Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, played at the old Ebbets Field, and retired to see his team, Branch Rickie’s team, move with O’Malley to Los Angeles.  The Yankees remained, to dominate.  And in 2024 the two historic New York rivals faced each other, for the 12^th time, in baseball’s World Series.  Mom cranked the volume to jet-engine level, and the crowd’s roaring me pained my ears.  Dad began to talk, and I could hear neither him nor the announcer, so I waved for Mom to mute the barrage.  The TV remote has grown old, and certain buttons respond only to forceful fat-finger pressing, not that her fingers, or mine, are fat, but the buttons are so small as to defy precision pressure.  She gives the mute button a focused, two-handed effort, leaning forward and stretching her sweatered arms toward the television: surely the closer the remote is to the appliance, the better the remote will work.  “That pitch was a ball.  It was low, and outside.  And he swung at it, and he missed.”  I nodded dully at this intelligence, already two batters old, and waved for Mom to reengage the decibels.  The mute button shows signs of extreme wear, and, again, she strained to shorten the distance those struggling radio waves had to travel.  It seemed to work.  Dad soon began to comment again, this time on a base hit, adding his indecipherable garbling to the crowd’s screaming, and on an unexpressed pretext I exited to the kitchen, perhaps for ice cream.  At the commercial break, when Mom mercifully mutes the aural chaos, I announce how tired I felt, and that I thought I would go to bed.  It was the top of the ninth inning, in game 5, with the score 6-5.  I still don’t know who won the game, or the series.  Evenings are a bit quiet now.  A bit.

(Photo from Wikipedia, used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)