If we ran into each other Thursday night at Floydada’s Christmas parade, you might have noticed I was wearing a New York Mets baseball cap. I am not a Mets fan, I’ve never been to a game at their stadium, but I have a soft spot for Mets hats.
It all started because my mother (God rest her soul) had no idea what a New York Yankees logo looked like.
It’s not that I was a Yankees fan either. In fact, I cried tears of real joy when Neftali Feliz struck out Alex Rodriguez to send the Rangers to the 2010 World Series. But that’s not what this story is about.
My mother often traveled to Colorado Springs for work, and many times her company put her up at the nicest hotel in the city. She was there in the summer of 1990 when someone with her group mentioned that George Steinbrenner was in the hotel lobby with them. Her 11-year-old being a huge baseball fan (Rangers, if you hadn’t noticed above), she decided to try and get an autograph.
She succeeded, and when she got home she presented me a Broadmoor Resort cocktail napkin signed “To Ryan, a future Yankee, George Steinbrenner.” I was thrilled — everyone knows about the legendary owner. Plus, that was like a contract, right?
That’s when Mom hatched the plan to buy me the aforementioned Yankees hat.
I remember when she gave me the hat she thought was the right team. I opened it to a look of slight confusion — it was a little like the scene in the Canadian tale “The Hockey Sweater,” but instead of protest, I thanked her and gently told her about the gaffe, because it WAS at least a nice hat.
I wore that hat almost as much as I wore my beloved Rangers hat. But wearing it to my counselor’s office would forever change the hat’s meaning to me.
I had recently started meeting with my counselor twice a month to talk about a number of issues, including my parents’ divorce and growing up with a chronic illness. She knew I played little league but we hadn’t really talked baseball until she saw that orange “NY” on my hat. She asked me what I knew about the Mets, and if I followed much of their history. The only things I knew for certain was that Nolan Ryan had pitched for them when they won the World Series in 1969.
It turns out she knew someone else who was on that “Amazing Mets” team, and on a lot of Mets teams of the 60s and 70s — her brother, First Baseman Ed Kranepool. All of the sudden I knew someone who knew someone famous. It was like playing that 6-degrees of separation game before it was a thing.
We also now had something to talk about, something to bond over. She even got me writing to her brother, who sent me an autographed copy of his 1972 Topps baseball card. Eventually I even sent him the hat to sign, which he obliged.
I wore that hat until it fell apart, literally. The bill started coming loose before my family got me to agree to stop wearing it. Thirty years on I think about the mixup that led me to that hat, and what it came to mean for my early life and growing up. And while I don’t have that hat or my mother around anymore, I have the memory.
This holiday I hope you have a memory of a gift that brought you joy, even if it wasn’t quite what you expected.
Merry Christmas.
