After nine o'clock, with the radio positioned properly, the game was almost audible. Dad raised it from kitchen counter to refrigerator top, where baseball crackled on with greater clarity. Three extra feet helped pull the signal from another state, but still Detroit pulsed through a humming tube as something distant, intermittent, alien. Perched on a kitchen chair, red sneakers dangling inches from the floor, I watched him play a game of infinite refinement. Arms up, he turned the box first one way, then another. Fingers made hair-breadth adjustments to a dial, tilted the antenna ten degrees. Balance achieved, he eased away, hands motionless and poised, a choreographer of static. Still it came and went. But from the wind-up fouled off strike swing and a double play could be ball two there it goes we assembled something. When a pitch landed in oblivion we imagined the count. For minutes we endured the fade-out at the warning track— Six to four? Two runs score? Slams the door?— wondering whether we should realign, take chances with our game, risk losing what we had. —EFQ

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