Where is my father?
My father is in a box of ashes in Asheville. My father is at Shea. I am at Shea too. It’s 1979. There’s hardly anyone in the stands. The planes headed to and from Laguardia roar over the field every few minutes, causing my father to press his fingers in his ears. “Let’s go, Mets!” I shout every once in a while. My brother does too. My father grimaces down at the New York Times. My father buys us hot dogs and soda. He buys me a miniature plastic bullpen cart, the kind shaped like a baseball with little bats in front propping up a roof shaped like a Mets cap. I love it. I vow to hold onto it forever. But where is it? Where is Shea Stadium, for that matter? Where is Sergio Ferrer?
Sergio Ferrer spent the entire 1979 season with the New York Mets, the first time in his nine years in professional baseball that he didn’t spend some or all of the season in the minor leagues. And yet he only appeared in 32 games, and most of those appearances were so brief that they didn’t include a trip to the plate. He faced a pitcher only 9 times all year. I never noticed him, or if I do I don’t remember, so it’s like he was never there.
My father is in my bones and muscles and organs and blood and in the bones and muscles and organs and blood of my two sons. My father is in my gentleness with my sons and in my brooding desire to be left alone by my sons and in my periodic explosions of frustration with my sons and in my desire above all for happiness in my sons.
In 1979 Sergio Ferrer had 0 hits. All year long: nothing, and when it was over his major league career was over too. He got into some games that year as a defensive replacement, others as a pinch runner. In others he warmed up the pitcher if the catcher was busy switching into his gear. He sat. He perhaps occasionally held a bat, remembering what it felt like to connect. He waited.
My father is in the tiny scribbles of his handwriting on small white pieces of note paper in virtually every one of his books in his bookcase, his writing so tiny that it’s virtually unreadable, except you can always read enough to know that he was grappling deeply with what he was reading, all his life long wrestling like Jacob with the biggest ideas, the unknowable and unknown, wrestling for understanding, illumination, blessings. My father is in the tiny scribbles on pages in two folders now in my possession, one of the folders titled “My Jottings” and the other titled “My Musings.” Last year he ushered me into his room and showed me where he kept these folder. He knew it was getting near the end of the line, and he wanted me to know about his musings and jottings. The musings are handwritten and thus difficult to decipher, but the jottings were transferred at some point to a computer file that he then printed out on a dot matrix printer that makes all the lines faint and every third line seem italic, randomly emphasized. These jottings are his diary, starting in 1970 and running to 2011. It’s a slim folder. The entries themselves are usually short, and months and even sometimes years go by without an entry. The heaviest period is in 1979. The flurry of entries start with this one:
6-24-79
On June 24, upon getting up with her rocker mom fell and broke her hip.
Two days (and two entries) later, there’s this entry:
6-26-79
I am witnessing the unraveling of personhood, of the sweet and loving soul that is my mother. How she fights its dissolution, increasingly obsessed with her few possessions—her book with the names and addresses, birthdates, etc., her sweater, photographs. . . .I weep uncontrollably . . . .
I still haven’t wept uncontrollably. I haven’t really wept at all. I stare at baseball cards. In this one the distinct outline of the player’s worrying face stands in stark relief against a ghostly background. This creates a sense that Sergio Ferrer is not even really there at all but instead is a cardboard cutout. He could be lifted directly out of the purgatorial blur. Who would be left? There seem to perhaps be some figures in the background, but you can’t be sure. And anything happening here at this stadium that no longer exists in a year of losing and nothingnness might just as well not be happening at all.
Cardboard Gods 
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