Friday has come once more, and with it another weekly installment of Friday Baseball here on Raising the Apple. I’ve been waiting for this weekend since last Sunday afternoon. There’s nothing particularly special about this weekend, no big events to anticipate or any big games from a baseball perspective. It’s a holiday weekend depending on your religious proclivities, but I’ve never been a huge fan of Easter myself. No, I’ve spent all week dreaming of this weekend because I’ve been away in the very windy city of Chicago all week attending a conference, and this weekend is my first opportunity to see my girls in what has felt like no less than an eternity.
Ordinarily I like to travel, seeing new places and having new experiences in them, but this trip was a solitary one and I found myself feeling more acute loneliness than I ever have before. My well documented fear of flying certainly did not help as it bookended the trip with the fear of never seeing my family again, but even my days safe on the ground felt hollow and empty without them.
It is one of life’s great ironies, having children. You spend so much of your time with them, tending to their every need, arguing with them over basic matters of survival such as being properly clothed and fed, and all the while wishing with every fiber of your being for a break and silently (or sometimes not so silently) cursing your younger self for not savoring every last moment of free-time that now seems a lifetime away. And then you board an airplane and mere hours later find yourself driving past a Rainforest Cafe and nearly tearing up in the back of a taxi, wishing with every fiber of your being for them to be beside you.
I spent all of my “free-time” that entire week thinking of them. I sent them pictures from Wrigley Field, we talked via Skype on my laptop, and Kate sent me pictures of them in their pseudo-matching pink coats at the park. It was only a few days but it felt like weeks had gone by. My brother-in-law Chris was waiting for me at the baggage claim, and I arrived home a little past midnight to a silent house. I peeked inside the girls’ bedroom for a brief moment, desperate to see them but not wanting to wake them up and interrupt their sleep. I got into bed and held Kate close before falling to sleep myself.
I slept in until nearly 9AM, later than I have since before Caelyn was born. As I staggered bleary-eyed into the living room to find the girls playing on the floor, they jumped up to greet me and soon my world was filled with hugs, kisses, and declarations of love. Caelyn told me how much she missed me and Lily asked how I got here, as if I had teleported in just now, the notion of my arrival having occurred while they slept still beyond her comprehension.
I had taken the day off from work and we had planned to visit the Bronx Zoo. Unfortunately so did much of the metro area. It was the first nice day of the week and Caelyn, along with every other school age child, had the week off for the Elementary School version of Spring Break. All the lots were full and street parking impossible. We drove around some of the more charming Bronx neighborhoods trying to find our way and asked a cop parked at the zoo’s periphery for directions. He told us the zoo was filled to capacity and Kate and I exchanged a glance, telepathically agreeing that Plan B needed to be formed, and fast. Bittersweet cries of “I want to go to the zoo” were coming from the back seat and the day was quickly sliding off the rails.
We considered dropping in on the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History but the traffic was horrendous and it was already one o’clock. We had packed a picnic lunch and so we decided to head for home, stop somewhere along the way to eat, and end up at Friendly’s for a consolation prize in the form of a chocolate sundae.
Kate and I know the Taconic Parkway well, having gone to school at Pace University in Pleasantville, where we met as college freshmen. It was a nice day and we decided to stop off at the campus to eat our lunch and take a quick stroll, showing the girls where mommy and daddy met, way before they were born. It’s been ten years since we graduated and there have been some changes but not many. The kids there looked much younger than I recalled, but the feeling of being one of them returned in a rush of nostalgia.
It was surreal, having missed my family so much all week, only to end up at the place where it all began. We didn’t stay long but I did get to snap a picture of Kate and the two girls sitting on a stone bench by the pond outside the library. I felt like it captured the clash of past and present that we felt walking hand in hand with our girls on the same sidewalks and paths we trod as carefree kids once ourselves.
That night, sitting on the couch and watching the Mets play the Astros at home, winning their first game at home in some time, I reached out my hand for Kate’s. They had lost so many games recently. 9 out of their last 10, 7 of which were consecutive. But now they were home, and things felt right. At least they did for me.
