(The beginning of this memoir goes back to 1949 for those scrolling back)

                                              DILEMMA AND DESPAIR

1962

     Driving the eight miles home from the Cerritos athletic complex through the flat, featureless boulevards wedged in between housing tracts and strip malls and the dwindling dairy farms, everything looked different and seemed suffused in a grey pall. Slowly dawning on me and infiltrating me like a clammy fever was the bludgeoning reality that not only for the first time in my life I was officially extricated from the love of my life, baseball, but that there was a change going on in me that was not good; I did not understand it but it was verified by the looks of my ex teammates as I left the clubhouse—this kid is a fuck-up and there is something very, very wrong with him. I was isolated and exposed as a psycho, trapped in the shell-shocked ruins of my surroundings like the last man on earth.

     When I got home, mother had just returned from her job as school nurse at Bolsa Grande high school in Garden Grove and was in the kitchen preparing dinner. I didn’t want to face her in this state, but she took one brief look at me and dropped everything to ask what was wrong, and when I explained what had transpired her eyes filled with far less sympathy than I expected.

     She calmly told me to sit down. I sat down. She sat down. “Sometimes,” said my mother. “Certain things are meant to be. Nature must take its natural course, and for whatever reason it ultimately works out for the best. Sometimes an experience you feel is terrible turns out to be a blessing in disguise, despite the pain I know you’re feeling right this minute and will feel for a while.”

     “I don’t see any blessing in disguise, mother. I should’ve signed. I could be off with Angus, beating the bushes, instead of wallowing in this…goddam suburb. I hate it.”

     She reached over and took my hand, making me feel squeamish. “Dell, I know it seems hopeless right now, but whether you come to realize it or not, you are the kind of person who is going to have to bear up to some very tough periods in your life, a lot of pain and disappointment, because you are not like other people. You don’t accept things as they are. You have always been independent, and rebellious, and people who are like that pay, always. In the end, this will make you a stronger person who sees more, and feels more.” She actually smiled at me. There had never been a time when she didn’t make things feel better for me at my lowest moments. “How lucky you are, believe it or not, to be more perceptive and sensitive, to suffer more, because there will be that much more to experience, so many more horizons to cross! You’re never going to be dull, and the world is full of dull people. Who you are and what you’re going to be are as opposite from the limited world of baseball as you could possibly imagine, and believe me, I was in baseball, with your father, for a good many years, and I know what you’d be up against. Your father, in case you didn’t know, knocked heads with coaches and managers and the front offices all his career, and he paid for it, and I’m not sure HE was cut out for that life, but he was such a brilliant athlete, and loved baseball so much, he didn’t seem to have any choice. In an era when men ended up doing what their parents wanted them to do, or took what was available, your father did what HE wanted to do, and so will you.”

     Later, at the dinner table, Dad said, “Well, a blind man could see the writing on the wall.”  He gazed at me, not happy. “What about school? You staying in school?”

     I was thinking, it was shameful to be eating my Dad’s food under his roof like a freeloader while my friends were either away at college or playing pro ball or working. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do, Dad.”

     “Well, if you’re not going to school, you can work for me.”

     “Maybe I’ll join the marines.”

     “Don’t go off half-cocked for Chrissake! You’ve already screwed up one part of your life—don’t ruin everything.”

     “He is NOT going in the marines,” stated mother. “Not over my dead body.”

     Later, mother came into my room, where I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. She sat on the side of my bed. “I think you should seriously consider writing. That English teacher at Western thought highly of your talent and felt there was something inside you that was a writer. And I think as long as you’re living here you should find a job other than working for your father. I think you need a change. You need to think about things. It’s been baseball baseball baseball since you were a little boy. Maybe down the line you can play again, honey, but right now you need a break from it.”

     She kissed me on the head, smiled at me in a manner that said things would be okay, and left the room.

     (Next Sunday installment: My own Private Disneyland.)