My Dad and I were never what you would call close as I grew into a teenager and for many years while I followed my education at the university level. We had a “Cat in the Cradle” relationship. The two things we did have in common were fishing and baseball. My best memories, being with my dad, were when we went fishing. The most enjoyable times we had was sharing the radio listening to the Red Sox.

We never talked much and seemed to both enjoy the moment. Dad was a man of few words and many deeds. The only baseball we watched was on the radio or TV, we never went to a professional baseball game, or so I thought.

"It is a clear, blue, sunny, summer day. I hear someone shouting “PEANUTS! CRACKER JACKS!”. There is a sudden, loud CRACKING sound and I see a batter, the catcher, and an umpire looking at a ball traveling into the bleachers along the first base line."

This memory fades away. There are no threads attached to it. It is just a vision of three individuals seen from behind the backstop screen slightly from the right side of the plate.

Over the years this vision returns from time to time. It is clearest whenever I go watch a baseball game and I am sitting behind home plate. Is it part of a dream? Did it really happen? I have no way of knowing.

Then in the summer of 2008 my wife and I are helping my mother move to Canada. I am an only child and now at 91 years of age she finds it to difficult to live on her own.

We have to go through years of accumulated history, that she and Dad had gathered in over 60 years of marriage. We had done Dad’s things 12 years ago after he had died and now it was Mom’s time.

“What’s this?” I ask myself, as I pull out an old baseball box. The box holds an equally old baseball with a player’s signature on it. The ball also has printed on it the name Ford Frick. Frick had been the president of the National League back in the 1940’s. H’mmm could this be? At the bottom of the draw is an old brown envelope. I open it and inside is a team picture of the 1946 Philadelphia Phillies

I gather the two items and head for the kitchen.

“Mom, can you tell me anything about these?” I show her the ball and picture and she smiles.
“Oh” she says, “Your dad brought them home the day he took you to a baseball game in Philadelphia,” she tells me.
“When was that?” I ask.
“The year he helped in the commissioning of the Valley Forge.” She answers, “That would have been in 1946.”

So there it was! Not a vision or a dream, it was REAL! I would have been four going on five. Just then another memory came to the surface. A memory of a big ship, a steep ramp, a huge cake and some broken airplanes, but that memory is for another story for another time.