42

I'm not being sentimental

The one and only Jackie Robinson. His number was retired from MLB in 1997.

Forty-two.

Numbers are funny. Wear them long enough and they’ll never let go.

Play the greatness out of them and they’ll be so tired by the end that you can just see the heavenly dust shimmering.

Ten pounds, eleven ounces: the weight of my brother at birth. My poor mother.

Three: the number of my husband’s high-school soccer jersey. Now worn by our son.

Fourteen was college. But we’ll get to that later.

Here’s a common number in our family: eighteen. Well, at least in May.

My brother’s birthday. My father-in-law’s birthday. The day ‘ol Saint Helens blew her top in the year of our Lord: 1980. That was a rough year out here in the west.

Here’s another one: fifteen. But flip back one month.

The sixteenth president of the USA took a gun to his head in 1865, so that

Eighty-two years later, number forty-two could walk out onto first base, damn proud of the color of his skin, look around, and see no one else like him.

Changed the game forever.

Let’s go back to fourteen. Well, really it went into the early morning of the fifteenth for those poor fifteen thousand lives.

1912, North Atlantic Ocean. The Unsinkable Ship sank.

They say you get more sentimental the older you get and I’m starting to feel that. Sort of how there are the facts in dates and numbers, and then there’s what’s true.

I didn’t know that April fifteenth was Jackie Robinson Day.

Learned something new because I’m forty-two now and I can’t think of that number without thinking of Jackie.

Funny how memory works. I think of Jackie because my dad used to collect baseball cards. I even drove down to San Francisco with him one year. Hitched a ride in the back seat of our brown Chevrolet Citation, with my dad’s buddy riding shotgun all for the love of baseball.

Any hitch-hiker in this galaxy would say forty-two is the meaning of life

which just goes to show you

no one really knows. Especially

at forty-two.

April fifteenth is also tax day which always comes back around along with

all those deaths on the fourteenth.

But the way I look at it, number forty-two walked out onto first base, to do what no one in a million years thought possible.

I’m not being sentimental or anything.

I’m just turning forty-two.