Richard Ford - Independence Day

“Why do you think you think about that?” I say irritably.

“I don’t know. It seems like it ruined everything that was fixed back then.”

“It didn’t. Nothing’s fixed anyway. Why don’t you try writing some of it down.” For some reason I feel aggravated by the story of my mother and the nun on Horn Island and wanting (God knows why) more children.

“You mean like a journal?” He eyes me dubiously.

“Right. Like that.”

“We did that at camp. Then we used our journals to wipe our asses and threw them in bonfires. That was the best use for them.”

Around and down the cross street I now unexpectedly see the Baseball Hall of Fame, a pale-red-brick Greek Revival, post-office-looking building, and I make a quick, hazardous right off what was Chestnut and onto what is Main, postponing my drink for a drive-by and a closer look.

Full of baseball vacationers, Main Street has the soullessly equable, bustly air of a better-than-average small-college town the week the kids come back for fall. Shops on both sides are selling showcases full of baseball everything: uniforms, cards, posters, bumper stickers, no doubt hubcaps and condoms; and these share the street with just ordinary villagey business entities — a drugstore, a dad ‘n’ lad, two flower shops, a tavern, a German bakery and several realty offices, their mullioned windows crammed with snapshots of A-frames and “view properties” on Lake So-and-so.

Unlike stolid Deep River and stiff-necked Ridgefield, Cooperstown has more than ample 4th of July street regalia strung up on the lampposts and crossing wires, stoplights and even parking meters, as if to say there’s a right way to do things and this is it. Posters on every corner promise a “Big Celebrity Parade” with “country music stars” on Monday, and all visitors strolling the sidewalks seem glad to be here. It seems in fact and on first blush like an ideal place to live, worship, thrive, raise a family, grow old, get sick and die. And yet: Some suspicion lurks — in the crowds themselves, in the too-frequent street-corner baskets of redder-than-red geraniums and the too-visible French poubelle trash containers, in the telltale sight of a red double-decker City of Westminster bus and there being no mention of the Hall of Fame anywhere —that the town is just a replica (of a legitimate place), a period backdrop to the Hall of Fame or to something even less specific, with nothing authentic (crime, despair, litter, the rapture) really going on no matter what civic illusion the city fathers maintain. (In this way, of course, it’s no less than what I imagined, and still a potentially perfect setting in which to woo one’s son away from his problems and bestow good counsel — if, that is, one’s son weren’t an asshole.)

We cruise slowly by the unimpressive little brick-arched entryway to the Hall, with its even more post-office-ish, Old-Glory-on-a-pole look and a single flourishing sugar maple out front. Several noisy citizens seem to be parading in a little circle on the sidewalk, doing their best, it looks like, to get in the way of paying customers who have walked over from nearby inns or hotels or RV parks and want to get inside for a quick evening tour. These circlers all have placards and signs and sandwich boards and, when I let Paul’s window down to hear, are chanting what sounds like “shooter, shooter, shooter.” (It’s hard to know what could be worth picketing in a place like this.)

“So who’re those morons?” Paul says, and makes a quick eeeck followed by a look of dismay.

“I got here when you did,” I say.

“Hooter, hooter, hooter, hooter,” he says in a gruff, giant’s voice. “Neuter, neuter, neuter, neuter.”

“That’s the Baseball Hall of Fame right there, though.” I’m disappointed, to be honest, but with no right to be. “You’ve seen it now, so we can go home if you want to.”

“Hooter, hooter, hooter,” Paul says. “Eeeck, eeeck.”

“Do you want to just get it over with? I’ll get you back to New York early tonight. You can stay at the Yale Club.”

“I’d rather stay up here a whole lot longer,” Paul says, still watching out his window.

“Okay,” I say, deciding he means he’d rather not go to New York. Though the air of anger flushes right out of me then, and I see my job as father once again to be a permanent, lifelong undertaking.

“What actually supposedly happened here? I forgot.” He is musing out at the milling sidewalk traffic.

“Baseball was supposedly dreamed up here in 1839, by Abner Doubleday, though nobody really believes that.” All info courtesy of brochures. “It’s just a myth to allow customers to focus their interests and get the most out of the game. It’s like the Declaration of Independence being signed on the Fourth of July, when it was actually signed some other time.” This, of course, is straight from avuncular old Becker and probably a waste of time now. Though I mean to persist. “It’s a shorthand to keep you from getting all bound up in unimportant details and missing some deeper point. I don’t remember what the point is with baseball, though.” A second wave of deep fatigue suddenly descends. It’s tempting to pull over and go to sleep on the seat and see who’s here when I wake up.

“So this is all just bullshit,” Paul says, watching out.

“Not exactly. A lot of things we think are true aren’t, just like a lot of things that are, you don’t have to give a shit about. You have to make your own assessments. Life’s full of little potted lessons like that.”

“Why, thank you, then. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” He looks at me with amusement, but he is scornful. I could easily pass out.

Though I’m still not to be turned aside, under the syllabus topic of separating the wheat from the chaff, or possibly it’s the woods from the trees. “You shouldn’t get trapped by situations that don’t make you happy,” I say. “I’m not always very good at it. I fuck up a lot. But I try.”

“I’m trying,” he says — to my great and heart-wrenching surprise — moved by something. A platitude. The strength of a simple platitude. What else do I offer? “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Well, if you’re trying, that’s all you can do.”

“Eeeck,” he says quietly. “Hooter.”

“Hooter. Right,” I say, and we motor on.

I drive us farther down Main into the tree-thick neighborhood of expensive and familiar Federalist and well-preserved Greek Revivals — all in primo condition and shaded by two-hundred-year-old beeches and red oaks — which in Haddam would cost a million eight and never come on the market (friends sell to friends to keep us realtors out of it). A couple here, though, have signs on their lawns, one with a JUST REDUCED sticker. Another paperboy is here, walking his route, swinging his swag sack full of afternoon dailies. An older man, in bright-red jackass pants and a yellow shirt, is standing in a yard behind a picket fence, holding an icy drink and raising his free hand for the boy to throw him a paper, which he does, and which the man snags. The boy turns toward us idling past, waves a furtive little wave at Paul, mistaking him for someone he knows, then quickly douses it and looks off. Paul, though, waves back! As though he thought, like a good dreamer, that if we all still lived in Haddam and life was revised back to what it should be, this boy would be him.

“Do you like my clothes?” he says, closing his window with the button.

“Not much,” I say, steering the curve around onto another shaded street, where there’s a blue HOSPITAL sign, and women in nurses’ garb and men in doctors’ smocks with dangling stethoscopes are walking down the sidewalk, headed for home. “Do you like mine?”