Father’s Day

I think I’ve been to Dodger Stadium once in the past decade and a half. Brooks and Lea Ann Roddan had been given some extra tickets to a game, and we sat together in some seats that were level enough with the field that the pitcher on the mound would block out the shortstop. We enjoyed the game, but Linda is even less fond of crowds than I am.

I used to go to games in the 1970s and 1980s, when tickets were much more reasonable. For a while, about forty years ago, a fairly large contingent of poets and artistic friends would attend games together. We called ourselves “Artists Interested in Baseball” (AiB). The photographer Gerald Marshall David was the main organizer.

Once, in the late 1980s, I believe, my brother Jim drove my father up from San Diego, and we met at Dodger Stadium, where we watched a game together. I think it was a Saturday afternoon. My dad was tall, strong, and handsome, and worked hard all his life. I wish he had lived long enough so that he could have seen me have some professional success as an academic. Very few offspring of career enlisted military personnel ever become full professors at a four-year college. In this photograph, one of his hands is extended as if to say “I present you my two oldest sons.”

My father died in September, 1994. His widow lived another quarter=century, and my brother Jim and I made sure that she had the best possible care the last three years of her life. The urns with their ashes are now next to each other at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego. Jim and I will not be buried there with them, but perhaps that is a way that fate marks those who give service to their country, for both parents were veterans. It is an experience separate from what most citizens can possibly imagine. I know that when I sit at the Academic Senate at CSULB, there are few people around me who have ever set foot on the grounds of the Veterans’ Hospital that is next door to the campus.

I will soon be two years older than he was when he died. I hope that I can work as a professor for at least as long as he was in the United States Navy, enduring conditions that few people serving in Congress can possibly comprehend.

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