Stealing Home, a memoir by Ron Seybold

Stealing Home: A Father, a Son, and the Road to the Perfect Game by Ron Seybold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stealing Home is a story about a man, his son, a road trip, baseball and a historic game. The author is determined to have the most memorable vacation with his son. Ron Seybold is divorced, and sees his son on established weekends and vacation times. In spite of this, he is determined to be the father that he never had, rather than the angry father that raised him.

He faces the fact that, so far, he has been he has been just that—angry, anxious and unpleasant to be around. Without telling us in so many words, he shows us the decision he made to change, to become a father worth remembering, rather than one whose children struggle to forget. He plans an epic vacation with his son. Their strongest bonds are Simpsons quotes and baseball, so he begins there. In a pre-internet world he gathers maps, a baseball atlas, phone numbers and a credit card to put together hotels, seats at games, a convertible Pontiac Sunbird, and a plan to have a baseball road trip; nine games in eight different cities in five states.

The memoir uses the games as a framework, punctuated by memories of his own childhood, his son's earlier years, his first marriage, all of which has brought him to this trip this summer in 1994. It's a book about struggling with anxiety, about fatherhood and about baseball. It is intensely personal and resonates me on many levels. But, the brilliant thing is how many different people different aspects of the memoir will resonate with.

A veteran sports writer, Ron Seybold has written a small, powerful book that is so very readable I would recommend it to almost anybody. Take it for a spin.

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Minor Meltdown

I’ve been reading some motivational books recently—more specifically listening to audiobooks during my ungodly commute. Jen Sincero is amazing to listen to; I recommend You Are a Badass to anybody who hasn’t read it. No seriously, go get it. I’ll wait…

Something that she (and others) talk about is getting out of your comfort zone. If you want a life you’ve never had before, you’ll have to do things you’ve never done before. And a lot of those things will be different enough to be very uncomfortable. This is just what i need to hear regularly to reinforce the decision I made a few years ago to be a writer. I allow myself be talked out of it regularly, even though nobody is trying to discourage me. I just give up on myself; it’s too much work, or I’m not as talented as real writers, or they’ll just look at me as if I’m cute for trying. Or, I don’t have a degree, that’s a good one to fall back on. Listening to these motivational materials is so effective to help us keep momentum when the doubts attack.

Aside from writing, my partner has challenged me, himself and another friend of ours to have 5 paintings done by mid-December. Not a problem, I thought as I penciled in time on my calendar. We’ve been painting with each other for over a year and we’re in the flow. So I thought.

Somehow this is more real. This time I have an idea that I’m really excited about. I mean, this has potential and I can’t wait to see the series up and in person. Before that, though, i have to paint it, which is what I began to do yesterday. I decided to get in the studio and get going.

First, I had to have coffee. Then, I needed a nap. I was thinking about my wonderful ideas and how I would execute them. Which made me terrified. Like, I-couldn’t-get-out-of-bed terrified. This is irrational because, as I’ve said, we’ve been painting together for a while. Our friend is out of town, and Partner was at work. It was just going to be me painting in peaceful solitude with my own music playing and cats keeping me company. So, I breathed and got out of bed to get to work.

First I was angry at everybody. Then, I had to find a reason to be angry at them, which wasn’t all that difficult. Why did you stack stuff on top of my canvas? Now it’s all warped. So, I got a new canvass out. Who took my ruler! How am I supposed to draw a straight line without a ruler. And my paint brushes; where are they!? Doesn’t anybody around here respect my stuff?! I’m never painting in this studio again. I will find someplace by myself to paint. WHY DOES EVERYBODY HATE ME? I’M NEVER TALKING TO ANYBODY EVER AGAIN EVER!

The canvas can be fixed by getting it wet; it should tighten up again. Oh, and the paint brushes were neatly standing in a container designed specifically to hold paint brushes.

Breathe.

I approached the canvas. This was really really frightening. I’ve been slapping paint on things pretty regularly for over a year, but this… this was a brilliant idea that I love and that I think has true potential. If I messed this up I’m messing up my dream. I thought about taking another nap right at this point. Tomorrow is a good day to start painting.

Breathe. Get back to work.

I have a fairly good eye for sketching, but that part of my mind was blinded. So, after a few pencil lines that I didn’t like were on the canvas, I sat down and looked at the picture I was working from. I thought back to high school when we would put a grid over a picture, then make a grid on our drawing paper and break it down that way. It’s like the drawing grids in the Dell Variety Puzzle magazine; you don’t know what you’re drawing; you’re just making each square in the grid look like it does in the guide, and when it’s filled in you see you’ve drawn a turtle, or a person riding a bike. If you had known you were drawing a person, your left brain would have kicked in and messed it up trying to make it look like a person. But, doing it square by square, your right brain can just do space relationships.

I pulled up my picture on the computer again, lightened it, overlay a grid and printed it. Then, I lightly sketched a larger grid on my canvass. Panic receded and a peace fell over me as I made lines I was drawing in each square match the each individual square in the reference picture. I threw my left brain off course even more by working on non-adjacent sections. I’d do the top middle, then go down to the bottom left, just making the lines match. Partner came in at some point and aimed a light at my canvas, which helped immensely. (Don’t tell him about my fit earlier.) (But seriously, this is why we need coaches, editors and people with other perspectives in our lives.)

I stepped back, and I liked what I saw. The sketch was coming along to be what I wanted. It needed something else that I couldn’t put my finger on, so I stopped. I came inside and began writing again. Honestly, after all that I did need a nap. While lying down with my cats I got a nudge from inside saying that I didn’t have to stay 100% faithful to the reference picture. I listened, and the feeling inside me said I could move the angles of a couple of straight lines in order to make the perspective more dramatic. I feel like that’s going to improve it greatly, and I’m glad I didn’t begin painting right away.

Jen did warn that if we weren’t 100% committed to make a change—like become a visual artist no matter what—then as soon as things got tough we would give up. Nothing was even all that difficult and I was ready to quit and take a nap. This is, if I’m not mistaken, when I usually give up. So, I will persevere. I’ve done it before when I had decided I would do something. In my early 20’s I learned Spanish in spite of things being thrown in my way, thinks like not speaking Spanish, some people making fun of me, or scorning me, or simply my being really really bad at it and clumsy. I thought I was giving up a few times, but before I even properly quit trying, I was listening to Spanish music again trying to make out the lyrics. This just shows that I CAN do these things; I just have to WANT to do them, and DECIDE to do them.

Thank you for sharing this meltdown with me. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

Early Morning Negotiations

I have been getting up at 4 AM recently. Let me clarify, I have been setting my alarm for 4 AM recently, so that I can write in the morning before going to my day job. I have decided that I'm going to write and be published and I am trying to get up early because I can write better in the early morning while it’s quiet—there are fewer distractions, nobody trying to talk or cook or ask me questions. My brain is not tired from working all day. Four in the morning is a great time for many reasons, but it takes discipline.

This is where I fight with myself a little bit. Early Morning Earnest feels that if he wakes up at this ungodly hour, he deserves to hit the snooze button at least twice. This leaves me getting up at 4:30 AM, which is still a lot of time, but it's not exactly what I was shooting for. Daytime Earnest tends to lose his patience with this. What's the point of waking up early, just to go back to sleep? Of course you deserve kudos for being woken up early—kudos like having your work published and in stores. If you wanted sleep, then you could set the alarm for 4:30. But, with that reasoning we'd be getting up at 5. Daytime Earnest refuses to set the alarm for 3:30 just to give Early Morning Earnest a chance to hit snooze twice, and knowing that twit he'd decide that he was allowed 3 snoozes.

We're still in negotiations.

Another Step Forward

A few years ago my partner and I went to New Orleans. I had never been, and I was worried that a hurricane might come along and wash it away completely before I got a chance to see it. I had talked about visiting New Orleans before, and the response was always, "We need to do that some day. We need to plan it." And then another few years would go by. So one day I decided that we were going and I began making plans on my own, with my sister's encouragement and a confused partner who kept trying to change the plan, or justify the plan by making it into a business trip, or find a cheaper hotel. But, that's why I took on the planning myself, to make sure it was a trip that I wanted to take. We stayed in a Bed & Breakfast on St. Charles Avenue, which was a converted mansion. We took a tour of the Garden District, the high point of which was the cemetery. (I love the way they handle above-ground graves. We could totally do that here in Texas.) We partied on Bourbon Street and visited art galleries and ate food, ate beignets and drank coffee. And ate some more.

I had taken a week off for the occasion. We left for NOLA on Saturday and stayed three nights. When we got back I was stoked. I was going to start a new life as an artist; I was going to leave my soul-sucking job. I was going to be different; I was going to be a new kind of fabulous with mad scientist hair. And mad scientist eyebrows.

I was going for it.

By the end of my week off I had talked myself down from my high. I had responsibilities and my art wasn't all that, and I'm too old to start something so drastic, and the way my friends sell art in festivals is tedious. So, I continued my job. (In all fairness, I learned a lot at that job, and stretched my limits in many ways. But it was still a soul-sucking job.)

Here I am over 10 years later looking back and wondering, Why? Why couldn't I have ridden that wave? Why did I talk myself out of it? Now I think about the fact that we all have only one body, which doesn't last much more than a hundred years, we live on a tiny planet in a solar system of nine planets (you're still a planet in my book, Pluto) that's in a ginormous galaxy, which itself is in an unfathomably large universe. Way back down here on this microscopic little spec called Earth, my plans to have fun making art, making people happy and making a living was irresponsible? To whom? I clearly had some ideas about life ingrained into my head and I don't even know where they came from. Perhaps a lack of security led me to cling to mediocrity. My job was not one that took me traveling and eating out with clients and truth be told, it barely had any security whatsoever. (One year about 5 people were fired in a matter of a month, and that was just from my department.) I was clinging desperately, hoping to die with enough money to buy food.

Now, I'm looking around again. I have a different job now, one that I briefly allowed to be a soul-sucker, but which I eventually got a handle on. It is not, however, a career—not for me anyway. I have written a novelette that I believe in, and I'm oh-so-close to being finished with a second writing of a mystery novel. I have a circle of friends who are creatives and I have paint and canvasses and ideas. I have lots of ideas for my art and for my partner's art and there is a spark inside of me that is growing into a flame again.

I left my previous job and came to this one with the express intent of writing and making money with art. Scary stuff, leaving behind secure mediocrity, looking for something more. Some people didn't believe in me and I have a lifetime of being a people-pleaser that I'm working against. "Oh, you don't think I can seriously make money with my art? You're probably right. I'm sorry." That’s more or less how it went down. And those people weren’t even invested in my life, just random people not believing in me. But, I’m back and it didn’t take me ten years this time. I will make art. I will be published. I will make money at it. I WILL be fabulous.

One other thing I'll say before I sign off. If you have depression or anxiety, deal with it. Go now. Stop what you're doing and find professionals who can help. The first person you find may not click with you, so you might have to look more than once for help. Do not give up. I was in the throws of depression years ago and I had this tiny little part of my mind that knew that there was a life that wasn't this dark. I call it a mustard seed of faith. There were times when I couldn't feel that other life; I couldn't even remember what it was like to want to live. But, that faith kept me going. I didn't know what a happy life would look like, but I did know that such a thing existed and I would have to keep working at it. So, if you are suffering from this, know that a life exists that is worth living, even if you can't feel it at the moment, even if you can't believe it at the moment. Know that it's true, even when you can't believe it. That's faith.

Cat in the Grass

Summertime