For new readers (I'm humbled and thrilled by your presence!), this is the story I started this blog to tell.  Faith (which I also spell with a ph-), family, and Philadelphia Phillies baseball.  It begins with "Part the First," and so on, if you're interested in following it from the beginning.  You'll have to go back to my main list of posts; I am a Luddite (hence the Chaucer!) and don't know how to insert the pretty links.

When you've just tumbled down a mountain you'd nearly summitted--or committed an epic late-baseball-season collapse and missed the 1964 World Series, in which the Cardinals, who will be a thorn in your side for decades, go on to defeat the Damn Y****** in a Series that books of nostalgia are later written about--what's next?

When you've been so devoted to your team that you go to a Phillies game on your honeymoon, find a way--though you are hardly the idle rich--to attend one of the 1950 World Series games on their way to a 4-0 Series loss to the Damn Y******, and you never switch teams despite moving around the country several times, and then you're one move away from being home (though you don't know that yet), and then your team lays this epic collapse on you--what's next?

When your devotion to your team pales in comparison to your devotion to your faith and your family, which includes you, your wife (you went to a Phillies-Brooklyn Dodgers game on your honeymoon), and your twelve-year-old daughter, and your marriage and family life have been shadowed by the mental illness that stretches as far back (and as far forward, though you don't know that yet either) in your family tree as anyone can remember, and your wife has had to keep you going for years so that you get out of bed and go to work and don't fall into darkness--what's next?

What's next, for the Phils and the family, is rain for forty days and forty nights (which, as resident sage Glen Bateman points out in the Great American Novel, Stephen King's The Stand, is "a Hebraic idiom that really means 'no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while'").  And not some kind of warm, sweet-scented spring rain either.  A Noah-in-the-Ark like rain.  Relentless, pounding, drowning out the surface of the earth.  It happened, we know--every culture has a flood story. 

When I was a child, I loved the part of the Noah's Ark story where Noah and family and all the animals pile into the Ark, and then God shuts the door.  Now, I find that a bit terrifying: "Okay, Noah, you trusted me, you obeyed me, and now there is no going back."  And the Lord closed the door.

There's nothing that Noah and family can do but stay on the Ark and tend the animals until the floodwaters recede.  There's no way for a sports team drowning in crisis to go but forward: Opening Day 1965 arrives, and you have to move on.  There's nothing for a loving family living in the Valley of the Shadow to do but keep getting up every morning and praying for the darkness to lift. 

A spectacular tumble into the valley followed by forty days and forty nights of driving rain is an appropriate metaphor for these years of Phils and family for other reasons as well.  Think of it.  If you fall from ten feet below the summit but land in a lovely valley with thriving agriculture, clear paths, and brilliant sunshine, it isn't so hard to regroup and head back up the mountain (the 2003-2004 Boston Red Sox did just this, with style).

Falling from just below the mountain top to a valley that is in short order assaulted by darkness, and wind, and rain, where you can't keep your footing for long, and you can't see three feet in front of your face, and any flash of light is just as likely to be deadly lightning as the sun peeking through the stormclouds?  That is a different matter.

And that is where my Phils and my family find themselves from 1965-1975.  The Phils do have their bright spots, though they are so often beside the point, or wasted effort, in the way that only good things happening to Philly sports teams can be.  In 1972, for example "some guy named Mike Schmidt" (as Jayson Stark always called him) made his major league debut, and Steve Carlton--who, naturally, comes to us from the Cardinals, wins 27 games . . . the team finishes last, 37.5 games out of first. 

The rest of the decade is marked by futility--only four times in this era do they finish over .500--and, moreover, that hallmark of Philly sports, plain old oddity.  Random, strange happenstances, both on and off the field, that make you look at your friends and say, "Okay, these things just do not happen in these ways to sports fans in other cities." 

To loop back just a bit, in 1962, The Whiz Kid himself, Richie Ashburn, plays a season for the expansion Mets.  Huh?  He makes amends by returning home the next year and being a beloved Phillies radio and TV broadcaster literally until the day he dies.  In 1968, in the hangover from 1964, manager Gene Mauch is fired.  In 1969, Curt Flood indicates that he will not be traded from (who else but) the Cardinals to the Phillies, thus laying the groundwork for modern free agency.  Of course the Phils are mixed up in a pivotal moment in the sport's history, looking kind of foolish.  Of course they are.  In 1970, the venerable Shibe Park/Connie Mack stadium closes, and is succeed by Veterans Stadium, described wonderfully if ungrammatically by sportsencyclopedia.com: "The Vet is in line with trend of the times boring faceless circular cookie cutter multipurpose stadiums being built for both baseball and football."  Yup.  Not only do the Phils veer wildly between depressing and slapstick in this era; they also move in to Tacky Palace. 

My family does not fare particularly well for most of this decade either.  Right around the time of the Collapse of 1964, my grandparents and my mother move from California, where my mother spent most of her childhood, back across the country to the Baltimore suburbs.  Now, granted, proximity to the Baltimore Orioles would depress anyone, but between her father's depression, the strain on her mother, hating her new school, and missing her California friends, my mom was a very sad sixth grader.  I can't really blame the Cardinals, Damn Y******, or Braves (who I think were still in Milwaukee at this point) for this, but I'm working on it. 

Probably because none of them were having much fun in these years (and were the Phils providing happy distractions from real life for their otherwise long-suffering fans?  No, no they were not), I know little about the time the three of them spent in Maryland, but in 1966, after 19 years away, they moved home for good--family, faith, Phils, all back in one place now.  But nothing's easy, for the Phils or their phans.  I'm not exactly clear on the timeline, but somewhere in these years my great-grandfather moves in with the family, and at some other point they realize they have no money left, so my grandmother heads back to work and my mom takes over the household chores (both she and my grandmother prefer it this way, then and in later years).

Despite everything, my grandfather's depression seems to have lifted somewhat in this era; by 1978 he was on some unpronouncable psychotropic that shut him down in the bedroom but apparently kept him going everywhere else (I know this because of a handwritten anniversary letter assuring my grandmother that she's the best thing that ever happened to him, and it's the drugs, not her), so the tradeoff was made, and theirs remained a devoted marriage that lasted 54 years. 

Whatever had broken in my mom after the move to Maryland was apparently over and done with, because she had a good time in high school, even meeting her first fiance.  She goes to college for one year, then changes her mind, drops out, and goes to work.   This is the first of many shoes to drop in summer 1971.  While the Phils are playing their way to a last place finish in The Vet's inaugural season, my mom, in the space of a few months, watches her dog get killed by a car, breaks up with her fiance, and comes home one afternoon, just minutes after speaking with him on the phone, to find her grandfather dead on the couch.  No words.

Noah, a losing baseball team, a grieving family--as Robert Frost apparently said, "the only way out is through."  Sail on.  1972 brings the Phils Lefty and Schmidty (and another last-place finish, but perhaps some hope), and it brings my grandparents their 25th anniversary, and it brings my mom a chance encounter with a co-worker while she is flirting with another co-worker.  She tells Chance Encounter Co-worker, "That's a nice tie."  Chance Encounter Co-Worker looks down and awkwardly mumbles, "I have to get back to the office."  He turns and walks away.

I have been telling my father for years that my other grandmother trained him with much better manners than to take a compliment that way.  My grandmother interrupted one of my grandfather's famous naps when they were just children; my mother's first compliment bounced right off my father's nerdy workaholicism (he is the tree; I am the acorn)--existence proving ways to meet a spouse.  Growing up on these stories, I always believed I would know The One because I'd meet him in an existence-proving circumstance.  He will remember where we were, and what topics we discussed, and what he said about them, the night we met.  Existence- proving?  The One?  Do the Phillies have two Commissioner's Trophies?

In any event, my father eventually recovered himself enough to ask the nice pretty girl out on a date.  A few weeks later, my grandfather said, "This is clearly serious.  Save your money for marriage and move into our spare room."   A few months later, they were engaged.  One  year to the day from their first date, they married.  Incidentally, neither one of my parents have ever been particular baseball fans, but their parents were, and I am living proof that this can skip generations.  So when they stood before God, family, and friends in April 1973--baseball's opening month, just like both of their parents before them--and vowed to love, honor, and cherish 'til death do them part, the next link in the chain was forged.

Faith.  Family.  Love.  Baseball.  Hope.  Failure.  The future awaits.