Posted by Holly at April 30th, 2008

My orange cat, Koufax, loves me. He sits in my lap, relaxed into the crook of my arm; so relaxed that it doesn’t even seem as if there is any weight on my lap. He doesn’t weigh very much, it’s true, but he is so comfortable in my arms that there is no resistance. Every now and then he reaches up with his tensile front paws in a big stretch. Honestly, he strokes my hair or my cheek. Then he reaches up with his mouth and kisses me…two little kisses with only his lips and one nibble. His six toes on each front paw make it feel as if he really holds hands.

He should probably have been named Campanella instead of Koufax because his paws do look more like catcher’s mitts than a pitching glove. He was named by the Brooklyn-born father of the woman I got him from who got him as a kitten. Her dad was a Brooklyn Dodger fan and, maybe because of his sandy color, named him Koufax for that famous pitcher. It’s quite okay with me. I even taught him a baseball trick involving sitting on command and then waiting, with a tempting pile of catnip in front of him, for me to say four words: ball, ball, ball, strike. On strike, he was allowed to have the catnip. This he did for years until I moved on to other pleasures and stopped practicing with him. He’s going into training soon, though, now that his nemesis Gemini, the dog, is learning how to read (he lifts his paw when I hold up a piece of paper that says PAW on it. Lots of doggie cookies are involved.)

My son will tell you I owned Koufax even before I saw him once I heard that name, being a die-hard Brooklyn Dodger fan myself, still waiting for them to return to their proper home. There are a lot of us. I once worked for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the park that Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted considered their masterpiece because of the natural terrain with which it was endowed. There’s a statistic that one in every seven Americans has roots in Brooklyn and I once had the idea that if I could raise $1 – one dollar – from even one tenth of those people, it would yield millions for the park. I used to float the idea whenever I was at a party or in some public social gathering and I would come back to the park with a fistful of dollars from enthusiasts. Once, on a Friday night at my crowd’s usual hangout, Sardi’s, I went into my shtick about the $1 and the park and one friend said he would give me five single dollars if I would dedicate them toward rebuilding Ebbets Field.

I actually own Campy’s autograph and Sandy Koufax’s on a little fold-out card, about 5 x 7. It says Your Dodger Pals on one side and Your Other Pals on the other. Campy and Koufax are on the Dodger side, numbers two and three. Above them is Ramon Jackson. On the other side is Carl Furillo, Johnny Colon, Henry Mandell and Gladys Gooding – the only person to play in Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. She played the organ at the games. I don’t really know who Johnny Colon or Ramon Jackson are and Henry Mandell is not a ball player. He was the president of the Men’s Club when that organization at Union Temple, the reform synagogue in Brooklyn at which I grew up, hosted an annual Orphan’s Breakfast that my dad ran. The words in these sentences are archaic today, a throw back to a time that was both more peaceful and more opaque, in which we didn’t think about labels the way we do today and were careless in the way we categorized people. Still, the intent was sweet – give a breakfast to support a bunch of kids who lived communally because they had no families; bring the kids together with everybody’s heroes, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Sam Levenson, the great comic – and another Brooklyn kid – used to MC the breakfast.

Still waiting for the Dodgers to come back to Brooklyn gave me the opportunity to root for the team in whichever city I was living. In Seattle it was the Mariners. In New York it was the Yankees (or, the Mariners East). I’m back to being a Yankee fan, now, since I live in a state that doesn’t have major league baseball. How can that be? It’s a shocking absence, in my opinion.

I love baseball. It carried rules for life when I was growing up about working hard to excel at something, about fairness and how you were chosen to be on the team according to your ability and not everybody got a chance to play and it didn’t scar us for life. I learned about courage with the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson. Baseball is remarkable for creating memories of a childhood. We – or, at least, I – recall sweet moments with my dad who would patiently explain to me that, yes, the players on the opposing teams were really friends off the field. Something I think about whenever I see two players, today, on opposing teams exchange hugs before or after a game. Baseball crosses genders. In 1955, the magical year, my mother was the only mother who had a transistor radio when we all played on the street after school and the moms watched from their bench position. My mother wanted us all to be able to listen to the games during the year that was finally Next Year. I once commented that there seemed to be more women at Mariners games than men. I looked it up and, statistically, Seattle does have a high population of female sports fans. Growing up, there was a woman who lived on the ground floor of our apartment building, with windows facing the courtyard, who rang a cow bell whenever a Dodger hit a homerun. I wish I actually remembered what that must have sounded like the day Gil Hodges hit four of them in regular innings in one game in 1950.

It might be spring on the farm today – finally after a long and wet and cold spell – and I might be headed up into the vineyard to prune grapes, but I can tell you I wish I were at a ball game. I’ll be listening to the sound of the crack of that bat in my head all afternoon. And, later today, Koufax goes back into baseball trick training.