Father Knows Less

by Lee Kalcheim

  Those of you with teenagers know that you cannot tell them anything. They already know it. This is a cliché, but it’s true often enough for you to avoid even trying to tell them something. But the good news is, you don’t have to tell them anything. They already know it. They learned it from you! Even though you don’t remember telling them what it is you wanted to tell them. They learned it from you, by example. If you work hard, your kids will be inspired by it. If you make jokes or listen to music or sing in the shower—if you express joy, your children will learn to express joy. You can’t say to a child “Express more joy Richard.” It doesn’t work. And it really sounds lame.

  There are things that cannot be taught—either because they’re too complicated to teach or they will fall on unwilling ears if you try to teach them. Not to worry. For every four-letter word your kids pick up from you, they will pick up a great many more important things. Enjoy life, work hard, and be kind to your mother, and your kids will, if you haven’t bought them an expensive computer game that takes them away from your world, embrace your world. And then surprise you when they reveal they have learned a lesson you’ve never taught.

  All of this, they taught me.

  SCENE: THE DEN OF A HOME IN STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA.

  (A baseball game is on the television. Lee sits with Samuel and Gabriel watching.)

  LEE

  Okay, runner on first, nobody out, the count’s 3 and 1 on the batter. It’s a good count for a hit and run.

  SAM

  Don’t you always want to hit?

  GABE

  And run?

  SAM

  And run?

  LEE

  No. On a hit and run count, like 3 and 1, when the pitcher has to throw a strike, the runner can take off on the pitch, because there is a good chance the batter will hit it. If it’s a hit the runner will get to third, if it’s a grounder he can avoid the double play. It’s aggressive baseball.

  GABE

  What happens if the ball is hit right to the first baseman?

  SAM.

  In the air. Bam!

  GABE

  Bam!

  LEE

  The … uh … the runner is screwed.

  GABE

  Is that a baseball term?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DAMNED YANKEES?

  Baseball is the game writers like to write about. I don’t mean baseball writers. Novelists. There is something about the game. It’s not really a team sport. It’s sport about grace and timing and individual skill. It’s a chess match in a field. It has no clock. It has an infinite number of dramatic situations, depending on the number of men on base, the number of outs, the kind of pitcher, the speed of the runners, even the position of the sun in the afternoon sky (when they play a rare day game). Despite the love of the long ball, it’s game of tactics that rewards the small things. The bunt, the steal, the sacrifice. What other sport has a play called a sacrifice? No wonder writers love it. (I am, in fact, listening to a ball game as I write this.)

  We stayed another year in L.A., as I hoped, with a “smile and a shoeshine” to generate some work. Julia was sewing seeds for her future as a literary agent by sitting in with a group of writers each week as they read and criticized their work. The boys were now in first grade, chaffing at the restrictions of having to wait quietly in line before filing into school and sitting quietly in class until called upon. The free exchange of ideas at home at our ragtag undisciplined dinner table discussions did not prepare them for the etiquette at school. It was our third year there, and we were integrating ourselves into a familiar American suburban lifestyle: lessons upon lessons—violin, piano, tap, (Tap? They adored Singing in the Rain.) and, of course, soccer and baseball.

  I loved baseball when I was kid. And it isn’t easy to love something when you’re not good at it. My hand-eye coordination stinks. In the army I was a “bollo” on the shooting range. I could not hit the target. I figured out a way of raising my score. I counted the number of seconds when the pop up target would fall by itself, so I learned to fire just before it fell and get credit for knocking it over. If I were to go into a real battle, I would have needed a few shills in the enemy line to fall down every five seconds, and then the others would be so intimidated by my shooting skills that surrender would be imminent. Fortunately I never got into a real battle. Fortunately for me and the United States Army. As a baseball player, my hand-eye coordination problem was compounded by the fact that I was afraid of the ball. As a ball came whistling at me, all I could think was, “This ball could kill me. Or if not, it could hit me in the head and knock me out and make me stupid or comatose or incapacitated for life. I’m going to be a writer. (Yes, I knew that at twelve years old. I wrote a screenplay at twelve about a platoon of soldiers in World War II based on all my harrowing wartime experience.) A writer was not going to be much of a writer if he was comatose. A fly ball is hit. I look up. I see it. But I can’t judge where it is. I run to get under it. Or as under it as I think I am, which is not really under it, and then as it descends I start thinking, of course, this ball could hit me in the head. And you know the rest. But for some damned reason, I loved the game. I never fantasized about winning the academy award for my World War II film. I fantasized about driving in the winning run in a major league ball game. And marrying Esther Williams. But that’s another story.

  You wonder as your children grow up whether they will acquire things like your hit-me-on-the-head-fly-ball phobia, or whether they, like their father, will learn to love baseball more as a concept than a game. Or, would they, like their mother, who rock climbed up sheer cliffs as a teenager (she once climbed up a stone fireplace in a restaurant on a bet), be fearless.

  You look for clues. Early soccer games, they’d bunch up around the ball like the other six year olds, leaving no one free to pass the ball to. Good, I suppose. They want to be part of the action. But you watch to see, when a player charges at them or a kid kicks the ball at them, if they shy away, if they are fearless or cautious. But does it matter, if they’re having fun? The last thing you want to do is overcompensate for your fears and say something stupid like, “Charge into him—the ball can’t hurt that much.”

  I think because of their being twins, they didn’t need a father or mother coach. They coached each other. And it was a great lesson in laid-back fathering to realize that instruction coming from their peers—their brother, their friend—is easier to take. Even if it’s cruel as it can sometimes be. Then that puts you in the enviable position of comforting your child, of being above the fray.

  “What he meant when said, ‘Don’t be a ball hog, jerk,’ is …”

  “I know what he meant, Dadoo.”

  “He just wants you to pass more.”

  “That doesn’t make me a jerk. He’s a jerk for calling me a jerk!”

  “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  They even begin to understand the strengths and limits of their talents without you having to say a thing. They both played T-ball. Sam was good at it. Gabe less so. So when Samuel graduated to “coach-pitch” Gabe chose to go to art classes at the museum. But he wanted to watch all of Sam’s games. When Sam hit a game-winning home run, Gabe jumped up and down for joy and rushed to embrace his brother. I was moved, not so much at Sam’s game winning hit, but at Gabe’s joyful, generous reaction.

  Would that Gabe had been my father when I was a young camper, upset at my inability to catch a fly ball. He would have said, as he does say today, “But look at what you do, do well.”

  He actually said to me when I was down in the dumps at the awful vicissitudes of my business, “But Dadoo, look at all the plays of yours that have been produced. You just keep working. You’re amazing.”

  Kids find a path for themselves, sometimes through great disappointment, and especially if their parents are imperfect, they respond and then give back.

  “You’re amazing.”

  It was October, 1996 in Los Angeles. Back in Massachusetts the
leaves would have been changing. The Berkshire Hills would be awash in oranges and yellows and reds. Twenty years back, when Bonnie Franklin and I were dating, she used to tease me because I would never visit her in Los Angeles in October.

  “Of course not. Not when your precious leaves are changing!”

  And she would laugh delightfully. And October is also World Series time, and in ’96, the Yankees were in the World Series. The games came on at five in the afternoon on the west coast, so we could watch some games and the boys could make their bedtime. Growing up in Philadelphia, I had hated the Yankees. The Yankees always won. Boring. The Phillies always lost. Hopeless, but not boring. Well, not completely hopeless. They could just maybe someday win it all. That gave me hope. Well, when you’re a kid you always have hope.

  And my hope was vindicated when my Phillies team finally won the pennant in 1950—and then dashed when were beaten by the Yankees in the World Series, four zip! Damned Yankees! Humiliating. Could it be true? Some teams were just better? I discovered later, when I became a Yankee convert, it is possible to root for a team that is so good you expect them to win. You have confidence they will win. (They are the best.) And that uneasy feeling I always had with the Phillies—the feeling that with the go-ahead runs on base, the hitter would not drive them in, just wasn’t there. Bad teams manage not to get hits with runners on. If there is a metaphor for failure in life it surely must be not getting a hit with a runner in scoring position. And so what happens is that every time runners do get into scoring position, as the batter stands in, you get that sickening feeling that … it’s over. Don’t get excited. It’s over. And after a while you give up. You’re disgusted. And start drinking. And you lose your job. And your wife leaves you. And you walk into the ocean, like James Mason in A Star is Born.

  I didn’t feel that way rooting for those magical late ’90s Yankees. They did everything right. They played little ball, big ball, any damned kind of ball that won ball games. Watching those games, I knew the exquisite feeling of complete confidence. There was no tension. My guys were the best. They would do it. Ah! And having come late to rooting for a good team was not that dissimilar to having come later to fatherhood. I could not have adored being father more, because I finally got it right. My obsession with the Yanks—and my obsession with my family—were all part of this great late appreciation for life. For, at long last, getting it right.

  On this October day in 1996, I was still a residual Yankee hater. But the Yanks had regrouped. This was a new team. And they were in the series against Atlanta. And I could teach the boys to the nuances of the game by watching it on TV while they asked questions.

  “Why is a batter out if he bunts with two strikes?”

  “Uh, well, I think … back in the old days of baseball, the 1890’s, batters would foul off pitches just get the pitcher really tired. And one pitcher, for the Cincinnati Reds threw seventy six pitches, all of them fouled off by a Chicago Cubs batter. So, they made the rule; two strikes, you bunt foul—you’re out.”

  “Dadoo, you made that up.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But, it sounds good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, do you know why?”

  “Haven’t a clue!”

  We watched as the Yankees came back from a two-nothing deficit, having lost both games at Yankee Stadium. They won four straight and won the series 4–2. I taught the boys all the nuances of the game. Go Nuance!

  “Why can a runner run to first if the catcher drops a third strike?”

  “Ah, well … that’s because there was a catcher for the Red Sox named ‘Thumbs Strickland’ who was a terrific hitter, and the Yankees tried to keep him out of the lineup as much as possible, so they forced the league to adopt the ‘dropping the third strike’ rule—which ‘Thumbs’ did a lot and allowed the Yanks to get more men on base and beat the Red Sox.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Okay, do you believe that the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees because the Sox owner needed the money to invest in a Broadway musical, No, No Nanette?”

  “No!”

  Well, Gabey, that’s true.”

  “But there is no ‘Thumbs’ Strickland.”

  “Nope.”

  “Was there a No No Nanette?”

  “You bet Sammo. Wanna hear some of the songs?”

  “Not during the game!”

  As we watched the Yankee game, something happened. These were not only new Yankees, these were different Yankees. A different kind of team. Not the power teams of Mantle and Maris. They played little ball. Hit and run. Steal. Bunt. Great pitching. And graceful fielding. Just watching Bernie Williams run defined grace. But most of all, most of all, there was Derek Jeter. He was a rookie. He was handsome. And he was good. He was good in the way that filled your chest. He made things happen. When he came up with men on you knew, you just damn well knew that he would do anything to drive in that run. He was able to take an inside pitch and twist his body and hit it to right field. He could get on first. Steal second. Go to third on a grounder and score on a fly ball. Do that three times a game and win the game on his own. He was a cheerleader, always standing on the top step of the dugout, encouraging his teammates. And he was a leader. And his being handsome in that modern, cross culture way (His father is black, his mother Asian) made him a symbol of what is best about America. He was the melting pot. He was good. And he was a synthesis of all the good things we could be. And, maybe most of all for an old Yankee hater, he was the leader of a different team. An unboring team. A team that won, but won in a different way each time. A smart team. I fell in love with them.

  And the boys fell in love with them. And baseball. What began as a lesson in the nuances of the game on a second-hand couch in Studio City evolved into as important and cozy a family ritual as reading stories to them at bedtime. Story reading was not just a one-way proposition; we read, they listen. Your kids ask questions about the stories, and you respond and comment. They get caught up in the narrative from the simplest silly adventures of Winnie the Pooh to the dark and complex wanderings of Huckleberry Finn. Watching baseball with the boys was, in its way, as cozy and intimate as snuggling with them in bed. Talk, strategy was being exchanged on that couch, but love of the game was being felt. And love of those players who played so well. And love of each other was manifest in every move and in every word and especially in the exuberant gesture that became a ritual, with all of us standing up on the couch and cheering at the top of our lungs when the Yankees came from behind and rallied to win!

  I can still feel the joy now, remembering, standing on one couch or another, a son on each side, jumping up and down, sagging into the pillows and screaming as Julia runs into the room knowing something good has occurred, and smiling at the sight of her men celebrating, she joins us in a pile to watch the glorious replay.

  My love of baseball and my love of family intertwined into a magical pursuit that would last throughout their childhood. Watching those games I became myself at their age, listening to games with my Dad. And when, as a parent, you become yourself as a child, and recreate that same comforting pleasure, your world reduces itself to the simplest, most basic experience. Parent and child are inseparable. Who is who? You are both. There is no finer bliss.

  SCENE: A BUS AS IT PASSES THE COLISEUM IN ROME, ITALY.

  (Samuel and Gabriel, seven years old, point to it with excitement.)

  GABE

  Mommy, Dadoo, look, that’s the coliseum.

  LEE, JULIA

  Yes!

  GABE

  In person.

  LEE, JULIA

  Yes!

  SAM

  Do they still use it?

  JULIA

  Oh, for concerts and things.

  (Gabe turns to Sam, and speaking with great authority)

  GABE

  That’s where the Gladiators fought.

  SAM

  I know, Gabe.

  GABE

&n
bsp; And where they fed the Christians to the Lions!

  SAM

  Yeah, but we’re half Jewish, so the Lions would only eat half of us!

  CHAPTER NINE

  ROMAN (WORKING) HOLIDAY

  After having lived in New York and Massachusetts and three years in Los Angeles, in the fall of the boys seventh year we were fortunate to have another choice: Rome.

  My old alma mater, Trinity College, Hartford had a study abroad program there. I had become friendly with the college’s new president, Evan Dobelle. Evan was doing terrific things at this rather staid old school—specifically an initiative to help vitalize the crumbling community around the college. He felt the school had a obligation to its neighbors. It should not be an ivory tower, but an economic and cultural engine in the community. He pulled it off. In the midst of his reformative zeal, we met at my college reunion and later that summer had a picnic lunch with our families, where he turned to me and casually said, “How’d you like to teach in Rome?”

  Julia almost fell off the picnic bench.

  “Yes! When? We’ll pack tonight.”

  Evan had seen a play of mine at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and knew that I had taught playwriting at N.Y.U. He didn’t know that Julia spoke pretty good Italian or that I wanted to move as far away from Hollywood as possible.

  It would mean a new home and a new school for the boys. What did they think?

  “Dadoo, is your Italian as bad as your French?”

  “I don’t know any Italian. I’ll have to learn it over there. I’ll take classes with the students.”

  “You can teach classes and take them at the same time?”

  “Is that legal?”

  “I think so. In Italy.”

  “What about us? We don’t speak Italian.”

  “You can learn. It’ll be fun.”

  “Mommy,” Sam blurted out, “say something in Italian.”

  “Voglio andare a Roma.”

  “What’s that mean?”