail of my life, it took a great deal of courage for me to open up about this particular secret. It was just so personal.

  Our interaction turned south as soon as I told Sarah and Wendy about Christian saying he had “stayed in hotels almost every night” and had traveled on trains when he was “tall like Daddy.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Cathy,” Wendy said with disbelief, “He could have picked that up anywhere.”

  Sarah laughed and added, “I’m sure he’s making that stuff up. That’s what three-year-olds do.”

  I ached to believe that they were right, but I couldn’t deny what I knew in my heart to be true. There was no possible way that Christian could have known these things. Wendy, a devout Christian, then said something that cut through me like a knife.

  “You don’t want to be on the wrong side of God, Cathy.”

  I was already feeling guilty for believing my son when he said he’d lived before, but now this?

  When my friends didn’t provide the comfort I was seeking, I turned to my mom for support. In addition to telling her all the things Christian had shared with us about being a baseball player in the 1920s, I also shared with her how shattered I was when Sarah and Wendy dismissed my overtures in the school parking lot. My mom found Christian’s revelations oddly coincidental. However, her advice was to stop dwelling on it—both Christian’s stories, and my need to convince Sarah and Wendy that Christian was not fantasizing.

  I heeded my mom’s advice to ignore it and wish it away for a few days, until I could no longer ignore the persistent nagging in my heart to search for answers. I wanted to know more about this man Lou Gehrig, whom our son had grown so fond of. I knew from my research that Lou Gehrig’s primary claim to fame, aside from his untimely death from ALS, was his uninterrupted run as the starting first baseman for the Yankees for 2,130 consecutive games during the 1920s and ’30s, but I wanted to know more about the man behind the legend.

  Every description I read of Lou Gehrig referred to him as the “Iron Horse,” a nickname he had acquired as the result of his unrivaled work ethic and his plethora of batting records, some of which have never been broken. Lou Gehrig was not only revered for his tremendous feats on the ball field, but also for his outstanding character and squeaky-clean reputation. While Babe Ruth was a poster child for the excessive drinking and womanizing that symbolized the 1920s, Lou Gehrig stayed away from trouble. He prided himself on going to bed early and getting 9–10 hours of sleep, while his teammates were out partying into the wee hours of the night. Lou lived at home with his parents until he was 30 years old. His passion for baseball was conveyed by a sportswriter who wrote in 1927, “They say that Lou Gehrig would rather play ball than eat, which is saying a lot for any ball player.” I found this quote especially humorous because the same could be said of Christian.

  When I read that Lou Gehrig was born in 1903, it brought to mind the comment that Christian had made at church camp about having “real fire in the lights” when he was “a kid before.” I had never been a big history buff, so I had no idea how homes were lit in the early 1900s. When I looked it up, I discovered that Lou Gehrig was born long before electricity lit up the streets of New York. The conversion from gas lighting to electricity wasn’t fully completed in New York City until the 1920s, so it was highly likely that Lou Gehrig’s childhood home did indeed have “fire in the lights,” as Christian had described.

  When all roads seemed to lead to Lou Gehrig, I decided to show Christian a photo of Lou Gehrig’s parents one night before bed. I was curious to see if he would be able to identify their real names among a list of fictitious names that I had made up.

  “Christian, look at the man in this photo. Is his name Joseph?”

  “No,” he quickly replied.

  As I rattled off five more incorrect names, he said no every single time. Then it was time to give him the real name.

  “Is this Heinrich?” I asked.

  Christian shook his head. “No.”

  I thought I had stumped him in this guessing game until I read the fine print below the photo, which said Lou’s father, Heinrich, went by the nickname “Henry.” I pointed to the man in the photo again and asked, “Is this Henry?”

  “Yes,” Christian calmly said, as if it was common know ledge.

  Then I tried my little experiment again by asking him to correctly identify Lou Gehrig’s mother. I pointed to the woman in the same photo.

  “Is this Mary?” I asked.

  Christian confidently replied, “No.”

  He then said no three more times in response to fake names I ran by him. And then, “Is this Christina?”

  “Yes!” He was right again; Christina was her real name.

  Staring closer at the photo, Christian looked at the woman’s face and said to me, “Why weren’t you there then, Mommy? I like you better.”<
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  This was by far the strangest thing he had ever said until he topped it a few seconds later by pointing at Christina Gehrig’s photo and saying, “Mommy, you were her.”

  Goosebumps crawled up my arms to the back of my neck, and made my hair stand on end.

  Trying to change the subject, I asked Christian if Henry and Christina had had a car. He replied, “Only strangers had cars.” Christian then told me and Charlotte that Henry and Christina both smoked, which made Charlotte giggle. I playfully pulled him close for a hug, but I could feel him resisting. He continued to pensively stare at the photo until he interrupted the silence by saying once again, “Mommy, you were her.”

  I shuddered slightly. It was apparent that Christian wanted to make sure that he had made his point. When I nodded to feign agreement, Charlotte leaned over to whisper in my ear, “Now this is getting really weird.”

  I didn’t give much thought to Christian insisting that I was Christina Gehrig because I figured it was his way of integrating the two worlds he was living in—his alleged past life as a tall baseball player and his current life. However, I was shocked that he was able to correctly identify the names of Lou Gehrig’s parents. I was also more than a little surprised when I read that Lou Gehrig’s mother had emigrated from exactly the same area in Northern Germany where Michael’s parents were born and raised. In another strange twist of fate, my maternal grandmother, like Lou Gehrig, was also a daughter of German immigrants and grew up in a very poor Chicago neighborhood in the early 1900s. I figured it was highly likely that Lou Gehrig’s German immigrant family, who had struggled to make ends meet, would be among the last to acquire electricity or an automobile. This fit perfectly with Christian’s statement that “only strangers had cars.”