Hints of Spring

T his winter has been rough. For nearly 20 days after New Year’s, the temperature never rose above 20 degrees Fahrenheit in downstate New York. My kids would not go out and play, and I couldn’t blame them; my dog barely wanted to go out to do her business. One snowfall had become a kind of frozen permafrost across our lawn. The street was full of rock salt that gets dug into her paws. For our scheduled winter break, we took a few days in Florida. Eighty degrees. Sunshine. Tried to soak it in over three full days. We returned on Saturday — just enough time to get groceries and pile in for the “bomb cyclone” that dropped 20 inches on us.

That 20-inch dump was the heavy stuff, the kind of wet, thick snow that drops when it is almost exactly 32 degrees outside. When it was over, it started to melt quickly, then the roads turned to black ice. Then three more inches fell. For the third day in a row, my kids’ return from winter break to school had been canceled. They are thrilled. Their parents are helplessly looking at Trulia listings in the South and Southwest. We’re not going anywhere, of course, unless we can convince most of our extended family to move, too, and interest rates drop back down to pre-Covid levels.

My only imaginative breaks come on Friday and Sunday evenings. Then my oldest son has non-mandatory winter practice for his 10-U soccer and baseball teams. We drive to a gym at a very expensive private school for the soccer. His ball-handling is improving each week in shocking ways, although I’ve read that he has no future as a pro already because he’s ten and lives in a climate that isn’t suitable to year-round play. I’m not going to tell him that, and I’m going to try to forget that some jackanapes wrote it. On Sunday evenings we hit the local town gymnasium, and he gets to practice hitting and catching. His team, newly assembled in its division for fall, made an improbably deep playoff run. But the two best players have aged out now.

After the Olympic thrills, we’ve tuned earlier than usual to the Mets’ spring training broadcasts from Port St. Lucie. The voices of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling are like aural sunshine coming through the screen. Just pure relief to hear them in the background again. The Mets are completely retooled this spring. Probably for the better, but my daughter misses Pete Alonso (so do I), and my son misses Brandon Nimmo. Advanced fielding stats alone are not going to endear my children to Bo Bichette or Freddy Peralta. My kids, still having some of their innocence, need to see magical playmaking. Their old man, corrupted by this world, doesn’t believe it unless it comes in a Microsoft Excel file. Increasingly, baseball feels like a spending match between the Dodgers and everyone else. So be it.

But time’s passage is cruel. We didn’t just lose the Polar Bear from the Mets. Beloved radio announcer Howie Rose is taking on a notably reduced schedule this year and hinting that big decisions have to be made about his future. With him goes a version of a New York accent that I rarely hear anymore. And that reminds me of having already lost Steve Somers’s postgame shows, which were my midnight fuel on long trips up I-95 to visit my fiancée as we prepared for a wedding. He grew up in San Francisco but sounded more authentically New York than Jerry Seinfeld. The one-year contract renewals, and his recent move to the South, mean that Keith Hernandez is likely on his way out, too, someday. We’re getting more of Daniel Murphy in his place. Fitting, I suppose. Murphy’s heroics were in my daughter’s infancy, the way Keith’s were in my toddlerhood.

As spring comes, I realize I’ve been counting up the losses. The loss of my father-in-law last Thanksgiving. The realization that it’s been 15 years since my own mother left us. It was another year I didn’t get to take that bucket-list SEC game trip with my Irish father. Another year I delayed a few personal projects. And a winter in which, having fallen twice very hard on our steep, icy driveway, I determined to gain better strength, even if my confidence will never quite be the same. Not even my beard going fully white made me feel old the way that second pratfall did.

It’s time to look forward, though. To new enterprises. A new book. A new season for my sons and daughter. I think the only treatment for middle age is to try to take everything you’ve learned, every setback you’ve endured, every venture that failed, and every fear that stalks you and transmute them into building something that lasts. I’ve got another big quarter-century run before I start taking things one year at a time.