Making It Home: Life Lessons from a Season of Little League

by Teresa Strasser

Overview

"This is a story about a team that becomes a family and a family that becomes a team. . . a wonderful book ." — Cal Ripken, Jr.

"A MUST READ!"—USA TODAY (ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2023)

An achingly heartfelt and surprisingly funny memoir about family, grief, and moving forward.
 
When her brother dies from cancer, and then her mother just four months later, Teresa Strasser has no one to mourn with but her irresponsible, cantankerous, trailerpark-dwelling father. He claims not to remember her chaotic childhood, but he’s a devoted grandpa, so as her son embarks on his first season pitching in Little League, Teresa and Nelson form a grief group of two in beach chairs lined up behind the first base line.
 
There are no therapeutically trained facilitators and no rules other than those dictated by the Little League of America, and the human heart. For Teresa and her father, the stages of grief are the draft, the regular season, and the playoffs. One season of baseball becomes the framework for a memoir about family, loss, and the fundamentals of baseball and life. They cheer, talk smack about other teams, scream at each other in the parking lot, and care way too much about Little League.
 
Making It Home is a bracingly honest journey through grief, self-doubt, and anxiety armed with humor and optimism. After all, America’s pastime may be just a game, but it always leaves room for redemption, even at the bottom of the lineup.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593546086
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/06/2023
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning writer (Comedy Central) and Emmy-nominated television host (TLC). She has been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Arizona Republic, The Jewish Journal, HuffPost, and The Today Show. Her first-person essays have garnered three Los Angeles Press Club Awards, including Columnist of the Year. She’s appeared on The View, CNN, Good Morning America, The Talk, and Dr. Phil. Radio and podcast audiences know her as Adam Carolla’s co-host. Her first memoir, Exploiting My Baby: Because It’s Exploiting Me was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and optioned by ABC.

Read an Excerpt

The old man picks up his pace, cycling shoes clipped into his pedals, flying down the sidewalk until he gets to the overpass just before Hayden Road.

He turns onto the Indian Bend Wash Path, a bike trail winding through a city park. It’s dark now, and he can barely see the palm trees and pagodas, the faded blue plastic dome-top trash cans. The parking lot behind the CVS, and the red and white lights of the Circle K, they stretch farther behind him now, just some dim lights down Thomas, across from a sleepy La Quinta Inn.

He pedals as hard as he can, then lifts off the seat, coasting along the yellow painted stripe on the path, to the place where a bridge takes him over a creek bed, the bottom only stones and browning leaves and broken glass. Yellow letters painted across the path spell out “SLOW,” but he doesn’t heed the words as he heads into a sharp left turn at full speed. He’s taken this turn a hundred times before.

It’s quiet now, deep in the park, just his heart beating and the babble of faraway city sounds. He lets out a tentative shriek. Nobody can hear him. He’s not bothering anybody, he figures. So, he opens his mouth wider, pushing out a fuller tone. Now he’s screaming, full out, into the dry desert wind.

He gets to an intersection, crosses the road into El Dorado Park, where the bike path picks up again, and he catches himself as he passes the shoddily manicured flowering bushes behind the Continental Villa apartments, NOW LEASING, and the neighborhood watch sign. He still yells, but he tamps down his volume until he’s back in the thick of the woods, whizzing by empty gazebos, picnic tables with benches attached, a volleyball net sagging over a rectangular patch of dirt and sand. Now when he screams, it’s from deeper down, with all the force in his bony old body.

Moans from the vast maw of fatherly loss travel through the air, undulating vibrations of unspeakably shitty times, long lists of medications on dry-erase boards in hospital rooms, late-night trips to the pharmacy for pain pills and cans of Ensure, and worse, the happy times, when he was so stupid, he didn’t even know to take note of them, talking about the 49ers’ offensive line, eating burritos at the Taqueria on Mission Street, laughing so hard when his grown son pinned him, his big grown bear of a child, wrestling on the carpet in front of the couch.

You don’t know when you’re done screaming about your dead son until you’re done. He lets out another wail.

He passes the man-made fishing pond, ducks floating, asleep. The air is salty now, a brine that carries the sound, which is nothing more really than a disturbance of the particles in the air, a disturbance that sets off the transportation of energy from one place to another, moving through solid surfaces and water, the pond and the ducks, a transmission as invisible and mysterious to me as the whereabouts of my brother. It turns out, a cold night is a good time for a father to scream; sound waves are louder and travel farther when there’s a chill in the air. I looked it up, the physics of it, how the speed of sound isn’t a constant, how it changes depending on the environment. The cold slows the molecules, saps their energy, so they’re too still on an Arizona night in early spring to vibrate as much as they do in the warm light of day. The old man’s cries take longer to ripple out than they did in summer, but they travel farther in the cool air, through crisp, sparse leaves, bird nests, the fence along the edge of the bike trail; to the beings going about their business in cars, whooshing toward home, windows up.

I only know about the screaming because he admitted it to me. I still don’t know why, except grief needs a witness, according to one of the grief books in a stack on my nightstand.

“Sometimes, I just start screaming. I’m not bothering anybody. So, I just scream when I’m riding home,” he confessed sheepishly, between innings.

“What do you scream?” Do you scream the name of your dead son, or do you just kind of scat?

“I don’t know,” he answered shyly, looking away at Camelback Mountain way beyond the outfield. “I just yell.”

I wanted to know more, but the game was starting, and I knew that was all I was going to get. If I wanted to talk loss with my dad, it would have to be about Little League baseball.