Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker

waves, I can’t help crying, either.
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    In 1976, the year Mark Fidrych became the all-time single-season leader in joy, my mother decided to start a business. The pure version of the back-to-the-land scenario had been that we would grow most of our food in a garden and raise sheep for meat and wool, and Tom would help get us whatever else we needed by making money or getting things in trade by being a blacksmith. But the blacksmith thing hadn’t worked out, and our garden forever remained a stubborn, miserly provider, and our sheep herd was rarely able to expand beyond its usual population of one: Virginia, the fat, friendly ewe who was more like a family pet than the vital cog of a livestock operation. We needed to buy food like everyone else. So, slowly, the adults in my house entered the so-called real world.
    This is what everyone has to do, right? You can’t be a child forever. You have to slice that part of yourself away and put on a uniform of some sort, whether it’s official or unofficial, and punch that clock. Is there a way to do this and still hang on to a wider sense of the world?
    My mother believed so. She painted on a rectangular board a more colorful, warmly cartoonish version of our house and of the road, Route 14, winding past it. Above the portrait she painted “Studio 14.” She and Tom hung the sign outside, announcing to the world that we were now in business. Looking at the sign, the bright colors, the cartoonish simplicity and warmth, it was difficult to tell what kind of business it was, or even that it was a business at all.
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    Many of the stories about Mark Fidrych focused on his antics—how he often bounded over to a teammate to slap him on the back after a good play, how he got down on his knees like a gardener to groom the mound, and, most notably, how he talked to the ball as if it were a friendly little creature capable of listening to and carrying out his gentle instructions. But he wasn’t just a curiosity, a novelty. He kicked ass. He worked fast and threw everything hard, at the knees, and he couldn’t ever really be touched. That Monday night game against the Yankees, he dominated the team that would eventually win the American League pennant. Afterward, Yankees captain Thurman Munson would grumble that the rookie pitcher was a showboat. But
Munson was just slow to get what everyone would eventually come to understand—even the gruff Munson, who became friendly with the Bird when they formed the starting battery in the 1976 All-Star Game: Mark Fidrych simply couldn’t hide his love for the game.
    Hey, you don’t have to hide your love away! You don’t have to be dour. You don’t have to pretend you don’t care.
    In saying all this, Mark Fidrych forever became for me everything good from the decade of my childhood. He’s the Pet Rock, the mood ring, the CB radio. He’s the Six Million Dollar Man battling Sasquatch, Kool-Aid smashing through a wall, Fat Albert and the Gang banging on trashcans. He’s SpaghettiOs and Oreos and Quik. He’s a pack of smiling yahoos spilling out of a customized van in a cloud of smoke, Foghat blaring. He’s Doug Henning and the Banana Splits and Dynamite magazine. He’s Alfred E. Neuman. He’s that moment when you start laughing and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to stop.
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    One day I was out in the driveway, throwing a tennis ball at the strike zone my brother had duct-taped to the garage door. A man walked by the house and asked about the Studio 14 sign in the yard.
    â€œIs that like Studio 54?” he said.
    Though I didn’t understand what he was talking about, his question may have been the first contact I made with that quintessential product of the 1970s, disco.
    Not long after that, my brother, my mom, and I were walking around the streets of a nearby town that actually had more than just one general store. We saw a copy of the