“Through the Closed Door” by Daniel Tobin

A piece by faculty member Daniel Tobin appears at Berfrois:

In one of my albums of old family photographs there is a picture of my brother and I standing on either side of Babe Ruth’s locker in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I am eleven, my brother two years older, and we look the part for the time: 1969, the sons of stolid Irish Catholic parents who had us in the late 1950s, still button-down and Bryl-creamed that summer of Civil Rights and Woodstock and kill counts from Vietnam before our tepid teenage rebelliousness kicked in, incongruously, in the era of the Hustle and the platform shoe. In another photograph we are joined by our mother’s childhood friend, Connie, a nun in full regalia, her rosary a beaded lasso looped at her side, her face crimped but smiling broadly under her snood’s high white façade—her habit’s equally constricted and flowing architecture preserved now in the photograph beside the uniforms of some of the game’s greats. By then I had memorized the batting averages, home runs, and other salient statistics of the all-time leaders as well as the dimensions of every major league ballpark, past and present. I kept my current baseball cards in a special plastic case designed to look like a miniature locker complete with swinging doors.

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