Panpipes & Baseball

Sixteen years later, and I still pull it out every summer: Sombra Aymara, the somehow-chalky sound of South American panpipes. My little sister bought the CD on the cobblestones of a hot summer fair in August, sucked in by live music piping between plates of funnel cakes and stalls of homemade wind chimes. Suddenly, it was the only music we listened to that summer, every day, all six of us kids; we loved it. August was the month of panpipes, a new sound in a young world.

There was something else new that summer, something so linked with my hometown that it is one and the same. St. Louis and Baseball.

I was thirteen years old the warm summer of 1998, the summer of the home run chase, the summer an entire city was in love with one man. The muscle and brawn of Mark McGwire. Can it really be explained, this magnetic attraction to one swing of the bat? My sister and I still talk about it from time to time, the allure of watching Big Mac pound a home run into the stands. We weren't the only ones. One city, addicted.

As the chase intensified – and we listened to more panpipes between nightly games – there were rumors running around for weeks that this wonder of mankind lived maybe a mile down the road from our long-time childhood home. Maybe half a mile. For a summer, we were obsessed with finding out for sure. My sister was too young to join me, but I remember every possible Friday biking one neighborhood over with a friend, just to figure out which house was his. To be so close to greatness! It was a game, really. Which castle did he own? Was it the one with a false balcony and fountains, or the modern one with the funny angles? I would bring reports back to my sister. “I'm sure this is the one.” “I think we finally found it.” “I don't know… There were tons of plants in the windows.” “Maybe it was his.” We never knew. But it didn't stop us from hovering like nervous rabbits around the streets – and, yes, sometimes the windows – hoping a great sign would be revealed that, indeed, a home run prodigy did live within.

And while we watched the chase, and biked to chase, we listened to more panpipes. So much panpipe. The connection was irrelevant, I'm sure. In no way do panpipes and baseball logically mix. But even this long time later, I hear the panpipes and still immediately see the red hair and ox-strong arms of our first baseman smashing another one somewhere just south of outer space. The man who first inspired me to love baseball.