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A Great Love

by Sue Granzella

Oh, God, I love baseball. It's been sort of like my third parent, with me through all stages of my life, helping to raise me. As a kid...I'd chase our border collie around our back yard on El Centro Avenue in the fields north of Napa, listening to the Giants on the radio on a hot Sunday afternoon as my dad trudged in from the orchard. I'd ride my bike down to the school with my brother, our legs burning as we stood up the whole way so we could pedal faster, off to play in the stickery field with Jimmy Shook and Johnny Biale until it would be too dark to see the ball.

I'd huddle down in my bed late at night, secretly taking the radio to bed with me because I was nine and the A's were ahead. It wasn't my fault. Mom and Dad were to blame, for teaching me the companionship of baseball, its rhythm, its history, its magic. I devoured every baseball biography in the Napa Children's Library. Baseball is in my bones. 

My first overt defiance of the law was because of baseball. I was in sixth grade, the A's were in the playoffs, and Sister Mary Benignus spied the odd tilt of my head during religion class. She strode over to me, and, with an angry flush and an accusing finger, ordered me to produce the evidence. So I pulled on the cord and unraveled my secret joy, removing the wire I'd carefully strung inside the sleeve of my scratchy wool sweater, past my Peter Pan collar, up into my ear beneath my uniform plaid beanie. The tinny game sounds coming through the earphone were silenced as I turned over my transistor radio to the authority. I can't remember who won that day.

Then it was summer, I was sixteen, and my new Atkins-diet body looked amazing in my sleek yellow two-piece swimsuit. My sisters and cousins and I lay baking on the hot cement around the pool at Lake Tahoe, doused in July's perfume of Sea 'n Ski and chlorine. I was uncomfortable around boys; they did mysterious things with girls, and I knew I wasn't ready for that. I felt like an alien. But I was an alien who knew how to talk baseball, and that day, I somehow found myself in the middle of my cousin's teen-aged buddies, expounding on players' batting averages, home run totals, and pitching prospects. I had no idea how to flirt, but I instinctively knew that my baseball knowledge had impressed those boys. When my swimsuit and I eventually turned and walked away, it was with a new-found confidence.

When I was twenty, baseball patiently taught me that adults plan ahead. I'd decided at the last minute to head to Candlestick Park and watch that evening's Giant-Dodger game. So my friend and I drove across the San Mateo Bridge, listening to the radio pregame and hoping that we'd arrive by 7:30, in time for the first inning. As we neared the stadium, I saw that the park was completely dark, yet I heard strains of the "The Star-Spangled Banner" wafting from the car radio. My mind struggled mightily to make sense of this conflicting input.

"Do you think they're having a power outage?" I asked my friend. It was all I could come up with.

He was skeptical. "And still singing the song? Over the speaker system?" He waited a moment, but I hadn't caught up. So he asked it: "Did you even think of checking whether the game was in San Francisco or Los Angeles?"

My hands jerked the wheel of my 1969 Dodge wagon off to the right, and I pulled over in time for us to hear the radio roar of the crowd, 350 miles away, as we stared at the dark stadium. It was ten minutes before I could drive again; I was laughing too hard to see. We opened the windows and breathed in the cool breeze off the Bay, and it occurred to me that I wasn't quite grown up yet. 

Over the next two-plus decades, there were boyfriends who came and went, until I finally figured out that I was ready to find one who would come and stay. Since total honesty was one trait that I knew I needed in a partner, I figured that I owed any future mate the same thing. So I'd included the words "baseball-crazed" in my match.com description of myself.  At least he wouldn't be able to claim that he hadn't been warned.

John and I met in November, that bland limbo period in between the end of one baseball season and the start of the next. On February 1st, we were window-shopping along Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley and saw a baseball version of Monopoly in the window of a game store.

"Hey!" I announced. "Only two more months until Opening Day!" I gleefully squeezed his hand.

By then, I'd already fallen in love with many parts of this man, among them his sense of humor. "Yeah, only two more months of me getting to be the guy in the relationship," he deadpanned, rolling his bright blue eyes, resigned. My laugh rang out in delight.

The two months passed, and John continued to be the guy in the relationship, by then the only guy I knew I'd ever want in my relationship. It had taken me forty-four years, but I'd found this person whose mind was alive, whose wit was brilliant, and whose heart was kind. The words: "I get to be happy!" took up residence in my heart, and I took up residence in John's house after our first year together.

Though John didn't quite share my passion for baseball, he had a passion for respecting what mattered to me. So as we grew closer, we increasingly shared baseball, and it became one of many threads woven into the fabric of our life created together. We watched games with my mom, whose Alzheimer's-afflicted brain could still follow the sport. On our two-week trip to Mexico, we picked up a Giants game on the only TV we saw the whole time. And back home, we hung out at A's games on lazy summer afternoons. 

And then a miracle happened. Second only to the miracle of my finding John, the Giants found their way into the battle for playoffs last fall. The whole month of September was exquisitely agonizing, as each torturous game was filled with excited shouting, both from the Giants on the field and from John and me on our greenish cat-clawed couch. By then, we had our routine down cold. At night, we'd set the DVR to record the next evening's game. The next day, we'd make sure not to listen to the radio after five o'clock, so that we wouldn't hear bits of the game and later pollute the mind of the other with hints of outcome.

Once we were both home, we'd assume our positions on the couch. I'd curl up with my steaming bowl of dinner oatmeal, and John with his mac' and cheese and the remote. I'd turn off the lights for luck, John would press "play" on the remote, and the next three hours would be filled with strikeouts and steals, pitchers and pressure. When the luck needed to be changed, I'd put on my panda hat, and once when extra power was needed, I asked John if he would wear it. I only had to hear: "I'm NOT wearing that friggin' panda hat!" once for me to know that I'd asked too much. From then on, I just put it on the dog.

Sometimes it was hell, but always it was heaven. I never wanted the fun to end.

And then it did, right before it was supposed to reach its frenzied peak. Two hours before Game 1 of the World Series, I got the call from John's doctor, the same one who had assured us the week prior that he expected a clean report for the biopsy he'd done on John. I had been so relieved by those words that I'd forgotten that we were still waiting for the official results. So when I heard him begin with: "Well, actually..." I felt more disoriented than anything else. After our short conversation, I needed just one thing -- to see my husband of four years. But I dreaded seeing him too, because I knew that my words to him would change his life.

John got home a few hours later, whistling as he brought in the day's mail. My heart squeezed as I thought for the thousandth time how cute he looked in his brown UPS shirt, worn flapping open like a jacket over his "Life is Good" t-shirt. His thin but strong legs crossed the room as I patted the couch next to me. 

I remembered to use the words "early" and "small" and "treatable", and then I waited for him to speak.

 "Hmm." He looked as if he were concentrating somewhat, as if I'd just asked him to multiply 35 times 26 without paper. Not bothered, exactly - just focused. And then he said it again: "Hmm."

I gently asked, "Were you thinking of this as a possibility at all? Is this a total surprise?" I wanted to hear how he was feeling, but I wasn't sure how to get there.

"Well - sure, I knew that it was possible, but I guess I wasn't really expecting it." He was already standing up. "I guess it is what it is," he continued, peeling off his shirt.  "Okay, I'm going to shower, and then we can start watching the game."

Baseball? NOW? He was already upstairs, so I said it to myself. My heart had been lassoed and yanked out of my chest, and the last thing I thought I'd be able to do was sit in front of a TV and watch a bunch of men play a kids' game, pretending that it was serious when everyone knew that it didn't matter at all.

But surprisingly, it helped to have the game on. It sucked us in, and as we hollered and cheered, I realized that it was good to have something mindless to focus on, something to remind us that he was still the same person he'd been over the past two months of crazy games. Wearing ridiculous hats and flicking lights on and off, we felt normal.

In those next few days, we had a doctor appointment and a plan for surgery, and the

Giants won three of the first four games of the Series. And then it was time for Game 5, the game that could bring the championship to San Francisco, a city that had waited longer for a winner than I'd waited to find John. The DVR had been set, the hat was on the dog, and the oatmeal warm in my bowl. John grabbed the remote, and I stepped just outside the TV room, rubbing my hands over my ears so that I wouldn't accidentally see or hear the score before John could mute it and rewind to the start of the game. I waited for his signal that it was safe.

And I waited.

But the signal didn't come. I cautiously peeked in far enough to glimpse John, but not the TV. He was aiming the remote, pushing buttons, and finally, just staring blankly at the TV screen. I had a bad feeling.

"Did we lose the recording?"  I spoke softly, in slow motion. Each word was a heavy rock, and I could only lift one at a time.

"Maybe."

Kaboom. That was a blow. If John were confident, he wouldn't have said "maybe". I covered my mouth; I may have held my breath. I knew how long ballgames last. If everything that had happened before we turned the TV on had gone away, we'd missed almost all of the game.

It felt like time had stopped. I finally let myself glance up at the paused TV screen and saw that time really had stopped. The skinny, long-haired Giants pitcher was motionless on the mound. The little score box showed that it was 3 to 1, and it was frozen on one out in the bottom of the 8th inning. My team was ahead in the World Series, looking like they'd win it for the first time in my life. And I'd missed it. I'd been their fan forever, and they were winning it without me.  Without me.

As my mind was grappling with that truth, John must have started to admit to himself that Comcast had betrayed us. He began making some frightening noises. It made me think of the time my cat swallowed my sewing needle, and my screaming had startled her into making deep growling sounds I'd never known a cat could make. John was no feline, but the sounds coming from him were just as disturbing to me. The helpless yells of frustration, the deep-pitched shouts - they pounded like hammer blows from my calm, even-tempered husband. Except there was nothing for them to strike but empty air and a still-life pitcher.

But as John's agitation grew, a strange calm overtook me. Words were filling me, words that I felt more than thought. What filled me was this: My husband had cancer. My husband had just learned that he had cancer, and he did not need one more thing to feel badly about. If there was one thing about me that he knew, he knew that I loved baseball. I'd loved it in utero. And as disappointed as he would be himself at having missed the last game of the World Series, he would maybe feel even worse for me. So I had to let him know that it was absolutely fine with me that we'd missed the game. It wasn't - but everything in me needed him to know that it was.

So I became another person, an impressively serene person with an excellent sense of perspective. She was unrecognizable to me. I heard myself calmly telling John that Comcast would show the game again later, that my sister had certainly recorded it, that we could watch the replay on line, and that the end was what was important anyway. I doubt if it helped him to feel any better, but perhaps it helped us to move forward.  At some point, we pushed "play" on the remote, and sat down in silence to watch the last few minutes of what broadcasters would later say had been a fantastic game.

By the top of the 9th inning, John seemed back to his normal calm. Me? I looked more pathetic than did our hat-clad dog. Tears were streaming down my face, and these were not tears of joy at my team's likely victory. But neither were they tears of disappointment at my having missed the game.

It was a sense of wonder that had turned me into a crying mess. My whole life, I'd loved baseball more than anyone I knew. My team was about to win it all for the first time in my life, and I had missed the whole game.  But here I was, with John next to me on the couch. I get to be happy in my life with this man. I breathe in that truth every day. And he has cancer. And as indescribably disappointed as I was about the game, I know that anything that is about him matters more to me than baseball does. And that's saying a lot.

And so I cried. And so he paused the game.

I tried to tell him some blubbering version of that, but it didn't come out the way I felt it inside, all soaring and angels singing. It came out more like: "You're above baseball in the pecking order of my heart." He was probably just glad that I hadn't included chocolate chip cookies in my ranking system.

But I knew what I meant, how happy I was that he and I had found each other, how lucky but scared but lucky I felt. So I just told him that I was done talking, and that we could finish watching the game that had already ended in real time. We hollered a few more times, fist-pumped when they finished it off, and laughed through the celebration.  In real time, the Giants had already started the party without me. But John and I shared the celebration together.

 

Sue Granzella is a third-grade teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from Napa, she's known since age six that she loves writing. Impressively, after this initial realization of her passion for the written word, it took her a mere 46 years to submit A Great Love, the first time she's ever entered a writing contest or attempted publication. Most of her writing until last year consisted of fiery speeches to elected officials, feisty letters to colleagues in her teachers' union, and too-long emails to friends. She is grateful to Louise Minks, the artist in central Massachusetts who talked with her in July of 2010 about surrendering to one's passion.

Sue lives happily and healthily with her husband, John, in San Leandro, CA. She loves road trips, quilting, dogs, laughing, hiking, baseball, and reading the writing of 8- and 9-year-olds.