What I learned in the bleachers as a youth-baseball immigrant dad

Author Rav Grewal-Kök’s son, No. 34, and his baseball travel team teammates.

(Courtesy of Rav Grewal-Kök )

I spent a recent Sunday in Norwalk, watching 12-year-olds play baseball on a field nestled between a juvenile prison and two sets of railway tracks. It was a hot, dry day. Any trace of a breeze carried the smell of diesel fumes from the industrial zone over the tracks. Still, there was no place I’d rather have been.

Friends of mine who don’t have children, or who have children who aren’t obsessed with sports, wonder at me. For much of the year, I wake up early on weekends to take my son from our home in Atwater Village to tournaments with his travel team. We’ve driven to Sylmar, West Covina, Jurupa Valley, Irvine, Ladera Ranch and San Diego. I’ve turned down invitations to go on camping trips and weekends away in Vegas and New Orleans. Though I have a novel that just came out , I’m not going on a book tour. All this because I don’t want to miss any of the action on the field.

As the seasons turn, I find myself filled with gratitude, instead of regret. It’s not only that I’m proud of my son for committing to a sport he loves. Nor is it the consolation of watching him grow stronger and more confident while my own body ages and declines. I appreciate the hours my son and I (and often my wife, and sometimes our teenage daughter), spend driving to and from tournaments — hours when we talk, and listen to music and witness the sprawling, varied life of this region. And I have other, yet more personal reasons.

As a boy growing up in Hong Kong and western Canada, I knew the United States from movies and television and a handful of books (Twain, Steinbeck, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”). I didn’t spend any significant time in this country until I went to college in Montreal, where I was a sprinter on McGill’s track team. Each year we traveled to meets in New York and New England. I looked forward to the road trips to Syracuse University, Dartmouth, Harvard. Even in the depths of a northeastern winter, the indoor tracks were warm and bright. I was attracted to the energy and optimism of the young Americans I competed against. I liked the way they talked. In a way, their language was calling me.

Back in Montreal I decided on an English major but spent less time with Shakespeare than with American novels. I read Faulkner and Hemingway after sessions on the track and in the weight room. I watched American movies, listened to American music. Eventually, I enrolled in an American law school, fell in love with and married an American woman, in time became a citizen myself.

Baseball, the most American game, one I never played as a child, has given me a broader perspective on American life. I’ve spent so many nights and weekends with the same group of travel team parents that they’ve become a kind of extended family — a rare thing, in this atomized age, for a man in his 40s. I can yell as loudly as the next parent, but I also like to stand at the back of the bleachers or the foul netting and listen to the others as they talk and cheer. When I hear one of their pet phrases — “Be a wall, boys!”; “Show me something, Papa!”; “Everybody bangs, bang bang!” — a thrill runs through me. These men are speaking a uniquely American language, one so fresh and welcoming and funny — so perfect, to my ear — that I can’t help but adopt snippets of it as my own.

Though the games can mount to moments of high drama, there are languors too. When the action slows, I talk with the others. A ballpark, like a bar, isn’t the place to discuss politics or religion. Except that when you spend so much time with the same group of men and women, when you see them more regularly than your sister or parents or decades-long friends, you do.

My own political views put me on the left, in the American context. I’ve lived only in blue cities in this country. Most of the people I’ve met — lawyers first, then, after I started to write, other writers and artists — have been liberals or leftists. Like attracts like. I’ve had friends who have identified as socialists, anarchists and Greens, but in the 20 years since I graduated from law school, and before my son joined his travel team, I don’t think I ever befriended a Republican. I’m not alone. The data show that Americans are segregating themselves by ideology as never before.

That’s changed now for me. The parents on our team come from diverse backgrounds (Mexican, Korean, Armenian, Italian, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Turkish, German, my own Punjabi) and work a range of jobs (accountant, salesman, firefighter, mechanic, retail clerk, publicist, nonprofit director, county lawyer). They hold a range of political beliefs. But all of them, including the ones who have told me they voted for President Trump, are generous, engaging, devoted to their families. They cheer for my son as they cheer for their own. While we have our differences, we are not strangers. It’s a simple lesson, even a childish one. Perhaps it’s right that I learned it while watching children play.

For people who share my politics, every day since the inauguration has brought bad news. Of course I’m worried about the future. But for all our failures as a nation, I’ve also seen that so many ordinary Americans still value decency and open-heartedness. No one is unreachable. I remind myself of that truth, and I know it’s not yet time to despair.

Rav Grewal-Kök’s stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Ploughshares, New England Review and elsewhere. His first novel, “The Snares,” was published April 1. ravgrewalkok.com