My Early Years: Baseball, Vision and Finding My Place

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I wanted to take an opportunity to share with you who I am and how I ended up writing A Life Worth Living and starting this blog.  I won’t delve into every detail of my life, just the high points (and low points) that helped shape who I am.  Mostly I just want you to get to know me, and hopefully at some point, I’ll get to know you too.

I was born September 26, 1969 to Rocco and Maryann Giruzzi.  I have one brother, Rocco III, and a sister Pam.  I know it sounds cliché but I pretty much had a normal childhood.  My father owned a pharmacy; he and my mom worked very hard to give us a great life.  We had one family vacation a year to Cape Cod.  Otherwise, life was filled with the usual things – school, friends, fighting with siblings, girls, and baseball.  

I was the baby of the family and when I say that I don’t just mean my family.  I was the baby of the entire family – the entire Giruzzi clan and the Hobaica clan (my mother’s side).  Most of my cousins were five plus years older than me.  I mention this because while my family loved me (and still loves me today, thank goodness), I missed out on something.  There were all these stories of my brother, sister, and cousins growing up together, hanging out, getting in trouble, etc. that I was never a part of.  To this day, they still talk about those times and it feels to me like they are talking about another family.  Don’t get me wrong, like any position in life, there’s the good and the bad.  There were many advantages to being “the baby” of the family, but from a very young age, I was used to being on my own.  I wasn’t living on an island or locked in an attic never to be involved with my family, there was just this window of time where they sort of all grew up together that I wasn’t part of.

And so began my life on the fringe, and trying to find my place.

One of many cherished memories I had was my cousin Eric grooming me to be a Little League pitcher.  I actually ended up being fairly good – pitched a no-hitter in an All-Star game, struck out 10.  Isn’t it funny the things we remember?  Struck out ten.  One of the difficulties I faced growing up was with my vision.  At around age 8, I went blind in my right eye and as I grew, I developed a cataract in my left eye.  By age 16, I could barely see the pages of a book right before my eyes.

In baseball, there was this rule that every boy had to play two innings in a game.  They really should have suspended that rule for me because in most instances, I couldn’t see the ball anywhere but from the pitcher’s mound.  I remember once I was playing right field (it seemed the “safest” place to put me), a ball was hit my way (which I only knew because my teammates were screaming at me).  I never saw the ball until after I heard it hit the ground behind me.  This brought laughter from the opposing team and embarrassment to my teammates and myself.  Despite my achievements in baseball, academics (graduated in the top 10 of my high school class), my lack of vision shaped my social interactions.

In my junior year, I had two surgeries on my “good” eye, which ultimately restored my vision to 20/20.  I remember driving home with my parents from a post-surgery checkup and really being able to see life for the first time in a long time.  I noticed the details of life that most of us miss.  Don’t think the irony is lost on me that A Life Worth Living is about creating a new vision.

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