Without question, the greatest graduation gift I received
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- June 2, 2019
- 1068
I’d like you to think back to your high school graduation day: What was the weather like? Did it happen indoors or out? Who did you sit with? Who did you say goodbye to? What present did you get?
Was it a car, brand new and shiny, a Barracuda with a bow on it?
Or was it something more modest, a passport and a backpack so that you might travel around Europe for a while?
Or something more sinister, perhaps a draft notice from Uncle Sam?
Or was it something more eminently practical, as it was in my case?
Mom and Dad probably pooled their knowledge, considered my career prospects and decided if I couldn’t do anything else, at least I could try to write for a living.
Hence a typewriter, a manual Olivetti Underwood with lots of words and wisdom in it.
“He’s got talent,” my father might have said, “and he’ll need to write a lot of papers at Notre Dame.”
“But he can barely type a sentence without making a mistake, and his fingers are all wrong on the keyboard,” Mom might have said. “He had that girlfriend of his do most of his assignments for him.”
“I don’t think she’s his ‘girlfriend,’” Dad would have said, “just someone who helped him. And he passed the class, didn’t he?”
“I suppose we’re lucky that he won’t have to take summer school,” my mother would have replied. “All he talks about is that team.”
And that brings us to what was, without question, the greatest graduation gift I received, way back there in early June 1973.
Who knows when and where and how an idea like that starts? It’s in the air, like a rainbow that only a few can see, and all of a sudden it’s as real as a bag of bats and a summer without limits.
When I was 18, I did my best to be good at everything I tried, but trying wasn’t nearly enough to make the varsity baseball team, so I contented myself with playing records during lunch over the PA system and writing features and columns for the school newspaper.
But there was something missing.
Ever since I was a kid, I’d played baseball every year, and I loved the game, not only the hits I had and the plays I made, but seeing my team’s name in the standings that appeared in print every week.
That was so cool, especially when we were doing well.
So when it came to pass that a friend of mine approached me with the notion that a bunch of us seniors ought to form a team to compete in the local slowpitch softball league, I was intrigued.
And a little concerned.
“Sounds great,” I said, “but I’ve never played the game.”
“No one has,” he said, a big smile spreading across his face. “That’s why it’s gonna be so much fun to beat these old guys!”
He set about recruiting a motley collection of our classmates who had only one thing in common.
They were all very smart.
Turns out that was the crucial ingredient to our success.
So as high school drew to a close and most of the others in our class were preparing fond farewells, the dozen or so of us who had come together were looking forward to something special.
But first, we had to learn the rules of the game.
No one knew the first thing about slowpitch softball.
Some of us had grown up playing Little League and then Pony League baseball, but a few had never been down that road.
Which was fine.
We were all starting from Square One.
Turned out rather than digging in against a pitcher who threw so hard you couldn’t see the ball, in slowpitch the art was in the arc.
The ball was lobbed high into the air, like a weightless horseshoe, and came down on an angle transecting your shoulder and knees.
And then there was the matter of the 10th fielder, or “rover” as it was called. In slowpitch he could position himself anywhere on the diamond, thus cutting off whichever defensive gap he fancied.
It was a strange new world, one that took some time getting used to.
But as I’ve mentioned, we were an intelligent bunch, and by our second summer together, we’d mastered most of the nuances so that by the time Nixon resigned, we were playing for a title.
We even had our own theme song — Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” — and amazingly enough a faithful following of very pretty girls in halter tops and cutoff jeans cheering us on.
Something as special as that can’t last forever, so by the close of the bicentennial summer, we understood we were nearing the end, though I don’t recall any sad goodbyes.
Instead, what’s happened in the many years that have passed since our last game and final championship is that we have grown closer.
Odd how that most friendships formed in high school have a tendency to ebb at the water’s edge and that after graduation it’s memories with no new chapters, just a lot of my-old-school stuff.
We did something different because, well, we were different.
I think it might have started with the fact that our team sponsor was a downtown bar and that when it came time for the awards assembly, we all wore our jerseys, which read “3rd Base Lounge.”
This may not seem very subversive in June 2019, but believe me: Back in 1973 there were teachers and administrators who were none too pleased with our wardrobe decision and that having the name of a local tavern emblazoned on our chests was punishable.
But we were beyond their control by then.
We had our best years ahead of us.
What we did was turn high school into a years-long prelude, to create covalent bonds that last to this day, to play a new game together, to win way more often than we lost and to understand that when our names were called to accept our certificates, invited down to the gym floor, we had to smile because all of us knew, somehow, that we’d already received our best graduation present.
It’s a gift that keeps on giving.