The pain of love
I’ll accept it all
As long as you’ll join
Me in that emotion
—Carly Simon [1]
A couple of hours prior to the first pitch of the National League Wild Card Series, I thought about my cat Avery. I think about my cat Avery every day, several times a day, since he died last December. I miss him every day, several times a day.
Avery died on a Saturday, the same Saturday Buck Showalter was named Mets manager. I was too consumed by the logistics of dealing with the body of a cat who died on a Saturday night and a vet who wasn’t going to be open until Monday morning to fully absorb his passing. Maybe I still haven’t. Mourning would have to wait a couple of days. Tuesday I mourned hard. I was by myself the whole day, beset by a depth of sadness I’d never before felt, not after losing three previous cats, not after losing each of my parents. An unmovable cloud settled over my head. I let it wash over me or do whatever it is that sadness does. Then, before leaving the house to meet Stephanie’s train, I called our local Chinese takeout place and ordered basically everything I could think of.
“How come you got Chinese?” Stephanie asked, inspecting the contents of two bulging brown bags.
“We’re in mourning,” I said. “When you’re in mourning, somebody should cook for you.”
That’s also how I handled the night following my father’s memorial service. Beef lo mein and mourning. That was in 2016. I think I stopped mourning my father around 2018. No kidding. Not black armband mourning, not bursting into tears mourning, just an acute awareness of his presence in my mind despite his absence from this earth. It ran a couple of years. It hasn’t fully gone away, and that’s quite all right by me. I do the Times crossword like he did, and I wonder at what point contemporary clues — anything that assumed familiarity with acronyms like LOL — had him leaving squares blank. I listen to New Standards with Paul Cavalconte on WNYC Saturday nights and its app Sunday afternoons and laugh a little that for all the Top 40 inclinations of my youth, my dad inadvertently seeded an appreciation of Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughan in me while I sat in the backseat of our old Chrysler (I also imagine trying to explain “the WNYC app” to him). I slice a tomato for a sandwich, which wasn’t something I used to routinely do, and remember Dad routinely sliced tomatoes for his sandwiches. Those insurance commercials about not turning into your parents…there are worse things.
I still have brief conversations with my father in my head. I mean really brief. “Did you see the Jets game yesterday?” is about it. That’s about all the conversing we did before he took ill. My conversations with Avery aren’t much deeper, but I probably still have those, too. From that dark Tuesday in December until the middle of September, I was kind of convinced he was simply taking a nap, perhaps cuddled up under the blanket he used to sleep atop in the living room. I knew he wasn’t, but I liked to think he was. I’d close my office door so he wouldn’t unexpectedly trot in and pick a pile of my flotsam to disturb. His stack of canned cat food remained and remains at the ready, along with an unopened bag of litter. If someone came along and revealed he or she had a cat that could really use a supply of Fancy Feast and a refresh on the Jonny Cat, of course I’d hand it off. But for now, we paid for it, it’s Avery’s.
In the middle of September, though, it hit me that Avery was in the past. No great bolt of lightning struck. Stephanie and I were sitting on the couch, TV on, each of us scrolling our tablet or phone and I was thinking, “It’s just the two of us, isn’t it?” Avery wasn’t under a blanky or standing by in the kitchen awaiting dinner or plotting trouble upstairs. He had gone from not here but here to here but not here. The difference is more than subtle.
Yet I remain in several times a day thinking of him mode. Like the late afternoon of last Friday, when most of my attention was directed to the Mets and the Padres, specifically the Mets. I thought the Mets would win their best-of-three series, but I wasn’t sure. There are no certainties in the postseason, I told myself. I told myself and asked myself lots of things. One of those questions plopped onto my lap as Avery would in the course of his sixteen years as my favorite kitty ever:
“I can’t bear to start in with a new cat knowing how new cats inevitably become old cats and what that entails. How will I start over with this team next year if they don’t win the World Series?”
Missing from the picture of Cat Person in Mourning is a successor cat. Stephanie and I were catful from October 31, 1992, to December 18, 2021. Usually we had two: an heir and a spare. Bernie and Casey. Bernie and Hozzie. Hozzie and Avery. After the passing of Avery’s big brother in 2017, we didn’t install a younger sibling. Avery was a solo act at heart, bathing in the spotlight of every ounce of our attention. I honestly believe he mourned Hozzie for 30 seconds and then jumped onto Stephanie’s lap with the gusto of the Heather in Heathers who grabbed the dead Heather’s scrunchie and essentially declared herself queen of the Heathers. Hence, we rode Avery’s singularity for all it was worth, and it was worth plenty.
I sort of imagined that the second Avery left this mortal coil that there’d be a knock at our front door and we’d find two adorable kittens in a basket waiting for us. The knock never came. Nor did we seek to identify the next cat in the Prince Line. It wasn’t that we stopped being cat people. Once a cat person, always a cat person. I can’t count how many Likes I’ve issued to pictures and videos of other people’s cats (especially the goofy ones) these past ten months. But all I can think about when it comes to having a cat is not the sixteen years Avery gave us or how they ended on December 18 of last year, but November 22, the date we took Avery to the vet for his checkup. Our vet looked him over, felt him up and let us know time was suddenly growing short for our cat. Short after sixteen years, yet sudden nonetheless. Signs that Avery wasn’t his spry kitten self 24/7 had been hard to ignore, but I didn’t think he’d be on his way out before Christmas. “Pets,” our vet casually reminded us, “don’t live forever.” Thanks for the tutorial, chief.
I once read that every kitten or puppy given a small child is the beginning of a tragedy. We cared for and loved three cats before Avery. Each of them proved our vet’s truism. We wrote it off as the cost of doing business. Avery lived longest of all of them. Avery burrowed deeper into our hearts than any of them (and those other three were absolute first-ballot feline Hall of Famers). All I can think of when I begin to think of a new kitten is the day — probably many years, countless smiles and much soul-burrowing later — we go to the vet and are told pets don’t live forever.
I’m not ready to set out on that journey again. Maybe someday. Not yet.
Spring Training will come around in mid-February. I guess. I haven’t checked the schedule. A friend mentioned the date of the first exhibition game to me. I couldn’t process it as news I could use. I will eventually look up Opening Day and calculate the Baseball Equinox, because that’s what I always do, but I’m not moved to as much as estimate the midpoint from last season to next season. I’m sure I’ve read a hopeful invocation this week of however many days away Pitchers & Catchers is. It didn’t make me feel any better. Neither has anything A. Bartlett Giamatti ever put forward on the subject of pastimes designed to break your heart.
The fact that Mets baseball will come around again and the 99.999999% probability that I will be there for it doesn’t make me feel any better. It makes me feel like a bit of a chump at the moment. The losing enough through most seasons so it prevents a premature playoff exit may be the most effective inoculation against the disgustappointment that’s pervaded my mood since Sunday night. Of course that kind of losing doesn’t really do anything to brighten an outlook. It just keeps hope in check.
Which isn’t something to relish, just like choosing to go catless isn’t the key to better living simply because the inevitable loss of a hypothetical cat shadows my consciousness every day, several times a day. I didn’t become the Mets fan I became to minimize the disgust or disappointment that arises every season that hope nudges open a door I forgot to shut. I became the Mets fan I became exactly for the kind of season 2022 was from its first pitch until its final 257 (Game Three’s total for both sides). I became a Mets fan in 1969. The Mets in 1969 won 100 games and went to the playoffs. The Mets in 2022 did one better in the former and, if we agree to skim over details, equaled the latter.
I really did have high hopes throughout this season. I checked them here and there, but decided I preferred to maintain an almost relentless upbeat drumbeat on behalf of this team. They never lost more than three in a row, so I believed I could treat every L as an anomaly. That record of 101-61 was not a typo. It and they really were very good.
They weren’t the best they could be. Or they were as good as they could be and it wasn’t enough to get them to be the best there is, which emerged as a reasonable, attainable Met goal in 2022. It wasn’t enough to get them from the round of twelve to the round of eight. I’ve watched my Mets fall short in postseason contexts before. I fumed and fretted and, yes, mourned. Then I moved on, more than willing to give the team that fell short its flowers. I’m not feeling particularly floral about this team despite throwing roses at its feet for six months. Maybe someday. Not yet.
I tell ya what, though. I don’t regret the journey despite my misgivings toward the ending. I wouldn’t trade those sixteen years with Avery, either. I loved believing this team was the one that was going to add to that flagpole that has waved only two banners for too long. 1969. 1986. 2022. I didn’t know it in my bones, but I believed in my head and heart from April to early October that it was altogether possible and highly probable. Head and heart have been known to err.
The bigger mistake would have been to not give them both over to these Mets as I did despite my currently turning my back on them for at least a little longer. Time will heal that wound, even if the wound will fester until the National League Wild Card Series — and its spiritual dress rehearsal in Atlanta the weekend before — cease lingering in the atmosphere. I think I stopped mourning the outcome of the 2006 NLCS in 2008. No kidding. But 2006 as the flag that was going to accompany 1969 and 1986 is something I knew in my bones. Bones make errors, too.
To co-opt a phrase Steve Rushin crafted ages ago, I had more fun than a barrel of Mookies for most of 2022. We were the first-place Mets almost every day, says the master of compartmentalization. Even still. That was a ride. That was something to believe in. And it did get us to the precipice of where we needed to be. Perhaps the new playoff format and whatever new playoff format expands upon this playoff format will dilute the thrill of qualifying to play beyond the 162nd game. I’ve watched enough first-round exits by so-so Nets and Islanders clubs to not blink when my basketball and hockey seasons end quickly. Then again, those aren’t baseball.
When the Mets were on the verge of clinching their division in 2006, I visited our local liquor store, bought a decent-sized bottle of champagne and, the night after the clinch (I was at Shea when the blessed event happened), I toasted the Mets’ good fortune with my wife. It had been six years since our last October appointment, yet it also felt like it had been forever. Maybe because 2006 was an in-my-bones year, I knew we had to celebrate like the Mets celebrated. We wouldn’t pour any bubbly over each other’s heads, but a little buzz seemed appropriate. I didn’t know I was going to start making an earnest toast in the middle of our kitchen, but that’s what came out of my mouth, something about how much it meant to share this wonderful season, how I didn’t think it would be so long between division titles. Stephanie and I met in 1987. They won the East in 1988…and not again until 2006. I’m pretty sure she gave me a look of “oh, you’re really doing this” at my ad hoc stab at eloquence, and then she got in the spirit of the gesture. Hozzie and Avery evinced their usual apathy.
The toast became a clinching tradition, which is to say it didn’t happen again until 2015, a year when the division came into sight in August and was a foregone conclusion by September, so there was ample time to lay in something sparkling and, because the clinch came on a Saturday evening, run out for a nice pizza. A very nice pizza. A very nice toast. For the Mets, 2015 was a very nice year. One of the flagpoles was augmented, albeit the one with 1973 and 2000. You toast what you can get.
In 2016, the Mets rushed to a Wild Card. It was the most fun rush of its kind I’ve experienced since I started taking it upon myself to write about the Mets. I loved that late August-September surge of 2016 in a way I hadn’t loved a late August-September surge since 1973. The prize was less than a division title. The postseason would be only one game. Still, that Saturday was worth a pizza and a toast. That July, when my father died, I impulsively bought my first twelve-pack of beer since college. I’m thinking there were no fewer than nine cans from that pack still in the fridge by October 1, the day the Mets clinched. So we toasted with Blue Point Toasted Lager. (We never drank the rest, but one can remains shoved in the back of the refrigerator for the same reason 40 cans of cat food remain stacked next to the microwave.)
When the Mets clinched their 2022 playoff berth in Milwaukee, it merited a partial celebration by the clinchers themselves. More clinching ahead, so the party was subdued. After twenty raucous champagne showers for postseason participation and every series victory that followed in its wake, this was just a tasteful toast. Splendid job, men. Back at it tomorrow. The real pre-playoff party would come when we won the division. Well, you know how that went. And in our kitchen, it went nowhere from September 19 — too late on a Monday night to pop corks or order pizza — until October 5, when the regular season ended with what landed as a consolation prize.
[2]Play it again, Tim.
But I’d be damned if I let 2022 get away without the acknowledgement it deserved before we might decide it deserved no more than a cold glass of water. I bought the smallest bottle of champagne that our local liquor store sells; it’s 187 milliliters, called a Mini Moët. I called for the usual-size pizza, toppings and all, same as in ’15 and ’16. And on Friday night, October 7, somewhere between wondering how I’d ever conjure enthusiasm for next year if this year wound up going awry and Max Scherzer throwing the first pitch of the game that indicated awry was where this year was going, I proposed my traditional toast. We raised our glasses to the trip the Mets had taken us on this year, to the opportunity to venture a little further in the days and weeks ahead and, implicitly, to being the kind of Mets fans who do something like this when the Mets do something like they’d done. That they wouldn’t do much worth toasting in Game One let alone Game Three didn’t make the toast (or the pie) any less sumptuous or, to me, any less necessary. Wait too long to toast or trumpet those intermittent accomplishments that give you substantial dollops of joy, you’ll be waiting 36 going on 37 years. The Moët’s gonna be mighty flat by then.
This is what we do. We root. We recap. We rationalize. We revel. We regret. We rue. We reconsider. We recover. We mourn a beautiful season’s untimely passing, fully cognizant that it is not life or death. But it is baseball, so we’ll be excused for treating it as both. We do it together every year, right here, whether we can imagine doing it all over again or not, because we can’t imagine not doing it.
Hey, fellow Mets fans: here’s to us.
And here’s a little something to listen to [3] if you’re up for it.