Things passed along

"Swing level," the tall man says. "Don't try to kill it."

He is bent at the waist, his eternally angular frame assuming the rough approximation of a question mark. His right arm is extended. In his hand is a baseball.

Standing considerably closer to him than the requisite 60 feet, 6 inches is a speck of a boy who looks as if he were rush ordered from the Department of Runty Kids With Really Huge Glasses. The bat on his shoulder is almost as big as he is. It is high summer in Indiana; some indeterminate evening, twilight dawdling along as twilight tends to do in high summer, man and boy in the backyard of their neat brick home on the southeast side of Fort Wayne.

The man shakes the ball.

"Swing level," he says again. "Don't try to kill it."

He lobs the ball gently.

The boy swings level.

Above the ball. Below the ball. Above the ball again. On and on, the man shaking the ball and lobbing it, the boy swinging and missing.

"Swing level," the man keeps saying. "Don't try to kill it ..."

***

My father never raised no major leaguers.

His only son was comically small for his age and couldn't see a damn thing without the glasses that sat on his face like a pair of binoculars, the lenses thicker than the bottom of a Coke bottle. Baseballs ducked and ran for cover when he swung. Dribbling a basketball was like trying to dribble Jupiter. He couldn't throw a football 20 yards, and when he did hunters all over northeast Indiana went for their guns to bring down that quacking duck.

I was no athlete, in other words. I had the fine motor skills of a tree stump, and my track coach -- the only sport I ever quasi-participated in -- once damned me with this faint praise: "You've got great form. If you had any endurance, you could be pretty good."

So there were no "Field of Dreams" moments between us, father and son lobbing a baseball back and forth in the gloaming. Mostly this was because I couldn't catch a baseball with a three-state dragnet. And, partly, it was because my father was never more than a nominal sports fan.

Oh, he'd watch baseball or football or mostly basketball, because, at 6-foot-3, he played high school basketball the way most 6-3 boys in Indiana played it in the 1940s. For a time he was fascinated with tennis, mainly because he loved watching Bjorn Borg play. But we never really bonded over sports; the supreme irony of our mutual lives, and something we frequently laughed about, is that I grew up to be a sportswriter.

We will laugh about it no more, sadly. Dad left us yesterday in the skinny hours of morning, going peacefully in his sleep. At 91, he lived his full measure of years and more, and few men ever lived them better or more worthily. He was not famous or weighted with earthly honors or a great man as the world measures these things, but he was true and honest and everyone who ever knew him loved him. And surely there is greatness in that.

And, like all true and honest fathers, he will endure because of the things he passed along to his children.

If we never mastered the art of swinging level, for instance, we mastered other things, as father and son. Because of Dad, a former Civil War re-enactor, I am a Civil War nerd of the first order; his old re-enactor's uniform hangs in my hall closet, and I squeeze into it every Halloween (I am neither as tall nor as angular as the old man). Every few springs, alone, I make a pilgrimage to Gettysburg or Shiloh or some other Civil War haunt. That is my father's legacy.

So, too, is a general reverence for history, for the lessons it teaches that human beings routinely and blithely ignore, and for its relics. They are all around my house, these days; on the bookshelf in our den are Civil War minie balls and a chunk of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's wall and a tiny round button from a World War I German grenade, salvaged from the torn earth of the Western Front.

On another shelf is my Dad's old baseball glove. In one corner leans a cut-down hockey stick that belonged to his father, its age-dark handle wrapped in ancient black tape. And in the kitchen, on one wall in the breakfast nook, hangs a narrow knickknack shelf.

On it, carefully placed, are a clutch of wooden blocks and a glass jar of marbles. Scattered among them are several small lead soldiers, striking belligerent poses. Old campaign buttons -- two of them Roosevelt/Wallace buttons dating to 1944 -- lie at their feet, as if the soldiers were tasked with guarding them.

That shelf, and those things, have been there for so long I rarely notice them anymore. But in the pre-dawn darkness yesterday, when the phone rang and the word came that Dad was gone, I found myself looking at them again. And thanking God I'd known a man who treasured such things, and how lucky I was to be his son.

"Swing level," the tall man says. "Don't try to kill it ..."

Always, Dad. Always.