Catch
If you dig far enough in my eldest son’s room—beneath the candy wrappers and textbooks, the various piles of suspect laundry, the veritable mountain of musical paraphernalia—you’ll find an 8-year-old catcher’s mitt that looks almost new. It was my Father’s Day gift in 2016, when he was 12 years old. I was 42 then, which seemed old at the time but now feels so distant that it might as well have been my twelfth or twentieth or thirty-seventh year. At this point, the glove is almost a museum piece, albeit well-preserved enough to come out of the case and back into action at a moment’s notice.
The mitt hasn’t been used in so many years—2? 3? 5?—I’m still surprised every time I see it there. Among time’s more devious tricks is its ability to rob you of sequencing, to dump the events of your life into a junk drawer of memories, all still accessible but jumbled together with unlike things. Why are these shoe laces tangled up with eyeglass screwdrivers and old charging cables? Because we have other organizational priorities, bills to pay and schedules to keep. It’s hard enough to just function, much less to tend an archive.
All this to say that extracting memories from this particular baseball mitt takes some work—especially if the goal is to then organize those snapshots into a story. But I don’t mind. Such efforts remind me—among the least nostalgic of any humans I know—to remember what it was like to be a father to Zachary, and to value that privilege the way I should..
I don’t want to over-romanticize baseball, a la most every movie ever made about the sport. As much truth as you can find in Field of Dreams or Bull Durham, the reality is that it’s a hard and pitiless game that exposes weakness and rewards reflex. It can be ugly up close. Besides, baseball is far from the only mechanism by which fathers connect with their children. My youngest and I have built much of our mutual understanding around literature and scientific inquiry and visual art. Our whole family is tied together by music. We have an eclectic mix in our collective junk drawer of family memories. Take out baseball, and there would still be plenty to untangle.
Still, the history we might have had is only theoretical, and the one Zachary and I actually lived includes a seemingly continuous game of catch that has stretched out for two decades, in four back yards a thousand miles apart.
***
Almost every kid learns some form of catch before they can even talk. Their little muscles can’t quite snag projectiles yet, but as soon as they can sit upright they can corral a plush ball rolled their way and then roll it back. It’s one of the earliest forms of reciprocal play a baby learns, and it grows with the child as motor control and depth perception improve. What begins by rolling a ball back and forth on the living room carpet moves outside as soon as the kid can throw hard enough to do damage.
We learned this the hard way with three-year-old Zachary. One spring day in our home in Little Rock, AR, Denise was alarmed at the sound of shattering glass in his bedroom. She came upstairs to find him staring in awe at his hand. Below the window, amid shards of broken glass, lay a hard rubber T-rex toy. When Denise asked what had possessed him to throw that at the window, he said that everything else he tried just bounced off.
His mother tried to explain the appropriate use of experimental practice. I called the local glass company, then took Zachary out back and played catch until he was too tired to lift his arm.
***
It was two years later, when we moved out into the country hills of Greene County, AR, that catch became not just diversion, but ritual. I would get a call at work telling me that Zachary was waiting for me to play baseball with him. And so I’d wrap what I was doing, drive twenty minutes home, and play until I had to go back for evening events at the campus ministry where I worked.
These were not easy days for us, any more than they would be for any young parent. We never lacked for necessities, but we had very little money to spare. I was working my dream job, but I wasn’t happy. I kept putting in more hours, in part from necessity and in part from the unshakable feeling that I was falling short. The words Denise spoke over the airwaves were about baseball, but the context revealed something else.
Come home. We need you. You’re killing yourself at work, and we all suffer for it.
Those long nights in the south yard were a remedy for the tension, though not exactly a cure. But they provided a similar function as praying the hours does for monastic communities. This was time set aside for the three of us—young Jay hated baseball and would go play in the garden instead—to concentrate on the most basic of movements. Throw. Catch. Run. Laugh.
I was never a very good ballplayer myself, what with my short limbs and terrible eyesight. And I’m sure the quality of my instruction would not pass muster among most coaches. But I know this: there are few places in which I was more present with my family, few where I was a better father to my kids.
***
Our first summer in South Dakota, Zachary joined the city league team in our town, and games of catch took on a new focus. He loved to play, but was also at an age in which he wanted to impress his peers. The faster the pitchers threw, though, the more clear it became that the eyesight he’d inherited from me would keep him from ever being a star hitter. If he was going to have his moment of glory, it would come as a pitcher.
And so, day after day, we walked across the street to the wooded area north of the library, set up in a wide clearing, and threw. Short tosses for warm up, long toss for strength, pitching practice for accuracy. Denise still joined us on occasion, but Jay had checked out in favor of Legos and sketch pads. Most days, it was just me and Zachary, working on strength and mechanics and confidence. He began throwing hard enough that I needed a catchers mitt. I looked into buying a mask to protect my face.
In many ways, these were good changes, signs of growth both in body and in maturity. But more and more of his baseball time went to practices and games with his team. I could watch and cheer and be proud, but I didn’t get to play. He was doing what every child should do, growing beyond his need for us. We were doing what every good parent should do, smarting from the sting of release. Releasing him anyway.
And then, just like that, it was over. When Zachary graduated levels into the local Baseball Association, he entered into the toxic world that small-town sports often becomes. A terrible coach, an unresponsive administration, some bad teammates, and he decided not to re-up for the next season. He devoted himself to music instead, which has turned out to be the great passion of his life so far.
Our games of catch never really came back—not with the same frequency or intensity as before. We threw on occasion, but other places of connection—guitar, biking, fantasy baseball, the St. Louis Cardinals—took a more prominent place. Zachary and I didn’t exactly grow apart, but we grew in different directions. Playing catch three times a week no longer fit.
Then high school. Marching band. Jazz band. My job, again. My hobbies. His hobbies. Graduation. College. Heartbreak and triumph, selves shattered and rebuilt. We left the house across from the woods for a small house we rented as a way-station, where our baseball gloves went into storage while we tried to find our collective footing. At the time we didn’t know what was next. We just knew it wouldn’t be here.
Now that we have a plan for the future, it’s no less terrifying. Six months from now, our children will be attending college in the Dakotas while Denise and I settle into our new lives in Kentucky. We’ll be living at a camp with plenty of open space to throw and catch and run, such as my middle-aged legs will allow. But the bedrooms will be empty most of the year, and the visits too short. We will be empty nesters who have moved the nest 1000 miles to the southeast.
But we still know how to play catch, how to stand at a distance and communicate through what passes between us. The throws will take more effort to send now, and more time to reach their target. We will have to be patient and to pay attention. It’s going to be a lot of work. But we will do it.
After all, we’ve been learning how to care for one another since day one, sending and receiving signals that come fast, and with every emotion imaginable. What we throw at each other can be angry and unfair and tender and gracious, but in the end the balance is love. I don’t know how else any family can work.
***
Families are hard. It’s not always clear why some make it and some splinter. I have so many friends who have endured that pain, and I wish I had answers. But all I have is my own story, and a handful of things I think I know for certain.
One of which is this:
Playing catch is the essential parenting skill—the back and forth, the chase of wayward throws, the reliance of another person to receive what you send their way and return it to you in kind. Perfection isn’t the point, and in fact can be the enemy. What matters is the engagement, the time together, the shared covenant. I will catch what you throw at me, and if I don’t I will walk to find it. I will trust you to do the same for me. And we will not give up on each other.
