How I Spent My Summer Vacation
It was remarkable.
Our family vacation was in Victorville, California, in the Mojave Desert. It was at least 107 during the day, but I have a tendency to exaggerate.
It could have been 307, I would have been there.
Our older son, a true baseball junkie, is living his dream in the high desert region of California, between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, as a play by play announcer for the High Desert Mavericks, a Seattle Mariners farm club.
He's been a baseball fan all of his life, literally having learned to read on the back of baseball cards. His father must have stood over his crib ordering him to adore the St. Louis Cardinals. I never actually caught him murmurming the starting line ups to the baby, but whatever his method, it worked. Our son Alex loves, loves, loves sports, and most particularly baseball.
He studied broadcast journalism in college, even attending my beloved alma mater, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. But in the final analysis, he rejected his original career path as a reporter, and opted for play by play. We dutifully listened to WNUR-FM, the university station, as he covered the battling Wildcats.
A working mother and consumate multi tasker, I listened to Alex as he did football, women's softball, men's baseball, whatever the sport.
I would use the time to clip coupons, pay the bills or clean out the email account, while on the internet during his college years. I had long given up on being able to mold a reporter and instead hoped to learn something, anything, about the rules of the game he was covering.
What else would a mother do?
Alex had another job before he landed in the desert, but we couldn't hear him up north in International Falls, Minnesota. (That story is for another time.) Yet, through diligence, some talent, and just plain luck, he headed for Victorville in March. Old enough to get settled by himself, Alex had been doing just fine. He adored his job. He loved the team. He had found a home among the other 20 somethings who made up the staff of the "Mavs."
"You're only as happy as your unhappiest child," someone said to me recently in the KSDK elevator. So I guess the bottom line of this story is about the utter jubilation I felt that day in the desert, when I watched Alex behind the microphone, calling the game for the Mavericks.
He had reference books around him, his laptop on the Major League stats, information about the visiting team taped to the glass wall of his booth. He had binoculars for plays he may not see, a scorecard he was keeping in pencil and, most important, he was carrying on a one way conversation on the radio all at the same time.
Any mom out there would not be surprised to know I did not sit in the broadcast booth without a tear or two. His dad felt it, but I think held it together that first night. (His teenaged brother was just so amazed he really didn't know what to do, but jumped around from booth to booth, acting like he owned the place.)
This was Alex, confident and calm on the broadcast, who had made his way all alone to a town where he knew no one. He had found friends and colleagues among the front office staff. He had learned everything he humanly could about the Mavs, and was using that knowledge in every inning.
He is certainly not making the most money among his college buddies and high school friends. He's not the most successful I would guess, although he is absolutely making his way. But what he is doing is following the path that makes him most happy. He is taking all the lessons he somehow, hopefully, learned from his parents, his grandparents, his aunt and uncle and gaggle of cousins, his teachers, his mentors and our family friends, to build on a career about which he is truly passionate.
There are some points of clarity I think, that come with parenthood. There are times when something becomes so obvious, whether it's good or bad, that it almost takes your breath away.
This was one of them, in the desert, on my summer vacation. It is the time when I thought, somehow we have had a small part in giving our son one of the greatest gifts.
For me, in raising my two sons, it is often about a bat and ball. This time it was about full hearts. Alex's and mine.
