Caroline's First Game

(2 of 6)

So what? Williams did nothing the day I saw him play, and whether the Spinners were merely bad or really dreadful was of equal inconsequence. The Spinners seemed, to me, the answer to the question about Caroline's first game: A Red Sox team from the place whence Caroline's Mommy and Daddy hailed. Luci's family is first-generation Chelmsford, which is a Lowell suburb (and which, incidentally, subsumed Lowell for two centuries until the city split off to become America's first planned industrial town in 1821). My parents are also first-generation Chelmsford, having moved there after the war, but are multi-generation Lowell. Luci and I now live in Westchester County, N.Y., but in a conceit we still feel ourselves to be New Englanders. We like lobster and clam chowder and Sam Adams beer and we root desperately for the Sox and just as desperately against the Yanks. We feel that we are not of the Hudson Valley but of the Merrimack Valley; we feel we are, still, of Lowell. I wanted Caroline to be somehow of Lowell, too. I wanted her to be part of all that her mother and I were part of. And since there was now, apparently, a gleaming new ballpark, designed by the firm that designed Camden Yards, sitting by a bend in the river and packing them in whenever the Spinners were home, I had an opportunity. Caroline's first ballgame would be in Lowell, when next we had a reason to make a trip home.

Which we did a week ago, for a visit with my mom, who's rehabbing from hip-replacement surgery. (That Mom, at 77, is recovering from modern-medical-miracle surgery at old St. Joseph's hospital, now called HealthSouth or something like that, two blocks from her girlhood home on Mt. Vernon Street, and five blocks from the Jeanne D'Arc Credit Union, where she worked her way up to president during a fifty-year career, seems to me cosmically significant. Make of it what you will, or nothing at all.) Since we were going up to Lowell to visit Mom, I went online to suss out the Spinners situation. Sure enough, they were home to greet the Staten Island Yankees (Sox-Yanks, what could be better?). I called my friend Chaz Scoggins, sportswriter for the Lowell Sun and broadcaster of the Spinners games—not to mention older brother of Kim, a quarterback for whom I centered at Chelmsford High, 1968-70—and Chaz pulled some strings. I scored four behind the plate for me, Luci, Caroline and Caroline's Uncle Kevin.

And now, we'll let the game begin.

We are riding in the minivan down Pawtucket Street past Mt. Vernon, past old St. Joe's (Hi, Mom), past Merrimack Street and down toward the canals, which were once Lowell's vital arteries and are now where Lowell's latest revitalization is centered and where the ballpark sits. It is a beautiful evening, the second of summer, humid but sunny. Caroline is napping in her car seat; Luci's back there with her; Kevin's in the jump seat reminiscing about trips to Fenway and the sandlot games of our youth.

We drive slowly past the Mill City microbrewery where the patio tables are filled, and pull into a large parking lot across from the old Wannalancet mills. Spaces are scarce but we find one, and Caroline wakes up as if on cue. She blinks her eyes and focuses them, for the first time, on Lowell.

Lowell calls itself a city but Kerouac got it right about Lowell in his The Town and the City: It's still a town. Everyone knows everyone, and everything feels small, even here in the shadows of the great old brick mills. This is my personal reflection, anyway, as we walk toward the park. Caroline, now waking up fully, breaks my reverie.

"Is Tiger in this?" she asks.

"No, Sweetie. Tiger's sport is golf."

Luci, holding Caroline's other hand as we are in a parking lot—we're careful with her, our oldest, our first, while trying hard not be overprotective—smiles without laughing, not wanting to embarrass Caroline.

"Pedro?" Caroline asks.

Single A short-season. "No, Sweetie. Pedro's in Boston tonight, and can't come. But yes—Pedro plays baseball. And Pedro's older brother Ramon once played baseball with this team. A rehab start."

"I watch baseball with Daddy," says Caroline. This is a mantra in our household: "C'mon and watch baseball with Daddy."

"Yes, Sweetie," I acknowledge. "You watch baseball with Daddy. On TV. Tonight you get to see it live."

"Like Blues Clues Live?"

"Just like that."