The House I Recovered In

My father died on 25 September 2004. My mother died on 22 May 2005. They replaced my hip on 25 July 2005.

That is nine months, and I was nineteen for all of it.

There is a question people do not usually think to ask about that stretch, and it is the most practical one there is: where did I go?

The answer is the Hyatts.

Ten days, maybe two weeks

I stayed at their house in Scottsdale for about ten days to two weeks after the operation, before I started at the University of Arizona.

Say that back slowly, because I have said it quickly for twenty years. A nineteen-year-old, two months an orphan, two weeks out of a total hip replacement, about to start college in a different city and about to try something a stack of doctors had told him not to try.

That is who was in their spare room. And they just — had me there. Fed me. Let me heal. Sent me off to school.

And then it did not stop

That is the part that turns it from a kind gesture into a family.

Any time I came back from an offseason. Any time I wanted to stay at their house. Any time I needed food. Any time I needed anything. They were there, and it was never presented as a favour, and there was never a moment where I was a guest who had outstayed anything.

I still have the messages. Dannelle in September 2010, out of nowhere: "Let us know when you are in town. Dinner for sure!!!!! Love you lots. R and D." She signs for both of them, Rick and Dannelle, like a unit, which is exactly what they were.

August 2012, I am home from the Czech Republic for one week, and I tell her I want to see them. The reply is not come visit. It is "We are having family dinner tomorrow night...come by!"

Family dinner. Not a visit. That is a preposition doing an enormous amount of work.

Who they are

Rick Hyatt — like a father to me. I am going to be honest and say I am not in close contact with him any more, because I would rather write this true than write it clean. That does not subtract anything from what he was.

Dannelle Hyatt — a second mother, and I mean that in the load-bearing sense, the same way my aunt Pam is. Just so supportive, so consistently, for so long.

Jayme Hyatt — like a sister. We do not talk as much now. She is still in Scottsdale.

Nicole Hyatt — who married Scott Redden, who is like a brother to me. They are in Las Vegas now, where he runs a dealership.

They were my angels. I do not have a more sophisticated word for it and I have stopped looking for one.

The detail I only just connected

I have told a story publicly for years about the tequila shot.

On the twelfth anniversary of the surgery I posted about being at a friend's house with the boys and doing a shot of tequila — "to the new hip!" It is one of my favourite memories from that whole period, and I have retold it as a funny thing that happened, unattached to anything.

I went back and checked recently.

It was at Jayme Hyatt's house.

Of course it was. That is where I was. The toast to the new hip happened under the roof of the family who took me in while the hip was still healing, and for two decades I have been telling the story without the setting, which turns out to be the entire point of it.

Why I am writing this down

I have spent a year putting the people who made this possible into writing. A surgeon, a chiropractor, a pitching coach, an aunt, a man I never met who told me on the phone that I could do it.

Every one of those is a specific intervention. Somebody did a specific thing at a specific moment and the trajectory changed.

The Hyatts are not that. There is no scene. There is no phone call that turned it around. There is a house, and a bed in it, and dinners, for years, at a point in my life when I did not have a house of my own to go to.

That is harder to write about and it is worth more than any of the interventions.

Rick, Dannelle, Jayme, Nicole, Scott — I know exactly what you did. I was nineteen and I do not think I said it properly at the time, because nineteen-year-olds do not.

Saying it now.