The Way Home: Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime - Softcover

Dunow, Henry

 
9780767907347: The Way Home: Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767907345 ISBN 13: 9780767907347
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

When Henry Dunow signs up to coach his son Max’s Little League team on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he finds himself looking back on his own childhood and his father, Moishe, a Yiddish writer and refugee from Hitler’s Europe, who had considered recreation like playing catch with his son narishkeit, “foolishness.” Determined to be a different kind of parent to his first grader, Dunow bumbles through a self-test of fatherhood on the scruffy fields of New York’s Riverside Park, playing coach, cheerleader, father, and friend to a ragtag bunch of seven-year-olds, many of whom are discovering baseball for the first time. The Way Home is the affecting and ironic story of Dunow’s journey of discovery as he watches his relationship with Max evolve over the course of a Little League season, and comes to understand what being a father to his son can teach him about the man who was his own father.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Henry Dunow is a literary agent who lives in New York with his wife, Wendy, and their twins, Max and Madeleine.

Aus dem Klappentext

unow signs up to coach his son Max s Little League team on Manhattan s Upper West Side, he finds himself looking back on his own childhood and his father, Moishe, a Yiddish writer and refugee from Hitler s Europe, who had considered recreation like playing catch with his son narishkeit, foolishness. Determined to be a different kind of parent to his first grader, Dunow bumbles through a self-test of fatherhood on the scruffy fields of New York s Riverside Park, playing coach, cheerleader, father, and friend to a ragtag bunch of seven-year-olds, many of whom are discovering baseball for the first time. The Way Home is the affecting and ironic story of Dunow s journey of discovery as he watches his relationship with Max evolve over the course of a Little League season, and comes to understand what being a father to his son can teach him about the man who was his own father.

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One

Am I Out of My Mind?

The call came on a cold, snowy night in January.

"Henry Dunow?"

"Yes."

"This is the commissioner of the West Side Little League."

"Yes . . . ?"

"I've got you down to coach a team in the seven-year-old division?"

"That's right . . ."

"Well, I just thought we ought to talk a bit. Walk you through a few things, let you know what's involved, find out if you're really fully committed . . ."

An hour or so later, I'd gotten an earful of exactly what was involved and what full commitment was going to mean. Midweek practices, lugging equipment bags, field maintenance, overinvolved parents and underinvolved parents, needy kids, scraped knees and broken bones, meltdowns and crying fits (among the kids), meltdowns and crying fits (among the adults), seven-year-olds who wouldn't know their way to first base and seven-year-olds who would be smacking line drives into the outfield like Ken Griffey, Jr. Keeping everybody happy was a Big Job. The commissioner wanted me to know exactly what I was getting myself into. Was I up for it?

That night I have a terrible anxiety dream. I'm on a ball field without any grass and littered with debris, surrounded by a bunch of seven-year-old boys, including my own son, Max. Except these boys are all big for their age--tall and beefy! Some of them are bigger than I am. Only Max is his real size, and he's a peanut next to these behemoths. "Okay, guys, gather round," I say. "My name is Henry and I'm going to be your coach this season. We're going to have a lot of fun!" The boys look at me dubiously, with a kind of sneering disdain, restlessly kicking at the ground. Even Max looks a little unsure. Then the biggest one, who's suddenly towering over me, says, "You're the coach? You don't look like my dad! You're old!" The other boys mumble suspiciously among themselves. Then the dream shifts and I'm in the field, a ball coming at me. A grounder. It's that same grounder that was always coming at me when I played ball as a kid, the one that always got between my legs or bounced up and hit me in the chin, letting the runners score. It's the grounder. An eternity passes as the ball gets closer, moving toward me like a guided missile. Finally, it's right in front of me. It rolls between my legs. The oversized monster children jeer and mutter to themselves. I look for Max to see how he's taking it. But I can't find him. He was here a minute ago. Have the oversized children done something to him? Those thugs. Where is he? I cry out for him, terrified.

Whoa! I woke up completely drained and slightly depressed. Was I up for it? I was practically having a panic attack. And what about Max? He's a gentle boy, about to turn seven, small for his age. He's just beginning to get his toes wet as an athlete. I'd heard all the stories about cutthroat competition, Little League rage, obsessive parents, psychopath coaches. I knew little kids could be cruel bullies. Was this too soon to be exposing his tender psyche and limbs to Little League?

Bottom line? This was the last thing I needed. I lead the classic overextended New Yorker's life. A demanding job as a literary agent with long hours at the office and mountains of manuscripts at home. Two kids--seven-year-old boy and girl twins, Max and Maddy. After the hellish madhouse that begins with getting them off to school every day (I swear there are fifty-six sets of mittens, scarves, and hats in our apartment, but try finding a matched pair at 8:32 on a weekday), cranking through a workday at the beck and call of my clients ("pecked alive by little birds" could be my epitaph), then back to the trenches to do my part with homework, piano practice, dinner, baths, pick up the room, pj's and good-night books, and a getting-into-bed routine so elaborate and ritualized it makes the High Church look casual by comparison. Even after my wife, Wendy, and I have picked up the wreckage left behind by a day of family life, there's still more. Phone calls and e-mails to return, schedules to coordinate, bills to pay, it never ends. Finally we'll collapse into bed, I'll make a halfhearted attempt to get some reading done for work, and then--boom!--down for the count. Did I really want to say yes to another claim on my time, let alone feel responsible for a fresh horde of little boys not even related to me?

And since when was I such a big jock? I'm a card-carrying, big-city intellectual type--the last getup I picture myself in is a sweatshirt, clipboard, and silver whistle. If I'd wanted that kind of scene, I'd have packed up the family and moved to the burbs long ago--where little boys are named Andy, Chuck, and Bill, not Max, Lucas, Cormac, and Marley. I'm a balding, forty-eight-year-old, hypochondriac short guy--and though I like to think I exude a certain Left Bank panache, I'm probably more Woody Allen than Belmondo, and no one would ever mistake me for the Volvo-driving Dad Next Door. I'm streets of New York, you dig? Little League coach? Moi? Fuhgeddaboutit!

Sure, I play some sports. I'm pretty good at tennis and I don't embarrass myself on the ski slopes. Of course these are civilized grown-up sports, both of which I pretty much discovered and began playing as an adult. I'm certainly no gym rat: my idea of a good workout is walking to work. I am a pretty serious baseball fan--Yankee devotee since a New York childhood in the 1950s worshipping at the altar of Mantle, Ford, Berra and the rest of that immortal crew. I admit it--I could tell you what the Mick batted in his Triple Crown year, the starting lineup of the '78 team that took the Dodgers out of the Series in six, or what Derek Jeter's batting average was the day before yesterday. Fine, I'm a baseball nut. But Little League Coach?

What's more, this is New York City, not Toms River, New Jersey--what's a Little League doing in the mean streets of Gotham anyway? Stickball I could understand, but well-scrubbed kids in uniforms?

So where was this crazy impulse coming from?

Well, you don't have to search too far to find the answer. Meet my son, Max.

A year ago he wouldn't have known Derek Jeter if he bumped into him in the elevator. But now? Let's put it this way: every morning, the first sounds we wake up to are (1) Max padding off to the bathroom, followed by (2) Max unlatching the front door to get the sports page. By the time I get out to the living room, he's read every word of it start to finish, including box scores. My-son-the-sports-encyclopedia can tell you what the Yankees and Mets did last night, why Van Gundy played Ewing for only 20 minutes, what chance the Rangers have of making the playoffs, why Agassi finally has a shot against Sampras, who the football Giants' top draft pick is likely to be (and why); hell, he can tell you what the MetroStars (soccer anyone?) are up to. If he starts following Nascar, I'm going to begin to worry about him.

And that's just the news from yesterday. He can also tell you which six Yankees on the 1961 team had twenty or more home runs, or that when Reggie Jackson came to the plate in a 1973 game with a mustache on his lip, it was the first time facial hair had been seen on a ballplayer since the 1920s. A true sports nut knows his history.

It's a little scary. He's a walking 24-hour all-talk sports radio station, an IBM mainframe saturated with sports statistics and trivia, stores of arcane knowledge growing like some diabolical virus in a cheesy sci-fi movie. Wendy worries that there will be no room in that little brain for anything else, and I try to assure her that sports knowledge is like a useless vestigial organ--it can expand endlessly and accommodate vast stores of data without cramping the rest of the brain. There's no real...

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767907345
ISBN 13 
9780767907347
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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