My brother’s son plays T-ball, and one of the coaches in his local Little League group (group? team? franchise?) is the man I once wanted to marry.
Of course, I was really young then and hadn’t seen much of the world. But I loved that guy in my own fifteen year old way. One time we had a picnic with sparkling grape juice and plastic champagne glasses I bought at Belmont’s (our hometown version of WalMart before WalMart put them out of business.) Another time he was in the middle of asking me to go steady when he steered his truck into an Amish buggy. No one was hurt except our pride. And I had to wait an extra week to get his class ring.
The biggest memory I have of him is that he wanted to play Major League baseball. Some coach once told his mother that he had promise, so their life was spent driving all over Northeastern Indiana to groom the guy into a pro. For the year and a half I dated him I got sucked into the dream, too. I went to countless games, watched countless baseball movies and even read the encyclopedia entry on “Baseball” to make sure I knew what was going on. Twenty years later the only things I’ve retained are the fact that the pitcher’s mound is 60 feet, six inches from home plate and the certain knowledge that I hate that sport with a passion.
Oddly, the universe decided to churn out several top 40 hits about baseball while we were dating, and he loved each and every one of them. [If I never hear “Center Field” by John Fogerty again, I’ll be a happy girl.] Even more oddly, his favourite was Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”. He liked the fact that the old guys were sitting around talking about baseball. I think he missed the part that the characters in the song were lamenting the death of their dreams.
When my brother told me that he ran into Jim at Little League practice, that was the first thought that crossed my mind. I felt so sad for him and at the same time wondered how he could do it. How can he live the ghost of a dream, coaching seven-year-olds in Fort Wayne? Then I thought about it some more and realised that no stirring novels of mine have topped any best-seller lists and I just write for a blog. I think most people have their early dreams die. But I think the stalks of those dead dreams can, if you’re lucky, fertilise the new shoots of young dreams that grow into the fruits of your true adulthood.
Yep.
those last two lines are beautiful.
Somehow I knew from the title of the post and the first line it was going to be about “Glory Days”.
It makes me wonder who really had the dream – him or his mom. I take it he never made it even into the minor leagues?
Or you never know, he may have spent his time there, realized the limits of his talent, and had a successful career. Maybe there’s no real regret for a life wasted – lots of players never make it to the “bigs” but find fulfillment where they are. Which can still dovetail into being the Little League coach he is today…
Have you talked to him? Maybe you’ll be surprised.
No, I know exactly what you mean. My high school sweetheart that I almost married in college is another example. He was all set to do all these great things when we were young – so was I, but my life didn’t have nearly the direction set out in front that he did, nor could I have gotten into an Ivy League school – he could have, if he’d wanted. (I could have done all right and gotten into a decent private school, but not Ivy League.)
He ended up going to public school for college anyway anyway – one of the better ones in the South, and it was a family thing – and he had his heart set on being an engineer. He also wanted to race cars. He probably could have done either, but he very well could have been the kind of guy that winds up being a top engineer paid a few hundred thousand a year, well, lots of places. He was set.
Then we split up after he cheated on me, and about a year later he married the girl he was seeing behind my back, and soon after that they had a kid. He wound up dropping out of college and for a long time was working as a mechanic at some car dealership. At some point many years later, he got his paramedic certification and ended up being in charge of the ambulance service where he is, think he’s still doing that.
I’m sure this has all been fine, well, & good for him… but it wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Of course, my life hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to either, but again, I never really had any clear-cut direction I was going in, and certainly never all as set out and planned out as he had his.
Funny thing is I have run across his son’s MySpace, his son’s in college now and apparently has the car & racing bug too. He’s also going to school to be an engineer. On his blog one day he was talking about some engineering project he needed to work on and said something about getting his dad to help, but then made a comment like “But what does my dad know, he’s a paramedic.”
That just blew my mind, that the kid obviously didn’t know his dad started out in engineering school, much less all the other big dreams and plans for his life, apparently. I can’t imagine why, and it made me a little sad. Weird how things turn out.
profound thoughts
Hey, from the UK here. Maybe, Bruce was right after all. What is Glory Days really about?
There is an awful lot of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics that resonate with us all, paticularly a we get older (Laughs out loud!)