Newsletter 133: Turning Seven, and then Turning Eight

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one is November 2018, about my son turning seven. Since he turns eight next week, this seemed like a good time to re-run it.

The first time I remember getting mad at my father was October 10, 1982. 1982 was a bit of a breakthrough year for the Leitch boys. Try as he might up to that point, my father had found no success, for the first six years of his son’s life, getting his son to care about sports at all. He tried to sit with him and watch the Saturday afternoon baseball game on television, he took him to Mattoon High School football games, he drove him all the way to Champaign to see the Illini basketball team. Nothing stuck. His kid didn’t even like to play catch with him in the backyard; the boy would much rather sit inside with a book. (His first grade teacher actually sent a note complaining that he was spending his recess sitting in the corner just reading.) The nadir was T-ball. Baseball was the obsession of Mattoon, Illinois, and fathers proudly showed off their son’s skills every Saturday at Lawson Park, for the whole town to see. But Dad didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to look, as his son sat in right field chewing on his glove and watching the trains go by, or striking out…