Every year when I hear that the first pitches of baseball season are being thrown out, the oldest image that I can remember comes into my mind: sitting in my stroller at the age of two watching one of my dad's softball games in Schiller Park on the East Side of Buffalo.
In a few years, after leaving the now gang-ridden area of the Queen City, I would eventually line up in the batter's box and grow an infectious love for sports in general just like my dad did.
I got involved with almost any kind of sport I could, whether it was basketball, floor hockey or football. I would tune my bunny ears on my bedroom television to any kind of athletic contest I could. I was simply enthralled with being around sports and everyone that knew my dad and I always remarked on how we were so similar.
But the comparisons never stopped there. From family members to close friends that knew us both, whenever they saw me, heard me talk or listened to my opinions, they always ended up saying at one point or another, "Wow, you are so much like your dad." At one time, Grandma Jarka used to insist in her old age that I was really her own son from my looks.
The ironic part of this all is that I have not seen my father in the last 20 years. Several months after my earliest memory, David Joseph Jarka would end up passing away after battling intestinal cancer for some time. Besides my first recollection, for a while everything I knew about my father had been through old photographs, home movies and stories from my relatives and family friends.
It didn't truly hit me how unfamiliar I was with my dad until my senior year of high school when I wrote a letter to him for an English project. Up until then, I never really thought about this situation or our relationship very much. I considered it just an unfortunate incident in my life and never dwelt on how significant of an impact it had on me. Regretfully, his death at certain times was merely an afterthought.
Eventually that project changed things inside my head. I began to think about how I knew relatively nothing about him firsthand. By the end of my freshman year of college, doing this along with some other compounding circumstances I was experiencing had put me into a deep depression. Thankfully, a strong support system of loved ones aided me in this rough time and was able to help me squash this seemingly infinite sadness after a few months.
Yet, even after my bout with depression, I still wondered whether even post-mortem, there was some way that I could still somehow make a connection with him. How could I quench my thirst of seemingly unattainable firsthand knowledge of my father?
Enlightenment came to me this past year. As I was tying my shoes up before playing a game of basketball in Alumni Arena, I began to reminisce on a story my mother once told me about how my dad made a mistake of wearing brand new sneakers to a pick-up game and had some terrible blisters on his feet as a result.
Suddenly, it clicked in my head. My whole life, whether I was making a big tackle, grabbing a rebound off the boards or applying a headlock in the ring, my dad was vicariously living on through me and not just via our shared names, but through our common love of sports.
Those missing feelings came found. Call me a late bloomer if you must for having it take me nearly two decades to come to this realization but it is better to take such a great length of time than to have this bond lost forever. For it to come to pass that him being side-by-side or within me all along is something irreplaceable.
So let this be my official decree. Whenever I go out and play sports, or do anything involved with athletics, I am not only participating for myself but also as a dedication and for the love of a man whose absence has affected my life like no one else has.
Thus, David J. Jarka may have breathed his last breathe in 1987 but his spirit continues on, through me.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
