There's a ball, and there's a glove

I went to college at a school that had two campuses: one on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and one in the Bronx. I split my academic time at each campus. And as such, each locale holds something enormous for me, even all these years later.

Fordham Rose Hill, in the Bronx, is a stunning, picturesque campus that has been immortalized in films for how quintessential the brick and the ivy are to capturing Northeast academic elitism. I lived in haunted dorms and took classes in even more haunted buildings. I took photos with friends on lawns that, if not for the poor digital photo quality of the era, would have been college brochure-ready. Fordham in the Bronx is many things, including a place that is a short subway ride from iconic Yankee Stadium.

There’s so much that I return to now, as an adult, without meaning to: places I half-noticed, sounds I half-heard, games I half-watched. The otherwise unconsidered sensory details that turned out to have been doing something quiet, beneath the surface, across time.

My friends and my family were Yankees fans, and growing up, we went to the games. When I was young and my father brought me to see the Yankees, we sat in actual seats with arm rests and cup holders to keep our iced tea safe. Later, it was the bleachers and cheap food outside the stadium, because when I attended Yankees games on the regular post-childhood, I was in college and I couldn’t afford a warm pretzel—much less the cheese sauce add-on that made the purchase worth it.

Fordham was not a “sports school” in the way some universities are. It’s New York, which is the city of everything, and the Yankees are just one of the many everythings. I wasn’t a baseball person, exactly. I was a girl who happened to go to college near a baseball stadium, with a dad and brothers and uncles who were Yankees fans, whose male friends and boyfriends and crushes were also Yankees fans. Looking back, especially from my current vantage point, I understand this is a different thing than being a baseball fan myself. In college, I wrote for the school paper, but never for the sports section. Those sports editors (all boys, only boys) were cute, but they could never understand what I was trying to accomplish in my Features section, and vice versa.

Then I graduated and my New York had nothing to do with sports, and eventually, my New York became too distant for too long. I did not watch baseball for quite some time—years. It went underground, as a game turned on somewhere in another room, a familiar logo on a hat, a rhythm I could hear through the wall of a bar.

Now, post-college and post-much else, I have three baseball kids.

My middlest is the one who plays like it’s his oxygen. My littlest is on a team, which he takes more seriously than most other things in his life. My oldest loves the game, watching and playing. And because of them, I’ve returned—at MLB games every couple of weeks during the summer, with the sound of a t.v. announcer in the background of my own apartment while I cook dinner, sitting on very uncomfortable bleachers at city baseball fields on Saturday afternoons, watching the plays with an intensity that I never knew I could apply to sports games.

Thanks to my boys, I know the 2025 stats for teams I couldn’t have picked out of the air ten years ago. I have learned the nuances of stadiums that I have never visited. I can recount the names of modern baseball legends better than I can name some my children’s friend’s parents, and I can, with confidence, expound upon the quality of the 2026 Mets starting lineup.

Along with baseball, my boys love a good bit. Right now, one of my favorites is how the eldest coaches the littlest while playing catch, regularly, up to seven days a week when the weather is good: “There’s a ball, and there’s a glove. And the ball goes in the glove.” So helpful! I wonder (facetiously, of course) if the same could be said of writing: “There are words, and there’s a page. The words go on the page.”

The first time I mentioned my childhood allegiance to the Yankees, my boys were confused. None of them had considered that I even knew what baseball was. But still, my middlest joined a baseball team because he wanted to join a team. He got good at it because he practiced. He showed up for the MLB games because his family members brought him. He became a Mets fan in due course, and so did I.

Now here I am, memorizing the layout of Citi Field for the most efficient pathways to the best food places. Checking the scores on my phone to see how the Mets and the Giants and the Pirates are doing on a Tuesday afternoon. When the Mariners do poorly, satisfaction blooms in my heart. I’m still buoyed when I see a Yankees win and a Red Sox loss.

The things that shape you are not often evident whilst the shaping is occurring. More often, they sit in the periphery. You can pay attention, or partial attention, to something for years before you understand fully what you are looking at.

I think about this when I write. I think creative life is frequently made of things that have been circling for a long time before they’re able to land. The book you are going to write is already in the room with you, no matter when you begin the outline. The story you are reaching for may have been floating in your subconscious since you were twenty. The attention you paid to things that once seemed peripheral—the suburban ice cream shop, the overly-chlorinated pool under the blazing sun, the salty soft pretzels, somewhere in the background—was not lost.

Often, we do not know what we are looking at when it’s directly in front of us. But at some point, as a creative person trying to tell a story, we do know. We look, and we see with new clarity or vision or takeaway. Through lines become apparent, and they turn into stories we can’t help but tell, for reasons larger than ourselves.

The return is a major part of the creative process. We gather whether or not we mean to. The question is, whether you'll come back and look. There’s the leaving, the noticing, even the eventual sitting-down-to-write. But also the openness, when something circles back, to turn toward it, instead of away.