🌱 Why do we tell stories?
A reminder that help tends to arrive just when we've given up
Greetings from Maryland. It’s been an interesting week, what with Alabama’s fetal personhood nonsense and SCOTUS’s latest outrage on the J6 trial. To counter that dark energy, today’s post is a story about my son’s adventures as a newly-minted teenager.
Thankfully, here on Substack, we’ve had a banner week for stories. The latest episode of
’s “Harmony House” added yet another twist. launched “100 Stories” with a banger. And released another audio story, with a premise so clever I will indeed “keep coming back.”If you missed it, I dared to share a short fictional piece as the Taking Back portion of February’s Talking Back to Walden. Subscribe here so you don’t miss next month, where I will finally tackle the building of his cabin.
Ten years ago, our 13-year-old son took the light rail downtown with a friend to attend the Orioles game. The friend had already fielded his father’s warning that they must leave after the seventh inning or find another way home. Without asking, they designated me the backup ride.
The O’s had been in a long downhill slide since July but miraculously scored ten runs in the bottom of the eighth inning. That’s two grand slams and a couple more homers just for good measure. All those at-bats take a lot of time.
When I got the text at 11:00 p.m. that they were just getting on the train and needed a pickup forty-five minutes later, I despaired. After hosting friends for dinner and cleaning up, I couldn’t stay awake that long. But there was no other option.
Two dead cellphones later, they stepped into our neighborhood’s favorite watering hole to borrow a phone from a stranger. My anger and resistance to the situation thawed a bit from sheer exhaustion, then melted entirely in the heat of their joy as they recounted the evening’s many adventures. Their sincere-to-the-point-of-groveling apology also helped.
Their first stories were about the people in the Tavern. The older woman who loaned her phone told them about her own son (a torn ACL has torched his hopes for a football scholarship to Hopkins), as well as offering them a ride home, which they—wisely—declined. When my son spotted me pulling up, he said, “She’s here!” and everyone in the place cheered.
Sometimes there’s no choice but to show up. For that simple act, I was rewarded by my son being his goofy self with me, sharing openly, all cultivated teen hardness dissolved in the thrill of freedom and adventure. He had gone out into the wide world and then returned to the safe container of home and mother.
How on earth had we come to this place already, that my son could hop the light rail, buy his own tickets to the ballgame, and meet strangers in the stands who teach him how to fold the huge American flag they had brought? How could he walk into a restaurant at midnight, belly up to the bar, and ask to borrow a stranger’s phone?
Parenting is a constant letting-go, interspersed with precious moments of gathering-up. That night with the boys caught me in a fleeting stillpoint of grace and love, thinking my son is a lucky boy, but not half so lucky as his mother.
In Three Uses of the Knife, David Mamet writes about Act Three, that point near the end of the story, where All is Lost. The hero has tried everything. He’s at the end of the line. But then, when things are bleakest, help shows up from some unexpected quarter. Perhaps the hero has summoned this help by ceasing his struggle and surrendering to his fate. His trials have forced him to pare back every façade, every false assumption, every pretense and ego-driven need to orchestrate. Until at long last, help arrives.
Whether he welcomes it with open arms or even recognizes it is always a question. Because—as we all know from hard experience—help rarely wears the clothes we’ve imagined.
We tell stories—our own or others’ and even made-up ones—to replay this pattern. To assure ourselves when we are wandering in the unknown, that help will arrive, just in time. It always does.
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No one appreciates baseball league young boys and old men.
The year I’m referencing here is the year that Henry “Hank” Louis Aaron eclipse the Babe Ruth all-time home run leader.
My father and I are a proof of theory and concept.
In 1974 at 10 years old, being a little league gold glove second baseman and .430 hitter, I had only spent a few days with one African-American in my life. A fellow naval aviator of my uncles. Commander Robert “Spot” Colville USN. Do you to my parents sending my sister and I all over the country on an airplane by ourselves and just the opportunities we had as children, I never gave the tone of anyone’s skin a second thought. I was flabbergasted that people were freaking out about people caring that Hammering Hank wasn’t white.
You see, in my mind, Hank Aaron was not a black man.
Hank Aaron wasn’t a black ball player.
To me, Henry “Hank” Louis Aaron was just a ball player. A damn good one! Like me. 😉
In reference to my father, his respiratory system was so bad the last four years of his life he couldn’t really leave the couch. For Farmer, used to spending his days outside and loving it that way, that’s imprisonment. That being the case, he followed the Royals intensely. Watched every game, new every stat by every player and all pertinent minutia concerning the team. I kept up with it in the newspaper allowing us a true connection and commonality.
As fate would have it, they made it to the World Series. Being only an hour and a half away from the stadium and once in a lifetime chance at least for my father for sure, my childhood best friend and I took him to the game. It’s the only time he would acquiesce in his life to be in a wheelchair. He left it in the corridor, walked up the stairs with us to our seats. Excited and beaming like a 12 year old kid.
We win that game and then later next week they won in New York and the World Series champs. My dad thinks me for that little field trip on his deathbed and many times in between.
Baseball is special….
Thank you, Julie! I love where you took me in this piece. Beautiful!