At some point, on a cool summer evening, Mike listened to a baseball game crackle out of his back porch window for the last time in his life. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what happened in the game. But I hope it was perfect.

The last time I did sit on the patio with him, joining his nightly tradition, we were listening to one of those agonizing games in which play after play seems to mock you with its absurdity. Sinking into our faux-wicker patio chairs, we groaned and pulled our hair as the San Francisco Giants left another runner stranded at third, grounded into another flimsy double-play, dropped an easy fly ball to blow their once comfortable lead. We didn’t hear the Giants score even a run. As the night set in we had to turn off the game.

I hope my grandfather’s last game wasn’t like that one. I hope it was exhilarating. In my imagination, Mike doesn’t notice the porch lights turn on as daylight slinks to shadow; he is glued to his seat. Maybe Patrick Bailey nails a tag at home or Yaz drives in the tying run on a fluke triple. Like always, the television volume is on mute, and the radio broadcast booms around him instead. Why? Because his son’s voice is the one that narrates the twists and turns, the wild pitches and three-run-homers, of every Giants game. Mike takes his greatest pride in his son’s work, his art: when my father told Mike he wanted to pursue sports broadcasting, he offered no passive aggressive ultimatums. When my dad struggled, he held no judgment. He trusted his son’s work ethic, and now he gets to watch as his passion blooms into a life.

Over the radio my dad’s voice bursts with electricity and Mike beams. 

I’ve been thinking of my grandfather’s life in two categories recently: summer baseball evenings, and everything else. This is an extremity, of course. But when he wasn’t immersed in a scene so all-encompassing, teeming with emotion and absolute sensory presence, the events of Mike’s life were mostly in-betweens. Every Sunday night, he drove three hours to his job’s headquarters, where he’d stay in a small apartment away from home for the workweek. Eyes straight ahead, these commutes were a means to an end. If he spent the week working diligently, he’d get to return home come Friday afternoon. Back to his family, his wife, the cool dusk and the drone of lazy cicada songs.

I often worried that his in-between moments were as monotonous as they seemed. Repeat the same gardening tasks every week, reheat the leftovers after work, get out of bed before dawn again and again. He was alone most of the time. He never complained. But was Mike’s faithful tolerance contingent on the eventual gratification of a summer ballgame or home-cooked family meal? Was there nothing in those in-between moments that held marvel in and of itself? I now wonder if, on his weekly slog back to work, the Virginia interstate ever whisked him into melancholy. If he ever pulled over just to stargaze or take a nice deep breath, to soak in that particular side of the road. I wonder if he had a favorite stretch of highway.

On that June day where we heard the Giants’ pitiful fall to some middling National League team, my grandfather and I abandoned our patio seats to watch the bats that streak across the twilight sky in his backyard every summer. We used to play this game often; standing side by side, we’d search the dusk, racing to be the first to point one out. The exasperation of the abysmal baseball game faded completely, unimportant in the face of purple sky and the leathery beat of secret wings. Our excited whispers hung suspended in the air like thick smoke, swirling, enveloping, dissipating slowly. Our breath, silently aflame.

Our batwatching only ensued from a painfully mediocre ballgame, and maybe those tense baseball evenings were so sweet solely because of the dragging weeks of work that had to precede them. Although it was rare, Mike’s steady patience always led to something magical in the end. It was a matter of making it there.

But the morning Mike died was an in-between: the start to an average day in an average week that was supposed to float him somewhere momentarily perfect, not plant him on the apartment floor — the temporary place he stayed only to work, miles from his cherished home — forever. The image breaks me. To ease it I dream that he fled his flesh and flew over the interstate one more time. Whisked his soul back to the site of sublime baseball evenings, as his own twilight pressed its way in, all around, too steady to stop.