DeeDee and the Rangers — a repost from 2011
October 28, 2011 was the day after Game 6 of the 2011 World Series. If you don't know what happened in Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, Google it.
As I tend to do in times like that, I put pen to paper (digitally) and scratched out some thoughts. Tonight, at yet another unfulfilling end to yet another Texas Rangers season, I dug up what I wrote then on a nearly defunct blogging platform and decided to republish it. Baseball can provide a unique set of signposts in our lives — and often, the same emotions surface at the same time every year. This is where my brain went on October 28, 2011, and it's remarkably similar to where it is now.
I've been thinking a lot about my grandmother lately. My mom's mom.
Her name was Valaree, but we called her Deedee. Born outside Winnsboro, moved to Dallas when she was 10, North Dallas High School graduate, met my grandfather while working in Dallas, raised my mom and uncle in Dallas, one-time president of the Oak Cliff Women's Club. She, to me, was Dallas.
In her autobiography — which I've been reading lately — she mentions how she was a pretty good baseball player for a girl. She mentions how she would go with her parents and her younger sisters, Wandie, on the streetcar across the Trinity River to Burnett Field to watch Dallas' baseball team (then, it was the Dallas Steers of the Texas League). She mentions how she would get to spend time alone with her dad — my great-grandfather — because she liked sports, and her three sisters didn't. She mentions how she and my grandfather, Herman, would go to baseball games in retirement.
My favorite Deedee story takes place at a Rangers game. She went with my parents to the Ballpark, and they were seated in front of Zonk, a relatively legendary Rangers fan known for beating his drum during games. At one point during the game, while Zonk was banging his drum, she turned to him and exclaimed, "You're hurtin' my ears!" Zonk stopped drumming for the rest of the game.
Deedee died on my 21st birthday, in 2007. I was in Missouri at the time, and never really felt more distant from my family than when I got that phone call. It was her death that really made me examine my roots, made me remember how much Dallas and Texas is truly part of me.
Since that day in 2007, the Rangers are 395-336 (.538) in the regular season, and have won two pennants. Amazing, when you consider that in the previous 35 years, they played at a .482 clip and had never sniffed the title.
I know. It's an arbitrary endpoint and an arbitrary statistic about an arbitrary thing.
Last night, with the Rangers an out away from winning a championship, she was all I could think about. Not Neftali Feliz. Not Ron Washington. Not Michael Young or David Freese or Josh Hamilton or Eric Nadel or Tom Grieve or Johnny Oates or me.
Just Deedee, the girl who used baseball to steal time with her dad, the woman who told Zonk that he was hurtin' her ears. Just the woman who was, to me, Dallas.
It's an arbitrary endpoint and an arbitrary statistic about an arbitrary thing. But not to me.