The other day, I’m at my dentist’s office, same dentist I’ve been going to since 1988, and he’s showing me an X-ray of my mouth. He points out three crowns. “I have two crowns,” I tell him. “You have three,” he says, counting them out like I’m five, “One, two, three.” He even checks my chart, which because of the length of our relationship is as fat as the erstwhile GTE Yellow Pages.
“Yep, I put three crowns in,” he says.
I can remember my first appointment with him in 1988, back when we both looked like extras from Pretty in Pink. But I don’t remember him numbing me up, drilling into my tooth, and fitting it with what would be my third crown.
Memory is very important to me... and he’s pointing to a memory cavity in my brain. I can’t even recall having a problem with that tooth, which apparently, I’ve been brushing and flossing now for a decade since thinking it was me, when it was a really a crown.
I’m in a panic about not being able to remember getting a crown.
Which makes me think about the All-Star baseball first-baseman Rod Carew.
Not that Rod Carew had crowns… he might have... I have zero information on that, but Rod Carew got a 3,000th hit, which helped elevate him to being one of the best players in the history of baseball.
And I can’t remember if I saw it. And that’s an even bigger cavity in my brain that no amount of Anbesol is going to relieve.
It’s been bothering me longer than forgetting about the crown. Did I actually see Rod Carew get his 3000th hit? I can’t remember. And that means I’ve already lost a piece of me.
Let me tell you a secret.
I fear death.
I know… pretty uncommon.
But one of the reasons I fear death is that at the moment that my life ends my memories will be erased, like a catastrophic hard drive failure or the Alexandria Library burning to the ground. And Rod Carew’s 3000th hit may have been on that hard drive, and it may be starting to fail.
You may not remember Rod Carew’s 3000th hit. I’m guessing that’s not all that disturbing to you. But for me, not remembering is an emergency claxon that tragedy is coming. Honestly, it seems like something I should remember…
like losing my virginity…
or getting my first credit card.
Going to games back in those days was always a last-minute decision… predicated on if my friends and I had recovered from our hangovers. We drove along muggy, hazy, white-light, blinding tangles of freeway to long lines of cars at the stadium entrance. We bought the cheapest seats, had a breakfast/lunch/dinner of beer and dogs and more beer and more dogs, and constructed new hangovers.
I remember knowing that Rod Carew’s 3000th hit would be a history-making moment that I could say I had witnessed. I thought I would be a more interesting person if I saw it. My grandfather saw Charles Lindbergh land in Paris. He was there, among the cheering Parisians, a college dropout who had recently sailed from New York, and just happened to be there when it happened.
That was pretty interesting. This was going to be my Lindbergh landing to tell my grandchildren about.
At the time when Rod Carew played for the Angels, I worked for KCBS-TV Channel 2 scheduling commercials, and one thing I do actually remember is looking out from my seat into the stadium, at fifty thousand fans, and thinking, “I decide what commercials you see and when you see them.”
But the memory stops there, like when the film breaks in the projector and you hear “flap, flap, flap, flap,” as the reel spins fecklessly.
I mention to my friend Malcom that I’m losing my memory and that I don’t know if I saw Rod Carew gets his 3000th hit. Malcom went to a couple baseball games with me back in the day. He says, “If you saw Rod Carew’s 3000th hit, I promise that you would remember it.”
“Maybe I just wanted to see it.” I tell him, “Maybe that’s what I’m remembering. There were so many things I wanted to do that I didn’t do. I wanted to live in Paris for two years. I wanted to live in Boston and write for The Atlantic. I wanted to buy a house, not just a house, but that big colonial in Pacific Palisades above PCH and Entrada. I wanted to hang out with girls, but they never wanted to hang out with me.
“You mean the one that fell onto PCH during the Northridge Earthquake?” he asks.
“Yeah. That was some house,” I respond.
“You’re being mawkish” he says.
“I failed to do anything I wanted to do in my 20s. If I just saw Carew’s 3000th hit, that would have been one success…,” I say.
“If you’d seen Carew’s 3,000th hit, you’d remember it,” he assures me. “Anyone would remember that.”
And so I let it go…
Until I find an Angels ticket stub from 1986 among some old papers. I type the date and Angels into Google, and…
It was not the game when Carew got his 3,000th. But that leads to search some more and find that it was in 1985. I had convinced myself it was 1986 because I remember the thing about scheduling everyone’s commercials and all the power that gave me, and I had that job in 1986. But it turns out that the hit was in 1985 and the thing about 1985 is… I kept a journal that year.
It was once the most important thing to me, a place to record all of my memories so that I never lost them.
I dig out the journal and pages drop from the failing binding. I gather them and I read about my life in 1985. There’s a girl in a black dress who dances with me all night at the Improv, and there are two girls from grad school who show up at my apartment, on my birthday, when I’m sick in bed. They bring a cake with my name on it. And there’s a girl at work, not KCBS, but the job before that, at the Robinson’s in Santa Monica, who looks up at me timidly and whispers into my cheek that I can have a girlfriend if I want. I forgot these things.
Finally, I find the entry… August 4, when I wrote, “I convinced Malcom to go to the Angel game with me. We drove down the 101 to the 5 and hit a terrible traffic jam before getting to the Big A in Anaheim. We had to stand in line and the only tickets left were in centerfield. It was John Candelaria’s first start as an Angel and he gave up five runs to the Minnesota Twins, but the Angels scored six. Rod Carew got his 3,000th hit and the entire stadium erupted. He hit it with Rich Dauer on second. They gave Carew the first base bag and the ball. Then the right field stands started screaming “Tastes Great,” and the left field stands screamed back, “Less Filling,” like a giant Miller Lite commercial.
And suddenly, I am able to fill one of my brain cavities. I am able to reconstruct a picture, be it hazy and low contrast. I can remember the hot seats in the monolith of concrete up above centerfield. I can remember the view of the Angels on the diamond. I can remember Malcom holding a beer. It’s not much, but I have these images back… they’re mine again.
And Malcom is with me in them. I call to tell him that not only did I see Rod Carew get his 3000th hit, but he saw it too. He laughs. He has absolutely zero memory of it, isn’t even sure he’s ever been to the Big A in Anaheim.
I didn’t ever live in Paris, but I did go there twice in the 80s and have been back since. I didn’t ever live in Boston, but I went there many times. And I didn’t buy the house in Pacific Palisades, but if I had, I might have been in it when it fell onto PCH.
And I did see Rod Carew’s 3,000th hit, which is something I can tell my grandchildren… if I remember.
