The morning I learned for sure my wife was pregnant, I was gazing out the window, putting off getting my day underway. I noticed a man on the sidewalk across the street from my apartment with his hands on his knees, looking down at the concrete between his feet. This was months ago. The kid’s still not here, so I don’t have any stats on what kind of father I’ll be. Probably similar to the kind of everything I’ve been. A little lazy, a little given to staring out windows, procrastinating. Prone to looking for answers in baseball cards.
In 1973, the first stop in Joe Simpson’s professional career was in Albuquerque. After playing in two other minor league cities, he returned to Albuquerque in 1974. In 1975 he played 9 games with the Dodgers and 133 games with Albuquerque. In 1976 he managed to get into 23 games with the Dodgers while also logging 108 games with Albuquerque.
The morning I learned for sure I was going to be a father, a man standing with his hands on his knees across the street started puking. He puked for a few seconds, scattering it on the sidewalk, then he straightened and walked a few steps to a car and leaned on it. I thought he was leaning on whatever object presented itself as handy to him in his efforts to remain relatively vertical at that moment, but after leaning on the car for a moment he took a deep breath, opened the car door, got in, and drove away.
In 1977, when I was nine, I watched a lot of Bugs Bunny. It’s pretty safe to say that Bugs Bunny cartoons on Saturday morning comprised the pinnacle of my week. Oh Saturday morning, nothing to do and all day to do it and cereal with heaping teaspoons of sugar and Bugs Bunny taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque. In 1977, Joe Simpson spent a few days with the Dodgers and the rest in Albuquerque. In 1978, ditto. Joe Simpson, like Bugs Bunny, seemed doomed to forever be undone in his attempts to navigate effectively out of Albuquerque. Finally, the Mariners swooped in to the rescue, purchasing Simpson from the Dodgers, and in 1979 he spent his first Albuquerque-free season in professional baseball. He did pretty well, too, hitting .283 with 17 stolen bases. But judging from the picture on the front of his 1980 card, he still was a little insecure about his place in the majors. He looks a little defensive, as if he’s noticed someone off to his right approaching, and as if such approaches had by this point in his career come to mean one thing only: back to Albuquerque.
An hour or two after I watched a man puke on the street and then drive off for his day, my wife came home from the doctor with medical confirmation that she was pregnant. Last night, months later, while we were watching TV, FedEx showed up with a big cardboard box, a rocking chair sent by my parents, for my wife to sit in while she’s nursing the kid. My wife put it together while I sort of stood around uselessly, then I took a picture of her in the chair holding one of our cats like it was a baby, a gag we’ve trotted out a lot lately and that never fails to annoy the cat. The rocking chair went in the baby’s room, which is filling up with colorful things. I’m excited but nervous, as if this bright new thing might vanish before it ever really arrives, as if someone is going to walk up and say Albuquerque and back I’ll go to the way things have always been, delaying, staring out windows at inexplicable departures.
Cardboard Gods 
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