The Traditions We Didn't Know We Were Making

PICTURE IT.

A family arrives at Citi Field for a Mets game.

Graham. Meghan. The boys.

They find their section, make their way down the row, and settle into their seats. There are hot dogs. There is baseball. There are thousands of people around them doing essentially the same thing.

A perfectly normal day at the ballpark.

And then one of the boys looks at his parents.

“Oh. We aren't going to sit where we normally do?”

Apparently, there had been a misunderstanding.

This was not how one attended a baseball game.

And, in fairness, Jeff and I may have been partly responsible.

How We Apparently Ruined Baseball

For years, Jeff worked for the Mets, and one of the great perks was getting to bring people we loved to games.

So every so often, we'd gather some of our closest friends and their kids and head to the ballpark. We didn't sit in rows of stadium seats. We had access to a patio area with actual tables—the kind you might expect to find in a dining room rather than at a baseball stadium—and enough room for the kids to move around without spending nine innings being told to sit still.

And then there was the food.

Sure, there were hot dogs. But there was also pizza, made-to-order pasta, charcuterie, carved meats, bottomless popcorn, and ice cream with what seemed like ten different toppings.

Apparently, we had set expectations.

The grownups talked. The kids ran around. Everybody ate extremely well. And, presumably, some baseball happened.

We did this more than once, and somewhere along the way something happened that Jeff and I hadn't realized.

We weren't just taking the kids to baseball games.

We were teaching them what going to a baseball game looked like.

So when Graham and Meghan eventually took the boys to Citi Field themselves, found their assigned seats and handed everybody a hot dog, the boys were understandably confused.

Where was the patio? Where were the tables? Where was everybody else?

And, perhaps most importantly, where was the pasta station?

We still laugh about it.

But I've come to think there is something rather wonderful hiding inside that story.

Nobody Announced It Was a Tradition

Adults tend to think traditions require planning. We imagine the things that arrive on the calendar every year: Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas morning, birthdays, summer vacations. Somebody makes the arrangements. Somebody sends the invitations. Eventually everyone knows, This is what we do.

But I don't remember anybody deciding that taking the kids to Mets games was going to become a tradition. It was simply something we could do, so we did. And then, sometime later, we did it again.

That's the funny thing about childhood.

Adults make plans. Children make traditions.

We think we're taking them to a baseball game. Meanwhile, they're quietly learning where we sit, who comes with us, what we eat, what they're allowed to do and what it feels like when this particular collection of people gets together.

Sometimes we don't discover that something has become a tradition until a child encounters the world without it.

You Make the Date

Jeff and I never lived close enough to most of the kids in our lives to be the everyday guys. We weren't the ones picking them up from school on a Wednesday or stepping in because somebody needed a babysitter for a couple of hours.

Their parents had lives. The kids had lives. We had lives. Seeing one another usually required calendars. There needed to be a dinner planned, a trip arranged, tickets bought, or a date put on the schedule.

For a long time, I think I unconsciously regarded that as something slightly less than the relationships people get to have when they live around the corner. There is an intimacy to being part of the everyday machinery of a child's life, and when you love kids who don't live nearby, it's easy to imagine that you're missing something important.

But I'm not sure I believe that anymore.

Because there is another kind of showing up.

You make the date.

You decide that these people matter enough to put something on the calendar. You drive the hour, buy the tickets, get everybody around the table and find something the kids will enjoy. And as the years pass and everyone's lives become more complicated—as they inevitably do—you keep finding another date.

That matters, too.

Especially for Guncles, Gaunties, chosen family, family friends, and all the other people who love children they aren't necessarily raising. Not everyone gets to be part of the everyday routine. Sometimes the people we love live across town, across the state, or across the country. Sometimes seeing them takes effort and planning.

We don't all get Tuesday afternoon.

Sometimes we get Saturday, three weeks from now.

So we take it.

The Things Children Keep

The interesting thing is that children rarely remember an experience the way adults expect them to. We might remember the logistics: who organized everything, what the tickets cost, whether traffic was terrible, whether everybody arrived on time.

Kids seem to keep a different inventory.

They remember running around while the adults talked. They remember the food and who made them laugh. They remember being allowed to do something they weren't normally allowed to do, the ridiculous thing somebody said, or the ritual everyone else had forgotten was a ritual.

They remember the table.

And apparently, years later, they remember that this is where we sit when we go to a Mets game.

There is something beautiful about discovering that you've become part of somebody else's we.

Because that's really what a tradition is. It isn't the turkey or the presents or the baseball game. Those are simply the scenery around a much more important sentence:

This is what we do.

And tucked quietly inside that sentence is another:

These are the people I do it with.

Maybe That's How Traditions Begin

I don't think we need to manufacture magical childhoods. Children are remarkably good at finding the magic themselves, often in places the adults weren't paying enough attention to notice.

Maybe our job is simply to give them enough moments in which to find it.

Invite them.

Take them somewhere.

Pull up another chair.

Let them run around.

Listen to the story you've already heard twelve times.

Make the date.

And then, when you can, make another one.

You may think you're just going to a baseball game. Years later, you may discover that you were building something.

Some traditions arrive with recipes passed down through generations and boxes of ornaments carefully unpacked every December. Others begin because a couple of Guncles happened to have access to a patio where the kids could run around while the adults ate dinner.

Nobody announces when an outing becomes part of a childhood. Nobody tells you that this is the afternoon they're going to remember, or stops the game long enough to say, Pay attention. This is becoming a tradition.

You just keep showing up.

And if you're very lucky, one day a kid will look around at a perfectly good baseball stadium, hot dog in hand, and wonder why on earth everybody is sitting in the wrong seats.