Andy’s novel, The Long Shadow of Hope, will be released this fall. Here is his first contribution to the Quarterly, an elegy written long ago, after the passing of a childhood hero.
Heroes
This will be the first opening day you’ve missed since 1911.
You with your infinite wisdom – me just a boy who thought Mays was the one and only.
But you had seen them all – Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle…
I had seen the Reds once and could remember Rose # 14 through heavy binoculars, and it stuck with me, like a dream that wouldn’t die.
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I remember walking down our street when I was young, fireflies glowing, crickets chirping, and there you would be, always, listening to your little transistor – to the game – smoking cigarettes, maybe having a beer. We’d talk pennant race, those dreadful Dodgers, or basketball – West was always the greatest.
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I acted like I knew everything – so you gave me a Guinness Book of World Records and Sports Almanac 1974 To get my facts straight. This just fueled my fire.
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Your son was my idol too, he played hoops like a lion, fearless yet graceful – I hoped I would rate.
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Ultimately, though, it was your daughter’s music that we both gravitated to… as I grew up and you grew old.
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You wrote songs though the music was in your head, poems sometimes as long as Kubla Khan, and stories that would make Twain smile like a river pirate in a stolen boat.
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Though you eventually quit, cigarettes haunted you till you were like a skeleton fighting the wind. Seeing you gasp for oxygen hurt, and I became aware that death hid like Satan himself in the burning white sticks you always held.
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I’ve been to many parks and stadiums now: Kansas City, San Diego, Denver, St. Louis, Detroit, Charlotte, New Orleans…
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But I’ll never enjoy a ballgame more than I did listening to the Big Red Machine, Bench, Perez, Morgan, Concepcion,
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Swatting mosquitos, sitting on the porch with an RC, laughing under a summer moon, with you, Simmons.
By Andy Spradling
First printed, The Kanawha Review 1991