Waiting For Opening Day With My Daughter

In middle age I have learned to appreciate the truth of things I had written off as cliches. Lovers of baseball like to treat Opening Day as a kind of holy day where life returns from winter dormancy. A lot of baseball lovers (including myself) lean towards the florid and flowery in describing the sport, imbuing it with literary flourishes that might seem ridiculous when applied to a boys game played by grown men. The descriptions of Opening Day certainly fit the bill for that kind of thing, but in middle age I have chosen to believe in the mythology.

As I age winter becomes more disagreeable to me. I am likely now to languish in thoughts about my mortality, or get sad from the lack of sunshine. The prospect of baseball gives me something to look forward to, and every year now in this late February moment the anticipation becomes unbearable.

This year that anticipation has become almost sweet and sublime, as one of my daughters has joined me in being a baseball nut. (Her twin sister has not, but she shares my love of history so I'm not too disappointed.) The nights that I put my daughters to bed I lie beside her as we watch highlight videos of the Mets' last season. We talk about what we look forward to in the next year. She laments the loss of Zack Wheeler to the Phillies. The other day we looked at the list of promotions for different Mets games and she must have asked me to buy tickets to ten different games.

Sometimes I think this is just too good to be true. Other times I worry that this is just a passing phase. I figure the girl at seven who wants to memorize the uniform numbers of the Mets roster and crack open packs of baseball cards will eventually want to leave me behind and go through the usual rites of American girlhood. I want to enjoy this as much as I can, because like everything else in life, it must come to an end.

And that's why Opening Day is so treasured by so many aging people, I guess. We who are increasingly aware of the finite, mortal nature of all around us can appreciate a new beginning. Soon the grass will be green again, the trees will bud, the birds will come back and baseball will be on my car radio. Most sweetly, I'll be with my daughter at the ballpark.