Nat’s game

September 22, 2012

Washington, DC

New Yorker, September 2012

‘Aaron, look!!’  I waved the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine in front of him, opened to the cartoon above.  ‘This!  This is my childhood!’  Aaron, who had spent a good hour of our last Friday evening listening to my father’s heated explanation of why Nats catcher Jesus Flores, who earlier that evening had let a 9th inning pitch get away that resulted in the Nationals squandering their 2-1 lead, would certainly not be deserving any chocolate-chip cookie that night. Aaron had to agree that the cartoon perfectly captured my father’s approach to athletics.  ‘Maybe you should frame it for his birthday,’ he suggested.  I’ve refused to buy my father a birthday present after I asked him on Saturday to see the book I gave him for Christmas last year, and he brought around his laptop and re-ordered the book on Amazon for me because ‘it wasn’t worth the 20 minutes it would take to find it.’  My father has never been big into presents.  The only present I’ve gotten in the last years is a tennis racquet that I had to hound him for months about before he finally got it.  The most memorable Christmas present of all time is the 8×12 black-and-white headshot of himself looking scholarly.  He gave one to everyone in the family, wrapped in a box.  It was an especially weird Christmas.