Everything is connected in the end.
--Don DeLillo
Underworld

I'd never seen you so animated until Bobby Thomson's "shot-heard-around-the-world." You'd been stingy with your emotions up to then, so cautious at the dinner table, as if in letting go would be the first step toward madness; you set an example so I'd chew my food with my mouth closed, and how to use a salad fork. Of course, it wasn't so much the pennant that was essential, but how after grade school you were there, meeting me when I walked down Sycamore Lane. I dawdled home expecting to rake the dreaded leaves, but you greeted me with unaccustomed sport-talk, "Thomson hit one to win it!" not as a fan but as a mother, running toward me in pedal pushers, your voice tremulous, your eyes bouncing in shiny sockets. It was 2:58 our time when the "Staten Island Scot" slammed a 0-1 pitch, a hard line drive into the lower deck of the Polo Grounds left field stands; your presence held out so much promise -- right then, I thought you a profounder mother. We seemed to hold together that winning ball after it jumped the yard, our hands grasping ascendancy; we were galvanized by the prevailing ball because it threw out the spell of the night before when you sent me crying to my room after I'd broken your favorite teacup. You used to baby-sit as a teenager the child of famed sportswriter, Ring Lardner. Who knows how much time he'd spent covering homers hit in ballparks? Maybe even back then, when you and I walked together into the house, Don DeLillo's vision imparted truth: "It is all falling indelibly into the past" as he would later write. But our enthusiasm coalesced and set aside DeLillo's prophecy, you telling me how announcer Russ Hodges kept shouting, "They're going crazy! They're going crazy!" I loved the way you gave me your excited voice, trying to duplicate that famous call. I imagined us embracing that ball, my small fingers intermeshed with yours, our fingers gripping the stitched seams, bonding hide to tautly lashed twine. It was only near the end that I finally saw how graceful were those same fingers in which you hugged with me in the breezeway after the game. You might've even heard on the radio the ball smashing that sweet spot, the part a few inches from the end of the bat's barrel where the ball got hit with maximum power, the hitter feeling no tense vibration: a perfect swing. Without nostalgia's false gleam, you shall exist more real than bat and ball, more decisive than touching home plate, more unaffected than hacks looting that apocryphal, October day, distorting nexus into chauvinism. That day won't ever get wrenched away; it will always strike against my heart, the greatest day when all that seemed true was true, the heroics of pennant fever when you let me understand I was your son.