The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting
W Is for Woods
In 1979, the year this card came out, the Iran Hostage Crisis began. I came to this thought recently, when realizing that the era of parenting in my home had passed Day 100, and realizing that I had thought of it that way, as if it were being reported on the nightly news, e.g., “Day 100: Still No Sleep.”
The Iran Hostage Crisis went on through the end of 1979 and through 1980 and into 1981. It was one of my first experiences in following a news story for an extended period of time, though earlier in 1979 I had also been aware that Skylab was plummeting to the earth in chunks and that the Three Mile Island nuclear plant was oozing deadly radiation.
The best moment of Alvis Woods’ professional career had already come and gone in a flash by 1979. You can sense this in his 1979 card. He is being surrendered back into the gray from which he came.
He’d been a minor leaguer for some years when he was selected with other odds and ends in the November 1976 expansion draft that breathed mediocre life into the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays. He was the eighth player taken by the Blue Jays, who had already nabbed another outfielder named Woods (Gary) with their fourth pick. Alvis Woods didn’t get a start in the team’s first game, but he entered as a pinch-hitter in the sixth inning and homered. This first big league at-bat for Alvis Woods, in the first game of a brand new team, must have passed by like lightning. I wonder what is left of the moment. Woods played for a few more seasons for Toronto, toiled back in the minors for a few more, then resurfaced for a brief stint with the Twins in 1986. He was a decent hitter, but he didn’t seem to have had any moments that would have topped that first one. What does he remember of it?
I don’t know what I’ll remember of these first months as a father. A few nights ago at dinner we set the baby down in a high chair. It was a first. To this point we have had to eat in shifts designed so that the parent who isn’t shoveling down food can hold the baby and attempt to keep him from becoming loudly and heart-breakingly unhappy, but last night we realized he was okay with sitting in his little chair even though he’s too young to really sit up on his own but okay with the slanted back of the chair propping him, so we sat at the table like humans and ate and he looked at a book made of soft cloth about bears. It was a peaceful moment. It made me want to aim my gratitude somewhere. I’ll aim it now, while thinking again of the moment, at Alvis Woods. These are the only gods I’ll ever worship, I guess. It’s been this way since I was a kid. So thank you, Alvis Woods.
A couple weeks earlier, I took the boy on a walk in his stroller to a park by the lake. Sometimes he falls into one of his exceedingly rare naps in the stroller, but this time he cried the whole way there, louder and louder. I walked faster and faster until I was trotting, then jogging, then running maniacally, because sometimes the extra jiggling calms him down, but on this day it wasn’t working. By the time we got to the park he was wailing and I wanted to tie a cinder block to my ankle and dive off the pier that extends out into where the lake gets deep. Instead, I took the baby out of the stroller and walked him around on some grass below some trees. He started to calm down and look around at the branches of the trees and some little birds hopping around from branch to branch. I sat down on a bench and got a bottle and fed it to him. It was a nice day, blue sky, mild. I was feeding my son on a bench below some trees.
I grew up surrounded by woods, but I never thought about them. Hallucinogens ingested in my late teens finally made me aware of the woods in a worshipful way. You know, like, “Wow, dude, check out those trees.” Now I stand by the window in my apartment in a city and hold my son and point at the trees on our street and say, “tree.” He stares out at them and at everything. His eyes are pure. Sometimes I feel like a hostage or like a flaming chunk of Skylab is about to fall on my head. Sometimes I want to tie a cinder block to my leg and leap into Lake Michigan. Sometimes I hold my baby and feel like it is the best moment of my life, my first at-bat, my first moment in the majors, my first game with a brand new team, my hands feeling some kind of perfect connection that will haunt me the rest of my lucky fucking days.
Cardboard Gods 
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