Continuing in our Top Ten Tuesday series, today I'm going to tell you about another one of my favorite moments ever. In 1979, when I was 12 years old, I worked with my dad for the entire summer (my parents had been divorced for four years by this point). He painted new buildings before they were inhabited--places like nursing homes, apartment buildings, etc.
This particular summer was a blast for me. My Dad was painting a building that was about 60 miles away, so he hauled a trailer onto the job site and that became our home base during the week (we went home on the weekends). We ate there, slept there, played cards there, and bonded there. We had so much fun together.
We didn't have a television or really anything else to entertain us, except for a radio and the aforementioned playing cards. That's all we needed. One night, after we'd played cards, and talked and laughed, I found the radio station that was carrying the baseball All-Star game. I've always been an American League guy--even way back then, since my beloved Kansas City Royals are in the AL. So, I was doing my best from a small trailer in an empty parking lot in Lincoln, Nebraska to root the American League on to victory.
I laid down in my creaky bed that night with the radio pressed against my ear as the game went into the eighth inning. The American League was up 6-5 when Lee Mazzilli hit a solo home run to tie the game. Unfortunately, the National League went on to win the game, but I'll never forget the feeling of closeness I had with my dad as I switched the radio off. I think he was in the other "room" in the trailer doing paperwork at that point, but I knew he was there.
And even though my family dynamics were far from perfect, he'd found a way to invite me into his world, and in a way, I invited him into mine (I don't think he ever really liked baseball). I couldn't have described it that way back then. I just knew that I felt a sense of security and happiness as I drifted off to sleep that night.
