Whatever Held

He had a serious wind-up before he was old enough to know what a wind-up was. I mean a toddler, barely steady on his feet, already rearing back with this deliberate, solemn intensity, like the throw mattered more than anything in the world. Nobody taught him that. It was just in him. And years later, when I’d watch him on the mound, seven, ten, twelve years old, it was the same face with the same gather and the same seriousness about the thing he loved. Some part of who he was showed up early and never left, and I got to watch it grow up.

He played from around seven or eight all the way to his freshman year of high school. Which means he played through some of the hardest years our family went through, years when the adults in his life were coming apart, and he just kept showing up to the mound and throwing strikes. I’ve thought a lot about that. How much was breaking around him, and how steady he stayed.

Once I got a speeding ticket racing from work to the field. His field was right next to his school, and I was flying to get there in time. I remember being annoyed about the ticket and not for one second regretting the reason.

The games themselves were pure. There was a game against his best friend. I think what happened is that his friend hit a ball that was surely gone, a home run the second it left the bat, and my son caught it.
Stole it right out of the air. I couldn’t tell you the score or the inning. What I kept was his face afterward, the excitement on him, that particular joy of a boy doing the thing he’s good at in front of the people he loves.

And I remember the Marlins. He was twelve, and his team won the championship, thirteen to twelve, a wild, close, impossible game. When it ended, those boys came together on the field like one happy animal, all of them so close-knit, so purely glad. He was down there in the middle of it. And I was up in the stands, jumping up and down all by myself, watching his joy from where I always watched it. He got to stand on the A’s field in Oakland a couple of times, too, and meet real players. I have a whole handful of these, the bright ones. He earned every one.

Later, when his father filed for custody, a lawyer asked me to document the absences of his father. I will state it, because it’s the truth and my son already knows it. So, I sat down with the old season schedules and
went back through them, game by game, marking which ones he’d actually attended. It was a strange, quiet kind of grief, reconstructing a father’s absence on paper after the fact, counting up in ink all the afternoons he hadn’t come. I thought it would matter. I thought a record like that would count for something. The court brushed it off. Didn’t care. I cared and
it turned out the record didn’t move anyone but me.

I never felt like I belonged with the other parents. Part of it was caution; his father had said enough bad things about me that I never knew who’d heard what. And part of it was that some of those parents were hard, judgy about how the kids played, keeping their own scorecards on other people’s children. I didn’t have it in me for that. I just
wanted to watch my son play.

So I found my spot. Behind the outfield fence, off on my own, away from the bleachers and the talk. And from back there I’d watch him, his wind-up, his gather, that serious little face grown up, and I’d be so proud of him it was hard to hold. Not just proud that he was good. Proud of how steady he was. How resilient, through all of it, through everything happening around him that he never asked for and couldn’t control. He just kept throwing strikes.

That’s where I loved him from. The stands when I could, the outfield fence when I needed the quiet. Wherever I was standing, I was there.