An emotional Yankees Baseball Moment (for my father)

You inhaled last at 6:01 that morning in the month of March, 2001, and yesterday I thought of you.

Twenty-three years is a very long time, yet the freshness of you remains, as fresh as the interest for the New York Yankees which you instilled in me.

Baseball is such a banal thing but it fills me with passionate joy and pain. The joy remembering Wednesday evenings driving home after church, with their game on the radio, and you and I sitting in the car until the end of the inning, before going into the house to finish listening. Then there is the pain of it being a memory.

Certainly I do not need to tell you that after so many Marches, much has transpired. You remember Billy Martin and his temperament, and you might remember Joe Torre. Now we have Aaron Boone, and yesterday, during a Spring Training game, Boone decided to celebrate the person, and the success of Torre, by having him make a guest appearance, executing a pitching change, at the tender age of eighty-three.

He walked to the mound after two outs in the sixth inning, and took the ball from Carlos Rodón (whose father left Cuba just a decade after you did). They had a short symbolic chat, and the stadium, and myself were emotional – as emotional as you and I have always been.

Draft notes for the upcoming book
“had i served you coffee – Recipes, Inquiries, and Fruits in Letters to my Father”