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I called my mom tonight to watch the last few pitches of the NLCS game seven, and to watch the Cardinals win the pennant. She grew up in St. Louis, and had actually flown out to catch a game of the first Cards-Dodgers post-season series; as the last pitch was thrown, she murmured in joyous disbelief, “I saw this team…I saw them play…”

When I was growing up, there was one baseball team in the world, and their uniforms were red and white, with a goofy bird named Fred perched on a bat. We went to St. Louis at least once a year to visit my grandparents and other relatives, and the highlight for me was the yearly trip to the nearest Venture (a local store), where my parents or grandparents would buy me a new, shiny red Cardinals warmup jacket. I’m not kidding when I say that I used up a jacket a year – I wore it every day to school, ate in it, slept in it, lived in it. To this day, the phrase “Cardinals jacket” seems like a single, continuous word rather than a noun modified by an adjective.

I wore a cardinals hat, ate Cardinals birthday cakes, and the first baseball card I remember explicitly saving up to buy was a Vince Coleman rookie card (which I’ve still got in a binder in my parent’s attic). In 1985, when I was in third grade, I made a bet with Kara Messenger that my birds would beat the Royals – I lost that bet, but to this day it’s my most vivid memory of that year.

Over time, though, I drifted from the Cardinals. I went to college in Baltimore and started going to Orioles games. My grandmother passed away, then my grandfather, and we stopped going to St. Louis regularly; my ties to my mom’s side of the family loosened somewhat without my grandparents to hold us all together. I’ve found a life of my own, first in Baltimore, then Ithaca, then NY, and now back in DC, and the little kid who would never take off his Cardinals jacket seems very far away, hardly recognizable at all.

And then, something happens like tonight, when I watch two pop flies and a ground ball to second and all of a sudden I see that bird perched on the bat on a player’s chest and my eyes well up as I remember the power that simple drawing held for me, and I can feel the smooth satin over my arms, taste the plate of toasted ravioli in front of me and see my grandfather sitting in his chair, just inches from the TV screen because he had nothing left but the slightest peripheral vision, chewing on a cigar and listening to Joe Buck call the pitches. I miss them, the Cardinals jackets and the toasted ravioli and most of all my grandparents, and I’m astonished by how vividly I can feel them all, a cascade of memories triggered by a team I barely follow anymore, made up of players whose names I no longer know, standing in the shadow of a storied past.

Comments One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.

Steve,

October 25, 2004 at 11:49 am

I also miss your grandparents!

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