The Home of Two Cliffs

MY OLDER daughter and I were biking around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to her last soccer game of the season, she in her pale green uniform. The spring of 2003, this was. I had turned forty a couple of months before. My daughter was nine. As I recall it, it was during this ride that she asked if I played sports as a kid, if my father was involved, what all of that was like.

“My father thought it was important for me to know how to play baseball,” I said as we pedaled in the pleasant air around the park’s paved inner loop. “People in his generation thought there were some things boys should just know how to do. So he tried to teach me. We spent a lot of time playing catch in our backyard. I wasn’t very good at it at first. And he wasn’t well—he was a good dozen years older than I am now, and he was in pain a fair amount of the time. He died within a couple of years of that. But he thought it was important for him to do this while he still could, because he knew he didn’t have a lot of time. When I messed up, he got impatient, and sometimes a little nasty. He was in pain, like I said. I understand it all now, but at the time I hated it, and I resented it. So,