by Mitch Albom
They call a short stay in baseball “a cup of coffee,” and that’s what I had, but it was a cup of coffee at the best table in the best joint in town.
Which, of course, was good and bad.
YOU SEE, I was more alive in those six weeks with the Pirates than I ever felt before or since. The spotlight had made me feel immortal. I missed the huge, carpeted locker room. I missed walking through airports with my teammates, feeling the eyes of the fans as we passed. I missed the crowds in those big stadiums, the flashbulbs, the roaring cheers—the majesty of the whole thing. I missed it bitterly. So did my father. We shared a thirst to return; unspoken, undeniable.
And so I clung to baseball long after I should have quit. I went from minor-league city to minor-league city, still believing, as athletes often do, that I would be the first to defy the aging process. I dragged Catherine with me all over the country. We had apartments in Portland, Jacksonville, Albuquerque, Fayetteville, and Omaha. During her pregnancy, she had three different doctors.
In the end, Maria was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, two hours after a game attended by maybe eighty people before rain sent them scattering. I had to wait for a cab to get to the hospital. I was almost as wet as my daughter when she came into the world.
I quit baseball not long after that.
And nothing I tried ever came close. I attempted my own business, which only lost me money. I looked around for coaching positions, but couldn’t find any. In the end, a guy offered me a job in sales. His company made plastic bottles for food and pharmaceuticals, and I took it. The work was dull. The hours were tedious. Even worse, I only got the job because they figured I could tell baseball stories and maybe close a deal in the frothy hubris of men talking sports.
It’s funny. I met a man once who did a lot of mountain climbing. I asked him which was harder, ascending or descending? He said without a doubt descending, because ascending you were so focused on reaching the top, you avoided mistakes.
“The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature,” he said. “You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.”
I could spend a lot of time talking about my life after baseball. But that pretty much says it.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, MY father faded with my athletic career. Oh, he came to see the baby a few times. But he was not as fascinated by a grandchild as I hoped he would be. As time passed, we had less and less to talk about. He sold his liquor stores and bought a half interest in a distributorship, which more than paid his bills without requiring much attendance. It’s funny. Even though I needed a job, he never once offered one. I guess he’d spent too much time molding me to be different to allow me to be the same.
It wouldn’t have mattered. Baseball was our common country, and without it, we drifted like two boats with the oars pulled in. He bought a condo in a suburb of Pittsburgh, joined a golf club, developed a mild form of diabetes, and had to watch his diet and give himself shots.
And just as effortlessly as he had surfaced beneath those gray college skies, so did my old man slide back into foggy absentia, the occasional phone call, the Christmas card.
You might ask if he ever explained what happened between him and my mother. He didn’t. He simply said, “It didn’t work out between us.” If I pressed him, he would add, “You wouldn’t understand.” The worst he ever said about my mother was, “She’s a hardheaded woman.”
It was as if they had made this pact to never speak about what drove them apart. But I asked them both the question, and only my father lowered his eyes when he answered.
The Second Visit Ends
“POSEY,” MISS THELMA WHISPERED, “I’m gonna visit with my grandchildren for a spell.”
She looked much better than when she’d rung the bell at my mother’s house. Her face was smooth and her eyes and lips were done nicely. My mother had brushed out her dyed orange tresses, and for the first time I realized that Miss Thelma was an attractive woman, and must have been a knockout when she was young.
My mother laid a kiss on Miss Thelma’s cheek, then closed her bag and motioned for me to follow. We stepped into the hallway, where a little girl with her hair in braids was heading toward us, clomping her feet.
“Grandma?” she said. “Are you ’wake?”
I stepped back, but she walked right past us, never looking up. She was followed by a little boy—maybe her brother?—who stopped in the doorway and put a finger in his mouth. I reached out and waved a hand before his face. Nothing. It was clear we were invisible to them.
“Mom,” I stammered. “What’s going on?”
She was looking at Miss Thelma, whose granddaughter was now on the bed. They were playing some kind of pat-a-cake. My mother had tears in her eyes.
“Is Miss Thelma dying, too?”
“Soon,” my mother said.
I stepped in front of her.
“Mom. Please?”
“She called for me, Charley.”
We both looked toward the bed.
“Miss Thelma? She summoned you?”
“No, sweetheart. I came to her mind, that’s all. I was a thought. She wished I was still around and could help her look pretty, not as sick, so here I was.”
“A thought?” I looked down. “I’m lost.”
My mother moved closer. Her voice softened. “Have you ever dreamt of someone who’s gone, Charley, but in the dream you have a new conversation? The world you enter then is not so far from the world I’m in now.”
She put one hand on mine. “When someone is in your heart, they’re never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.”
On the bed, the little girl played with Miss Thelma’s hair. Miss Thelma grinned and glanced over at us.
“Do you remember the old lady Golinski?” my mother said.
I remembered. A patient at the hospital. Terminal illness. She was dying. But she used to tell my mother every day about people who “visited” her. People from her past with whom she spoke and laughed. My mother recounted this at the dinner table, how she’d peek in the room and see the old lady Golinski with her eyes closed, smiling and mumbling in some invisible conversation. My father called her “crazy.” She died a week later.
“She wasn’t crazy,” my mother said now.
“Then Miss Thelma is...”
“Close.” My mother’s eyes narrowed. “It’s easier to talk to the dead the closer you get.”
I felt a cold flush from my shoulders to my feet.
“Does that mean I’m...”
I meant to say “dying.” I meant to say “gone.”
“You’re my son,” she whispered. “That’s what you are.”
I swallowed. “How much time do I have?”
“Some,” she said.
“Not a lot?”
“What’s a lot?”
“I don’t know, Mom. Will I be with you forever, or will you be gone in a minute?”
“You can find something truly important in a minute,” she said.
Suddenly, all the glass in Miss Thelma’s house exploded, windows, mirrors, TV screens. The shattering pieces flew around us as if we stood in the vortex of a hurricane. A voice from outside thundered over it all.
“CHARLES BENETTO! I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME! ANSWER ME!”
“What do I do?” I screamed to my mother.
She blinked calmly as the glass swirled around her.
“That’s up to you, Charley,” she said.
IV. Night
The Sunlight Fades
“ONCE HEAVEN IS DONE WITH GRANDMA, WE’D LIKE HER BACK, THANKS.” My daughter had written that in the guest book at my mother’s funeral, the kind of assumptive yet incongruent thing a teenager comes up with. But seeing my mother again, hearing her explain how this “dead” world worked, how she was called back to people by their memories of her—well, maybe Maria was onto something.
The glass storm of Miss Thelma’s house had passed; I’d had to squeeze my eyes sh
ut to make it stop. Shards of glass poked in my skin and I tried to brush them free, but even that seemed to require great effort. I was weakening, withering. This day with my mother was losing its light.
“Am I going to die?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Charley. Only God knows that.”
“Is this heaven?”
“This is Pepperville Beach. Don’t you remember?”
“If I’m dead...If I die...do I get to be with you?”
She grinned. “Oh, so now you want to be with me.”
Maybe that sounds cold to you. But my mother was just being my mother, a little funny, a little teasing, the way she’d be had we spent this day together before she’d died.
She was also justified. So many times, I had chosen not to be with her. Too busy. Too tired. Don’t feel like dealing with it. Church? No thanks. Dinner? Sorry. Come down to visit? Can’t do it, maybe next week.
You count the hours you could have spent with your mother. It’s a lifetime in itself.
SHE TOOK MY hand now. After Miss Thelma’s, we simply walked forward and the scenery changed and we eased through a series of brief appearances in people’s lives. Some I recognized as my mother’s old friends. Some were men I barely knew, men who had once admired her: a butcher named Armando, a tax attorney named Howard, a flat-nosed watch repairman named Gerhard. My mother spent only a moment with each, smiling or sitting in front of them.
“So they’re thinking about you now?” I said.
“Mmm,” she said, nodding.
“You go everywhere you’re thought of?”
“No,” she said. “Not everywhere.”
We appeared near a man gazing out a window. Then another man in a hospital bed.
“So many,” I said.
“They were just men, Charley. Decent men. Some were widowers.”
“Did you go out with them?”
“No.”
“Did they ask?”
“Many times.”
“Why are you seeing them now?”
“Oh, a woman’s prerogative, I guess.” She placed her hands together and touched her nose, hiding a small smile. “It’s still nice to be thought about, you know.”
I studied her face. There was no doubting her beauty, even in her late seventies, when she had taken on a more wrinkled elegance, her eyes behind glasses, her hair—once the blue-black of midnight—now the silver of a cloudy afternoon sky. These men had seen her as a woman. But I had never seen her that way. I had never known her as Pauline, the name her parents had given her, or as Posey, the name her friends had given her; only as Mom, the name I had given her. I could only see her carrying dinner to the table with kitchen mitts, or carpooling us to the bowling alley.
“Why didn’t you marry again?” I asked.
“Charley.” She narrowed her eyes. “Come on.”
“No. I’m serious. After we grew up—weren’t you lonely?”
She looked away. “Sometimes. But then you and Roberta had kids, and that gave me grandkids, and I had the ladies here and—oh, you know, Charley. The years pass.”
I watched her turn her palms up and smile. I had forgotten the small joy of listening to my mother talk about herself.
“Life goes quickly, doesn’t it, Charley?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
“It’s such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.”
I thought about the days I had handed over to a bottle. The nights I couldn’t remember. The mornings I slept through. All that time spent running from myself.
“Do you remember—” She started laughing. “When I dressed you as a mummy for Halloween? And it rained?”
I looked down. “You ruined my life.”
Even then, I thought, blaming someone else.
“YOU SHOULD EAT some supper,” she said.
And with that, we were back in her kitchen, at the round table, one last time. There was fried chicken and yellow rice and roasted eggplant, all hot, all familiar, dishes she’d cooked for my sister and me a hundred times. But unlike the stunned sensation I’d felt earlier in this room, now I was agitated, unnerved, as if I knew something bad was coming. She glanced at me, concerned, and I tried to deflect her attention.
“Tell me about your family,” I said.
“Charley,” she said. “I’ve told you that stuff.”
My head was pounding.
“Tell me again.”
And so she did. She told me about her parents, both immigrants, who died before I was born. She told me about her two uncles and her crazy aunt who refused to learn English and still believed in family curses. She told me about her cousins, Joe and Eddie, who lived on the other coast. There was usually one small anecdote that identified each person. (“She was deathly afraid of dogs.” “He tried to join the Navy when he was fifteen.”) And it seemed critical now that I match the name with the detail. Roberta and I used to roll our eyes when she launched into these stories. But years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family—who was related to whom—and I struggled. I couldn’t remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way.
So this time, I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree, bending back a finger for every person she recounted. Finally, when she finished, she pushed her hands together, and the fingers—like the characters—intertwined.
“Annnyhow,” she half sang. “That was—”
“I missed you, Mom.”
The words just spilled out of me. She smiled, but she didn’t answer. She seemed to consider the sentence, gathering my intent, as if pulling in a fisherman’s net.
Then, with the sun setting into whatever horizon of whatever world we were in, she ticked her tongue and said, “We have one more stop to make, Charley.”
The Day He Wanted Back
I NEED TO TELL YOU NOW about the last time I saw my mother alive, and the thing that I did.
It was eight years earlier, at her seventy-ninth birthday party. She had joked that people had better come, because starting next year “I’m not going to tell anyone it’s my birthday ever again.” Of course she said this at sixty-nine and fifty-nine and maybe even twenty-nine.
The party was a lunch at her house on a Saturday afternoon. In attendance were my wife and daughter; my sister, Roberta, and her husband, Elliot; their three kids (the youngest of which, five-year-old Roxanne, now wore ballerina slippers wherever she went); plus a good two dozen people from the old neighborhood, including the elderly women whose hair my mother washed and set. Many of these women were in poor health; one came in a wheelchair. Still, they had all been recently coiffed, their hair sprayed like helmets, and I wondered if my mother hadn’t organized the party just so the ladies had a reason to primp.
“I want Grandma to do my makeup, OK?” Maria said, bounding up to me, her fourteen-year-old body still coltish and awkward.
“Why?” I said.
“’Cause I want her to. She said if it was OK with you, she would.”
I looked at Catherine. She shrugged. Maria rabbit-punched me in the arm.
“Please-please-please-please-please?”
I have spoken enough about how bleak my life felt after baseball. I should mention that Maria was the exception to all that. I found my greatest joy in her. I tried to be a decent father. I tried to pay attention to the little things. I wiped the ketchup off her face after French fries. I sat beside her at her small desk, pencil in hand, helping her do math problems. I sent her back upstairs when, as an eleven-year-old, she came down wearing a halter top. And I was always quick to throw her a ball or take her to the local YMCA for swimming lessons, happy to keep her a tomboy as long as possible.
I would later learn, after I fell out of her life, that she wrote about sports for her college newspaper. And in that mixing of words and athletics, I realized how your mother and father pass through you to your children, like it or not.
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AS THE PARTY continued, plates clanked and music played. The room hummed with chatter. My mother read her cards out loud as if they were congratulatory telegrams from foreign dignitaries, even the cheap, pastel-colored ones with rabbits on the front (“Just thought I’d hop in to say...Hope your birthday is a real thumper!”). When she finished she would turn the card open so everyone could see, and she’d blow a kiss to the sender: “Mmmwah!”
Sometime after the cards, but before the cake and gifts, the phone rang. The phone could ring a long time in my mother’s house because she wouldn’t rush what she was doing to answer; she would finish vacuuming the last corner or spraying the last window, as if it didn’t count until you picked it up.
Since nobody was getting it, I did.
If I had my life to do over again, I would have let it ring.
“HELLO?” I YELLED over the din.
My mother still used a Princess phone. The cord was twenty feet long because she liked to walk around as she talked.
“Hello?” I said again. I pressed the receiver closer to my ear.
“Hel-looo?”
I was about to hang up when I heard a man clear his throat.
Then my father said, “Chick? That you?”
AT FIRST I didn’t answer. I was stunned. Although my mother’s phone number had never changed, it was hard to believe my father was calling it. His departure from this house had been so sudden and destructive, hearing his voice seemed like a man walking back into a burning building.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I whispered.
“I’ve been trying to find you. I called your house and your office. I took a chance you might be—”
“It’s Mom’s birthday.”
“Oh, right,” he said.
“Did you want to speak to her?”
I had rushed into that sentence. I could feel my father rolling his eyes.
“Chick, I was talking with Pete Garner.”