Heading For Home

Andy was mesmerized as pie by his first baseball game. Brian got the whole family season tickets from a coworker for the Lowell Spinners — which afforded everyone a primo view of the game and also meant that we were sitting on top of mascots like the Canaligator (Lowell was built on a canal) and Bob the Toothbrush (also, residents suffer from gingivitis!). My parents bought Andy special Red Sox overalls for the occasion–humbly pictured here.

He was captivated throughout–with a few gentlemanly pauses for purees and Puffs. He made fast friends with a preschooler named Conor and bucked each time a new mascot trotted onto the field. Behind me, a harried mother bemoaned the lines at Market Basket. A scrubbed older gent named Bob, decked out in a yellow collared shirt and pressed khakis, whipped the crowd into a frenzy with “Who Let the Dogs Out”and joked with little kids. He could’ve been D.

My grandfather, D to everyone (but to me first), was christened Paul. He’s the reason my son is named Paul Andrew. He played baseball in Lowell in the 1930s, when he lived with six brothers and one sister in a house on West London Street, not knowing then — but probably knowing then — that they’d never move more than a few blocks from home.

He had albums upon meticulous albums, now mine, with Lowell Sun clippings chronicling his exploits. “Little Paulie Durkin”‘s special talent was pitching. If not for World War Two, he could’ve probably played out here, too.

LeLacheur Park isn’t Fenway. It’s next to the Aiken Bridge, which connects nowhere to a slightly more hilly nowhere. There are burned-out factories, refurbished lofts, and a downtown that’s been “gentrifying” for 20 years. Tickets cost $15 a pop. Whatever crap I was trying to digest from a heart-attack-inducing dinner in Cambridge the night before could never measure up to whatever was for dinner down the street at the Owl Diner … and it was probably twice as good and half as expensive, sucker that I am.

This was never my home. But it is home.

My parents grew up in Lowell. My mother has approximately 3980o958 cousins, all of whom are from here, and most of ‘em still live here. At LeLacheur Park--named after one of my grandfather’s good friends and baseball teammates–an advertisement for our cousin’s car dealership hangs on a banner; meanwhile my ex-boyfriend, whose dad grew up next to my dad, announces the game. The field was dedicated by the city manager, Brian Martin, another of D’s close friends from a block down Andrews Street. D said they used to shoot hoops in his paved backyard, overlooking the Prince Spaghetti Factory.

We parked in the Notini’s parking Lot. Notini’s is where my grandfather worked as a wholesale tobacco salesman for more than 40 years, before retiring to help my mom take care of my brother and me. D was such a graceful athlete and a gifted baseball player.  He loved Spinners games, following them as excitedly as any Red Sox game.  These fields were the same ones where D played, with different names and in different times, decades ago. His friend and teammate Ed LeLacheur died last year. My grandfather died in 2008. But Notini’s is still here. The pink sun that illuminated the Aiken Bridge is the same pink sun that saw my grandfather home after so many baseball practices so many years ago.

As I flip-flopped to my seat, sweaty beer in one hand, Andy’s diaper bag slapping against my ribs, nachos in a free paw–I smiled because I knew that I hadn’t inherited any of his grace.

But I hope he saw us.

Seeing my sixty-two-year-old parents waiting for us in the seats that their son-in-law procured, blocks from the high school where they met as 16-year-olds, looking for their grandson Paul Andrew…I knew he saw us. D was there.