Opening Day

I was born in The Bronx and spent the first 21 years of my life there. It was a magical place at that time. Local grocery stores where they knew you by name and they always knew what you were in to pick up somehow. The local laundry where they knew exactly how your father wanted his shirts done and had the brown paper wrapped package waiting for you when they saw you headed in to pick it up.

From the time I was 6 until after college, we lived in Apartment 2B at 3149 Perry Avenue, Bronx 67, New York. Our apartment building was directly across from the last stop on the Subway D Line, and for 10 cents at the beginning, you could safely take that train pretty much to anywhere in the 5 boroughs through a series of connections.
Probably my most frequent trip was to take the train directly to the 161st Street and River Avenue stop. Why there? Well, that was where Yankee Stadium was located, and my earliest memories are listening to and watching the Yankees on the radio and TV.

One afternoon, I was playing ball in a park across the street from the building and my dad waved me over. He had come home with two tickets to a game at the stadium that night and we were going to see the Yanks play the Chicago White Sox. I could not contain myself and rushed up to my room, grabbed my glove in the hope of catching a foul ball, and implored my dad to hurry up so we could go. That was the first of what would be many trips on the D train to the stadium. I was allowed one souvenir (dad was a bus driver and even the tickets back then were a stretch for him), and I chose a Yogi Berra pin, which I still have some 65 or 66 years later.

The Yankees lost that day (I never forgave Luis Aparicio the then White Sox shortstop) but it began what is still a love affair with Baseball and the team.

The winters seemed to be colder and longer then, yet sometime in mid February, as the teams reported to spring training in Florida, lots of us would gather for our own chillier “spring training” at the small park across the street with one objective, to be ready for Opening Day.

It was always a day game then and during our time at St. Brendan School (‘57-’66) even the nuns were excited by opening day; and we were allowed to bring our transistor radios to school. Right around the first pitch all learning came to a halt as we focused on the mellifluous tones of Mel Allen and Red Barber painting a picture we could “see.”

Years later, the father-son bond over the game add another component to it. It had been announced that Yogi would throw out the first pitch on Opening Day, the first time he would return to the stadium since he was fired as manager and ending a 14-year exile.

I was teaching at Greenwich High at the time and lamented at the conclusion of my calculus class that it was already sold out. The next day a FedEx envelope showed up at my house with two tickets in row 3, behind third base, along with a note from the dad of one of those kids (Katie Krauss), saying how much he hoped I’d enjoy the game, and since they went to every opening day as season ticket holders, missing this one was no big deal.

April 10th, 1999, my son Drew and I went to a very cold and rainy game (it was his very first game), and I cheered my lungs out when Yogi came out to the mound.

Baseball opening day continues to be a big deal to me, but now there is another that makes me positively giddy - think Alastair Sim at the end of A Christmas Carol, interestingly released a year prior to me being released into the world.

That is Opening Day of our community pool. Since it is not heated, Halloween is, to me, the equivalent of the final out of the World Series, the end of something joyful, as that’s the last day the pool is open.

I have loved to swim laps since my uncle Dominic P. Starace taught me to swim. I can’t imagine being too far away from the water and swimming laps was and is for me, almost meditative.

We had to wait almost two years for the developer to make good on the promise to finish the pool, but now it is my favorite activity. Being, as it is, not heated, it is a bit brisk on opening day and will be for a while, but once you are in and gliding through the water it simply feels good. As soon as the sun was up this morning I was suited up and headed down for the first swim.

There is a spring training component as, not having been able to swim a lap since Oct 31, there were some muscles barking so I cut it off about halfway through. Regardless, today, Opening Day was pure magic…a mixed playlist on my H2O bone conduction headphones allows me to let my mind drift off the muscles barking and just enjoy the “ride.”

When I’m done, I take a few minutes to sip some water, review my thoughts for the day and head home energized. While lap swimming, in no way is comparable to being in the ocean, it is a result of years of ocean swimming, surfing and body surfing that the time thief has pickpocketed from me.

However, the seven-month season here in Bluffton still allows me to drift off to those times as I’m swimming and it makes opening day that much more joyful. As I’m packing up to leave the pool each day, I keep going back to a quote attributed to Frosty Hesson and it always rings true for me:
“We all come from the sea, but we are not all of the sea. Those of us who are, we children of the tides, must return to it again and again, until the day we don’t come back leaving behind only that which was touched along the way.”

Kevin Fitzpatrick is a retired teacher who, along with his wife Sue (also a retired teacher) is enjoying exploring life in the lowcountry and all it has to offer.