Echoes

For the past few days, I’ve been thinking of a time when I was in my twenties, driving out West. Either Dan or Jim was with me, the one dead now for sixteen years, the other someone I haven’t spoken to in a decade or more. We had no business driving at night on a road that snaked through the mountains, but this is what people do in their twenties. I have a sense I was behind the wheel—it was my father’s Ford Galaxie 500, and I felt responsible—while Dan or Jim played with the radio dial. The only light for miles around was generated by the Ford’s high beams and the dashboard, which was probably too weak to show the fear etched on our faces. Out of nowhere, which was just outside our windows, the radio started broadcasting an Oakland A’s game. The voices faded in and out, my co-pilot forever fiddling with the nob so that we could hear someone who had nothing to do with driving through the mountain darkness. That game kept our focus and may have saved two young lives. I was visiting in the hospital yesterday and put on the Phillies-Braves’ NLDS game. The patient didn’t particularly care for baseball but knew that I did. This is just one in a lifetime of examples of his all-around decency. We talked, watched the game, and then he was gone for tests. They brought him back just after Philadelphia had held on for a 7-6 win. “Is there another game on?” he wondered, but I had to go.