Leitch - Are we winning?: fathers and sons in the new golden age of baseball

In which your narrator tries
not to slap a three-year-old.

UNCLE WILL! UNCLE WILL! WAKE UP!

Im in a guest room. Its one of those guest rooms that young couples who are expecting large families, but havent gotten there yet, have for their old friends visiting from out of town who are too cheap to spring for a hotel. Someday there will be a child here. Right now, theres a thirty-two-year-old nursing a hangover. Theres a dresser, a mattress, a clock, and some piece of Ikea art on the wall. No one cares much about this room. Its a room to be named later.

I arrived at Mikes early the evening before. He wasnt home from the newspaper yet, so it was me, his wife Joan, the other leg of our college triumvirate, and their son, Jack. Jack is three years old, which means hes just starting to develop a personality that doesnt make his parents want to put him through a wall half the time. The suburban parents dont quite know what to do with their single friend from halfway across the country, so Joan asked if I wanted to accompany her and Jack for a walk.

They live in the Chicago suburb of Lisle, in a clean, safe, empty neighborhood with a collection of early thirtysomethings raising small children, finally taking life seriously, following in the footsteps of their parents, hesitantly. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers writes about how graduates of the University of Illinois, like Mike and Joan, inevitably end up living in Chicago proper before upgrading to the suburbs when grown-up life beckons. So few make it out of the state, Eggers wrote. To most, Chicago was Oz, anything beyond it was China, the moon. The University of Illinois has sort of a thirty-year round-trip shuttle bus. You grow up in the Chicago suburbs, you head downstate for four years of college, you come back up to Chicago to live in the city until you become the oldest guy at the bar and/or start having baby fever, and then you move to the suburbs and put your children through the exact same thing. In a weird way, its kind of a well-rounded life; youve pretty much covered all your bases. This is what Mike and Joan have done. They seem happy with it. I suspect theyre right. They sure as hell pay less for their home than I do for my apartment in New York, and they can move around in there without knocking over a shelf too.

Joan pulled Jack behind her in a wagon while I resisted the temptation to light a cigarette. The family park was just a couple of blocks away, as much as this twisting cul-de-sac land had blocks, and a few children ran screaming past us while their parents watched, more bored than nervous. I noticed that the playground joys of my youth are a lot safer than they once were. The teeter-totter, which was mostly used for sadistic Jump Off So You Can Free Fall The Child On The Other End To The Ground games when I was young, has been kid-proofed. You sit on one end, and your opposite sits diagonal to you. Neither one of you even approaches the ground. The merry-go-round, the contraption responsible for 35 percent of my bodily scars, has a governor to make sure it doesnt go too fast. Joan, humoring my line of inquiry, pointed out that a kid last week still found a way to break his leg on the slide, which might as well have been made of foam. Do what you want, but kids will always find a way to hurt themselves.

On the way back, Jack asked me, whom hed taken to calling Uncle Will, to pull him on the wagon. I eyed Joan for approval, and she nodded, glad to have a few minutes off. I pulled him faster than I probably should have, and he screamed in joy. So did I. Back at the house, sweating, I asked Joan if I went too fast. You cant go fast enough for him, she said. I wish I had the energy of either one of you.

Jack is a fun kid. Before he went to bed last night, I showed him my iPhone, and an application called Koi Pond, which provides a serene fake-fish-tank environment where you can touch the screen and splash the fish around. Its meant to be soothing. He enjoyed this for about fifteen seconds before asking what else? Like all boys, he preferred the game where you get to shoot zombies.

Whats a zombie? he asked.