I sat at the Dodger game with my girlfriend and our collective brood and I listened intently to her as she told me about how much she cherished going to Yankee Stadium as a young girl with her dad. She told me how they drove into the city and sat at those games together, just the two of them. Those were important and seemingly life-changing moments for her, spending that time with her dad. But now she was lamenting that the experiences she had going to those Yankee games with her dad were not the same ones her kids seemed to be having now.
It reminded me of a similar feeling when I first started bringing my kids to games. It got me thinking about those experiences, the ones I cherished from my childhood, those precious moments that I got to spend with my dad. I can still remember walking from underneath the concrete overhangs and seeing the field at Dodger stadium. The smell of popcorn and beer and freshly shorn grass. The heat from the sun and my dad sitting there with me talking about which players he liked and didn’t like. And me hanging on every one of those words. I wanted that moment to never end. I wanted to watch Ozzie Smith trot out to Shortshop and Ron Cey to 3rd base, for eternity, with my dad and his arm around me as if there was nobody else in the world but us and that Cardinals and Dodgers infield, playing a game on the greenest grass I had ever seen.
And fast forward to now, our kids sit in their seats looking around, wondering when they’ve eaten enough of their hot dogs to get ice cream. And then the ice cream being eaten and we the adults laughing, placing bets on when they’ll ask to go home.
When I was a boy I starved for my father’s attention. I craved the moments where he and I could go somewhere and do something that didn't inevitably involve us meeting up with his friends where his attention would be shifted. On those rare occasions we spent time just the two of us together, a baseball game was often the setting. It occurred to me that maybe the reason my kids don’t have that same fascination with sitting with me at a game and marveling at the lights, the atmosphere, the uniqueness of the moment is because I strive to be a different kind of parent. I try harder to listen to my children’s needs and to try to address them. I want to give them attention in a way that I hope allows them to open up even more about what they want and need. My parents came from a generation where the fact that they worked and kept me clothed and fed was good enough. They didn’t ask me if I needed more or wanted something different, and I certainly never deemed to ask because asking for more than the basics felt selfish.
I don’t know if that’s the reason why our experiences seem so different, but it’s the one that felt right to me over a plate of scrambled eggs this morning.
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