"Near the end of the 1946 season, a young Red Sox pitcher named Dave Ferriss went into Yankee Stadium to pitch and was stunned by the size of the crowd... Ferriss had only recently left a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta. That day he was so awed by the noise and tumult that in the middle of the game he decided to commit the scene to memory and take it with him for the rest of his life. He stepped off the mound, turned slowly to the stands, and inhaled the crowd..." - Halberstam, David. Summer of '49.That scene always stuck with me. I try to inhale crowds every chance I get. At a young age, baseball was a hobby. Played it, read it, watched and listened to it, collected it. Stacks of Beckett's under my brother's bed; the contents of those stacks would change over the years, as would my interests.
Dad had interests: hunting, fishing, flying, classic cars. There's a "swath of rumpled terrain whose eastern and southern edge(s) sweep in an arc some 200 miles long from the Austin area down past San Antonio and west to not far from Del Rio on the Mexican border" (ref.) called the Hill Country. To say that spending time in the Hill Country was merely an interest of his would be an insult to its draw. And draw it did, nearly every weekend in the fall.
When I was young my brother and I would go out with him more, but at a certain age our interests diverged [as interests between young men and their fathers are wont to do]. Older I get though, more I can see our interests coming back together. He's gone seven years today, but his interests remain, as do the memories, locked inside the safe right alongside that old knife collection, brought out now and again for a good polishing.
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