My mother isn't your average lady.
Take her birthday, for example: She has never asked for jewelry, clothing or elaborate cards. She couldn't be bothered to go to the theater district to see a show or to Lincoln Center for an opera or ballet -- things my dad wished she would do with him. If we bought her expensive chocolates, she would laugh. If we planned her a day at a beautiful spa, she'd just give a forced smile.
So we don't do these things. Instead, we give Mama Jacobs the things that she insists make her happiest: her family sprawled across our living room in our usual spots, and her boy Derek Jeter in his -- shortstop. Her birthday tradition is to watch all nine innings of a Yankee game with her kids and husband. Her family and her Yanks. It's that simple.
But my mom's a unique baseball fan because she doesn't submit to the ups and downs that come with wins and losses. Most fans are diehards; they celebrate the good times and mourn the bad.
But my mom has never viewed her relationship with her Yanks as a roller coaster ride on which she's just a passenger. She somehow sees the beauty of her team and the beauty of baseball in every game. Sure, a win feels good, but a loss just tells a different kind of story, and that story still involves the 25 men to whom she feels intense loyalty. That's why she refuses to change the channel whether the Yankees are up 10-0 or down 10-0. It's why she almost never misses a game. See, my mama loves her Yanks like she loves her children: unconditionally.
She wasn't always a rabid sports fan. I remember being a little kid and explaining to her what exactly a "dropped third strike" was. But she's always been an athlete. She was a tomboy from Queens who grew up playing sports with her older brother and his friends. She was the "Ice Box" of the neighborhood, the "Spinelli" to my uncle's "T.J."
As she got older, she likes to say, she realized she was a girl. She discovered ballet and discovered that, like just about everything else she tried her hand at, she was really good at it. So she moved her way up in the dancing world and starred at the Lincoln Center and eventually danced with the prestigious Joffrey Company.
Eventually she grew too old for ballet -- ballet years are a lot like dog years -- and became a professional model. She found that, like sports in the schoolyard and ballet on stage, modeling came easy to her. She did it for a while and made enough money to pay her way through college and graduate school. She married my dad, who was never a huge sports fan, so sports weren't a part of her life for a while.
Then I showed up. Even though I wasn't the sort of baby born with a Yankees hat on my head, I fell in love with sports quickly -- and I fell hard. And that was all she needed to get back on the wagon. Now, I have the mom who can name every player on the Yankees' 25-man roster, the mom who has a crush on the Upton brothers.
The other day, she got a phone call from her friend Sally asking if she was available to go to a dinner party in April. My mom responded with a mumbled "Um, I think ... let me just ... Can you hold on just a second?" She made a mad scramble out of the kitchen, running down the hallway toward my room like a little kid who was snooping around for her Christmas presents and heard herparents walking in the front door. She checked my Yankees schedule and saw they had a game that night.
She picked up the phone and told Sally that she wasn't going to be in town that day.
And there's Mama Jacobs for you, the woman who'd rather skip her friend's dinner party than miss one game out of 162. Gotta love her.
