Mandela-ing Myself

Dearest Rachel –

I apologize if this letter turns out to be less than exciting to you (although why should I expect anything I tell you about the goings-on this tiny little dust speck in the cosmos to be of any particular interest to you anymore, other than perhaps that the news comes from me?). I know that the topics of sportsball (of any variety) and writing don’t particularly pique your interest. Still, these are the sort of dreams that come to me these days, and I still think it’s only fair that I get to tell you mine after so many years of you telling me yours first thing in the morning. I sometimes wonder if I’ve been given as much overtime as I have in order to catch up with you on this matter.

I will say that, thanks to you, I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to sportsball like I used to as a kid. I still remember days that I would spend over at my grandparents house watching the local superstation as they covered the Cubbies as they played (and mostly lost) at the “Friendly Confines” of Wrigley Field. You, however, grew up on the border between Cub and Cardinal territory, and while it could have been a battleground between the two teams (like it often is around here between Bear and Packer fans during autumn – by winter, they’re too far ahead in the standings to argue about who the better team is), you were too far removed from the fray, both geographically and dispositionally, to really care about any of it.

And while I don’t mean to heap blame upon you for your indifference towards sportsball, I will say – as I did more than once while you were alive – that it took the fun out of watching the games. Blooper reels you could enjoy; the actual games, not so much. At least you recognized the historical significance of the 2016 World Series, to the point where it was you who suggested putting a “W” flag on my grandmother’s grave, which was received with delighted appreciation by the rest of the family (as well as a certain chagrined air of “why didn’t we think of that?”). So you weren’t completely oblivious to what was going on in the sporting world.

But the dream I had was a little more obscure – or maybe a bit more displaced – than all that. I was researching something to write about, and found out a tidbit about a certain player’s youth. You may be dimly aware of the Little League World Series, held annually in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (where, I would assume, the youth league was first founded). Apparently, as part of the festivities, there is a home run competition held, not unlike that as part of the MLB’s All-Star Game, and there was a particular young man who absolutely cleaned up during the 1961 series, at the same time that Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were simultaneously pursuing Babe Ruth’s single season record in the professional league.

The boy’s name? Mark McGwire, who would later engage in a similar race with the Cubs’ own Sammy Sosa, where both men smashed through Maris’ record twice in two straight years (a record that has since been bested as well; worse yet, all three men involved have either been accused of or admitted to using performance enhancing substances in the pursuit).

Future steroid use aside, this historical ‘fact’ demonstrated – or at least suggested – that Mark was destined for greatness at a young age, and the backdrop of an actual home run race taking place in “the bigs” made it a coincidence that seemed too good not to make a note of. Even my dream self was thinking that this was too literary; something about this didn’t add up. And of course, it didn’t; the math literally didn’t add up. Even a ten-year old in 1961 would have been in his late forties by the time McGwire was mass producing major-league dingers in the late nineties, well past the sell-by date for any professional athlete. Most ballplayers barely make it to their late thirties in “the show,” let alone hit their prime past this point. Even dreaming, I knew better than this, and resolved to look it up upon awakening, even though I don’t think I was lucid enough to actually know I was dreaming at the moment.

Fortunately, I already had my computer up and running (you’ll remember how we kept ours on almost perpetually in order to download various entertainments for our annual trip to the island. Now, I don’t have as much to collect anymore, not having anyone to watch stuff with, but some of what I continue to gather may merit a letter or its own someday), so I could check while I was still thinking about it. Sure enough, Mark’s youth took place well after the Maris-Mantle horse race, with the most notable event being his inclusion on the 1984 Olympic team, when baseball was made a part of the Olympic roster. Moreover, it turns out that Little League only started holding a home run competition as a sideshow to its World Series in 2019, long after McGwire’s retirement from the sport.

Basically, I seem to have Mandela-ed myself. Apparently, a lot of people seem to remember Nelson Mandela having died in prison during the 1980s, complete with having seen his state funeral on television. As an American who knew nothing about Mandela until after his release from prison and subsequent ascension to the presidency of South Africa, this seems patently absurd, but I imagine that they might be remembering some other such state funeral and – for whatever reason – thinking it was for him. Although, it begs the question as to why a nation still in the dying throes of actual apartheid would hold a state funeral for such a man, who at the time was still considered a terrorist (and thus held in prison) by that very state? So much about this false memory doesn’t pass the smell test, any more than the idea of Mark McGwire hitting pee-wee home runs at the same time the man whose record he broke was doing so for real.

And yet, we’re like this, relying on our memory for “facts” like this that aren’t. At least in my case, I was questioning it even as I was encountering this information in my dream; even my dream self wasn’t buying it. And while there’s a lot of information out here on the internet that simply isn’t true (just this morning, Daniel was asking me about some rumor pertaining to the newly-minted vice presidential candidate that struck me as both gross and impractical; I reminded him that the man had enough on his record to render him less than amenable for the office without such absurd accusations that would require extraordinary evidence for me to buy into them), there’s enough consensus to confirm or debunk a lot of what we may think to have happened.

But in more insular, personal happenings, where the only ones to verify or deny an occasion are either dead or decaying in memory, it’s not quite as simple. Without your word to back me up, I may well be Mandela-ing myself about this incident or that, and I’d like to prevent that as much as possible.

With that in mind, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.