Finding a way to live: a few thoughts on grandma’s, happiness, baseball, gambling, drinking, smoking, kitchen’s, friends, children, parents, love, life and death.

1. I was 12-years-old when my grandfather Dennis Poduska died. It was my first experience with death and, as most first experiences go, I was bad at it.

After the burial as everyone was walking from the grave to their cars I turned to my uncle and said something along the lines of, “Well, at least now Grandpa is up in heaven with all of his favorite Yankees.”

My uncle didn’t give me the kind of response I had wanted, which was some sort of smile and firm grasp on the shoulder, something that reaffirmed my belief in heaven as baseball utopia.

But I didn’t understand what my uncle - as a grown man, a father, and a son of recently deceased parent - did. Death has nothing to do with baseball.

That fact has remained with me to this day and will remain with me until the day I die: death has nothing to do with baseball.

My grandmother Dolores Poduska died on June 10.

Two weeks before she passed her family came down to be with her in a hospice center in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and we were able to sit with her and talk with her and hear some of her stories and tell her some of our memories.

My grandma held out much longer than anyone expected and a few days later she told my mother, her daughter, about how her favorite place to be in the world was the kitchen of her home in Laurens, Iowa.

Now, my grandmother loved her family, she loved to cook, she loved to play cards, she loved to smoke cigarettes and she loved to have a drink, and there was one place where all of those wonderful vices could mingle into a stew of pure enjoyment for her, and that was the kitchen.

She didn’t love the kitchen because of the furniture or the appliances or the sink, of course. She loved it because it grappled that joyful diaspora of her favorite things into one cozy place. She was the king in that kitchen, and in that kitchen her world was full.

My father and I left Iowa to go back to Minnesota on May 23 after that initial visit. No one was certain about how long she had to live but my father had been there for four days and needed to get home. My mother stayed behind.

On the way home we listened to the Twins beat the Brewers, and 19 days later my grandma died.

2. I have often thought, and I think many people do, about what it would mean to die. About what it would feel like and what would happen and where it would lead or not lead. It is one of two fantastic and utterly incomprehensible gifts that we all share. We share our beginning and we share our end.

As far as my limited mind can grasp what we do for our life, what we do in the middle of those (x,y) points, is to try and find some kind of fulfillment that can make us happier and hopefully make those around us happier. That is all.

What else could there be?

And surely it is within that simple and tiring quest for happiness that we all begin to draft some idea of what a personal heaven would be. Because if there is a heaven it would have to be something like constant and sustained happiness.

That doesn’t mean self-indulgence and greed, it just means base-level happiness, a way to sustain yourself for the benefit of you and the world around you.

And my grandmother found that in the kitchen.

So, logically speaking:

Heaven is happiness

Happiness (for my grandmother) is the kitchen.

Therefore heaven is the kitchen.

3. On the Tuesday after her funeral, my father and I went to the Twins/Pirates game.

We didn’t go for an exercise in catharsis, we went to enjoy the game. We went for an early Father’s Day gift. We went to have a beer and watch the girls go by and listen to the bat and watch Joe Mauer. And we stayed late through a bad game to watch Joe Mauer.

Now, if I ever have kids and I ever have a death bed I can guarantee that at no point will I ever say that my favorite place in the world was at the Metrodome on a summer evening.

Just won’t happen.

That isn’t the point.

Again, it isn’t catharsis.

Death has nothing to do with baseball.

But, what I have found myself thinking more and more about - and I have thought about it exhaustively - is what that meant when my grandmother said that her favorite place in the world was in her kitchen, and how that thought gave her happiness in her final days.

Or on a more basic level I guess I have just been thinking about what happiness is.

And while it may be a stupid and endlessly digressive thought it is nonetheless necessary for me personally if I am to find some way to cope with losing someone I loved on the purest level.

As a quick aside I think I should also mention that I have come to the conclusion that grandmother’s teach children about true love.

This is not the love of a parent which is battle-tested and necessarily weighted by the over-arching necessity of teaching children how to live in a world where they can constantly and endlessly screw up.

Not that love. But the love that you feel if you’ve ever loved a woman (or a man if we have a female reader - or if you’re into men) for the first time. If you’ve ever felt that sort of disgusting and constant love where you start acting stupid and immature and somewhat childish because all of a sudden your head is overflowing with a usually sedate emotion that has come to life like one of those robotic beasts in War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, and that bastard robot just burrows out of the ground (ostensibly your heart) and flies 1,000 feet into the sky (ostensibly your head) and just begins shooting hellfire all over your life.

That kind of love.

That’s grandma love.

And I loved my grandma endlessly and she loved me back, and so if she is gone than it is imperative that I consider what she meant to me, and how she lived, and what she meant to herself, and I have to seriously consider what it meant when she said that in her kitchen her life was complete.

4. I would say that without question I find happiness in watching baseball, and I find it often.

When my father and I went to that Twins/Pirates game I remember just staring at Mauer behind the plate. He had a certain bevy of routines that were oddly fascinating to watch: the way he dangled his glove lightly between his legs before snapping it up right as the pitcher delivered to home, the way he constantly swept dirt behind home plate starting with his right leg sweeping from left to right and then his left leg from right to left, or the way he would sit down on the pads over his calf muscles right up until the pitch was delivered and than stand just so slightly to create a slight and minimum momentum towards the pitch as it came in.

They weren’t of any real importance, but I remember just smiling and thinking that this is a great thing: to see a great athlete in person. It’s probably an odd thing to say, that watching a grown-man play a sport brings you happiness, but there it is.

5. Still, life isn’t just about happiness. Happiness as an emotional state and entity must have a direct and polar opposite, and unhappiness or anger or depression or sadness comes in a multitude of forms.

My grandmother was an addict. She had strong and nearly life-long addictions. Now, as a grandson I didn’t pick up on any of this until I was about 16. I just loved the woman, she loved me back, we ate awesome food, I rubbed my her scalp all the time, I often stretched the skin on her hands until it was tight and she looked young, I played with her penny jar until she gave me some pennies, she bought me pocket-casino games and spoiled me without hesitation.

She was Grandma Poduska. She was pure love.

But, she was also Grandma Poduska who had a serious and debilitating drinking problem and once chain-smoked in uber-defiance in-front of the whole family as her body was beginning to wilt away and it was apparent she needed care to survive.

She was and is and always will be imperfect.

I’ve always loved imperfect people. I think they’re beyond great. Better than perfect people of course - of which there is none (or only a handful if you subscribe to any number of religions). So, I don’t look down on my grandma for being imperfect and I don’t think she would look down on me for my imperfections.

I neglect everything. Waste everything. I figure I suffer from pride, greed,  envy, lust, occasional gluttony, occasional wrath, and occasional sloth.

That’s all seven of the big ones.

All seven, and I would imagine that at some point in her life my grandma suffered from all seven too.

We were and are and always will be imperfect, and even when she was at the apex of her happiness in the kitchen I imagine that she wasn’t without her imperfections there either.

And while I can often find happiness watching baseball I remember once at a Twins/Red Sox game in 2008 I yelled something along the lines of, “You stupid mother fuc#er!” from the fourth row of the upper-deck bleachers to Ron Gardenhire for not bringing in Joe Nathan in the eighth inning. There were families everywhere. It was right near the kid’s section. I was drunker than hell. Now, Gardy couldn’t hear me, but all those kids could.

We were and we are and we always will be.

6. I really haven’t followed baseball closely for about two months here. Even at the Twins/Pirates game there wasn’t much anger in the loss. I remember my father and I ascending to the exits and briefly revisiting some of the key plays, but there wasn’t much malice in the discussion, I guess we decided there was always the afternoon game on Wednesday.

Still, lately I find myself getting back into it. There still isn’t really any passion. I just kind of watch and especially wait for the Mauer at-bats and at crucial moments I may pay closer attention, but I certainly don’t pace anymore.

I used to pace all the time.

I remember in a White Sox game in 2007 when the Twins were climbing after the Tigers I literally walked from the living room to the kitchen four or five times while Joe Nathan pitched the ninth inning of a one-run game. I had a whole cosmic plan for how to send Nathan good vibes all the way at U.S. Cellular.

But, I haven’t paced much lately, because death brings out the grief and the questions of what it all means.

Still, I guess that probably isn’t what my grandma would want from me.

I often think that baseball is a pointless diversion from the key issues of family and friends and real-life relationships, and my grandmother loved her family and friends first and foremost until the day she died.

But of course there’s always the fact that my grandma loved to gamble.

Absolutely, 120 percent loved it.

My cousin Jenny and I took her gambling once after she had been diagnosed with cancer AND broken her neck falling out of bed.

And she told us to go somewhere else while she played.

I guarantee that in a quiet moment she would have openly admited that given the opportunity to have a slot machine in the kicthen right next to all of her kids and grand kids and great grand kids she would have taken it without hesitation.

I imagine that if there had been a slot-machine in that kitchen and it was over my right shoulder she would have broken mid-conversation to pull that lever and give it a spin.

She loved to gamble.

She had vices.

She was imperfect.

She was a fully-formed and god-blessed and lovely human being.

She loved the kitchen and the kitchen brought her her family and joy and it brought her demons and her nuances. She loved that kitchen, and that kitchen was her place for happiness, but that certainly doesn’t mean she was a saint and everything was perfect there.

And so I figure that if she is in heaven and heaven is happiness then surely my grandma is there with my Grandpa Dennis and an ash-tray and a slot-machine and God is okay with the warts and all.

7. After my grandma died I sort of thought that everything was pointless. That death was the only thing coming for me, and I should concern myself with that. Embrace the certainty and ignore the diversions.

But that’s a selfish and asinine and pathetic thought.

Because baseball is necessary for me.

It is necessary for my happiness.

I have come to see baseball as a diversion, but like cooking and being in the kitchen for my grandma, it is a diversion with a purpose. For me baseball isn’t really about the game or following the Twins, it’s really about my father and my brother and my uncle and my grandfather and my friends.

It’s about talking nonsense with B.J. or having a beer out in the garage with my dad while the game’s on the radio or calling up and bitching about the Yankees with my brother and uncle. It’s just about connecting with the people I love and filling up the void between those (x,y) points.

I know that I need to mourn the fact that my grandma is gone and in that mourning celebrate her life as best I can. I know that this is a time in life where I should focus on what matters most.

So, I will.

Being a gambler and a smoker and a drinker didn’t make my grandma my grandma, and me being her grandson didn’t either. It was all of it. It was the cacophony.

In death she showed me that being alive and in the kitchen and at the casino and in the grips of addiction and pain and bliss and joy is all of it, and that maybe because all of life is so uncertain and so wonderfully circumstantial, that maybe death in all it’s certainty isn’t worth thinking about at all.

And so I guess I am just trying to say that what my grandma is teaching me is that while death has nothing to do with baseball, that certainly doesn’t mean baseball has nothing to do with heaven.