INK FADES, BUT SON’S GIFT STANDS TEST OF TIME
What you see here is a baseball, a Rawlings Official League ball, five ounces in weight and nine inches in circumference. What you can’t see is what’s written on it: “I love you, Dad. Jared.” Trust me, though, it’s there.
Jared is my older son. He’s 30 now. He gave me the ball as a gift on a Father’s Day or my birthday — I can’t remember which — when he was about 9. I took it to work and put it on my desk, and it’s been there ever since, on my desk or in a top drawer, wherever that desk happens to be.
At first, I could read the writing well. I’d pick up the ball and read what Jared had written, and I’d wish we could go play catch right then. This would have been about the time Jared and my mom and I drove to Hannibal, Missouri, where my mom’s folks were from, and Jared sat in the back seat of the car in quiet agony because he had new braces on his teeth. He couldn’t eat because of the pain, so he mostly drank milkshakes, but he never complained. Jared, I can attest, does not complain.
A few years went by, though, and before long I couldn’t read the writing on the ball quite so well. The ink was fading fast. I kept the ball in the drawer more, shielding it from the light, but it got to where the second “d” in “Dad” was just gone. This would have been about the time our family drove up into Wisconsin on a vacation and Jared found the House on the Rock to be excellent. I wasn’t so sure, but I wasn’t 14.
More years passed, and the writing on the ball continued to fade. I could still make out “love” and “you” and most of “Jared,” but it probably helped that I already knew what the words said. Jared was seriously into the drums at about this time, and one of my oddly fondest memories — because it’s so simple — is of picking Jared up from jazz camp on summer nights and getting tacos with him before going home. The best way to be with Jared is to just be.
I don’t exactly remember when the writing on the ball disappeared altogether. Maybe it was about the time that Jared, now so athletic and graceful, went to his high school prom. Or maybe it was during those weeks when he and I drove all around the north suburbs at night so he could put in enough hours behind the wheel to pass driver’s ed. He was a natural.
But I like to think that Jared’s writing on the baseball faded away completely just about the time that he fell hard for Irina, a girl he worked with at Jewel. They eventually got married, next to a fire in a pavilion on a fall day in a forest preserve. And this year, like every year, they brought the turkey for Thanksgiving.
The Sun- Times, where I work, moved to new offices a few days ago. So I packed up my desk on moving day and tucked the baseball in my coat pocket and brought it home.
I’m going to keep it on my desk in the spare bedroom now, where I can read it whenever I want to. I can make out the words perfectly. Tom McNamee is the editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun- Times. He wrote this essay for his Facebook page. A fellow editor suggested running the essay in the Sun- Times as well.