Salty Popcorn and Memory

Movie theater popcorn is rich and buttery.

But baseball spring training popcorn is dry and salty.

That’s what I was thinking today, watching the first baseball of spring on TV, the Red Sox versus the Yankees.

And I was remembering all the spring training games my grandfather took me to when I first moved down here after college and for many years after.

It was never about the game itself.  I love baseball, but my attention span is quite short and seems to get shorter every year.

Going to a spring training game was all about and only ever about spending time with my grandfather, the same grandfather who took me to batting cages when I was a kid, the grandfather who, along with my mom and dad, went with me to my first Yankees game in NYC when I was about ten years old.

Spring training was never about the game.

It was about memories.

It was about the smell of the old station wagon that my grandfather picked me up in, that old Chevrolet tank that was older than me and smelled of gas and oil and faintly of sweat, smells that I will forever label grandfather smell.  It was the smell of his shed at his house, of the basement, of every place he lingered and frequented and worked.

Spring training games were about the candies my grandfather slipped to me from his pocket, the hard coffee-flavored caramels.

Spring training games were about community.  My grandfather purchased season tickets and got the same seats each year and each year we sat behind the same people, Pete, the former firefighter from Boston and his daughter Karen with the huge, bouncy curly hair.

The games were about the weather, about the Florida winter that surprised with the occasional chilly day but relented to spring and then to summer in an instant, bringing out the gnats that swarmed before the afternoon thunderstorm.

And the games were about the popcorn, the giant buckets filled with, as I said before, dry and salty goodness. 

The seats were hard, and the sun was sometimes unrelenting, merciless.

The truly good players never seemed to make the journey over here to the east coast of Florida when their team was in town, but I did see Chipper Jones play.  I was never a Braves fan, but I can appreciate an amazing player.

But the it was never about the game.

It was about my grandfather.