PLAYING CATCH
The bonding agent between father and son.
The baseball gloves, enough to outfit two teams, were in a box in the garage, where they had sat untouched for years. A couple were mine; some were my children’s; the rest, left orphaned at summer baseball games and picnics, had accreted to the family over the years.
Two weeks ago, my eldest son stopped in on an errand — it had something to do with his upcoming wedding — and we had time to kill while his mother fetched something for him, and for some reason, perhaps it was the onset of summer, perhaps it was the late afternoon sun slanting into the yard, I said to my son, would you like to play catch?
We pulled out the box and the gloves, compressed over the years by their own weight, were flat and stiff. We found two to our liking and slipped them on and worked their pockets open and shut, like fish breathing.
We went out into the street. We stood apart at the distance we always had, about the same distance for a pistol duel, and we began to throw, lazily at first, because our arms were stiff and it had been years since we had done this.
I can’t remember the first time we had played catch, but he would have been about five, with a toddler’s glove that, as small as it was, was still too big for his hand, and we would stand only a few yards apart and I would throw the ball underhand to him and he would try to catch the ball, fearful of it and with his glove held awkwardly high above his head like a waiter carrying a tray.
He would drop it, and then he would pick it up off the ground and fling it wildly and the ball would go off on a tangent across the yard.
It was more fetch than catch, and he almost never caught it except in those rare times when the ball dropped into his glove by sheer luck, and I would say to him, good catch, while thinking also, good lord, this is tiring, and feeling guilty for thinking so.
I was a young father, and filled with love, yet here we were, performing the quintessential act of father and son bonding, a scene so cinematic as to be clichéd, and all I was feeling was impatience. There is what is expected of us, and then there is life.
Our games of catch changed as he grew.
He improved, and we would stand farther and farther apart from each other, and, testing him, I would throw the ball higher and higher into the air, as if it were a fly ball and he were a centre- fielder, and he would run crazily back and forth underneath it, trying to plot its zenith and arc, and sometimes he would overrun it and the ball would drop like a bad joke behind him on the ground, and sometimes, to his wonder, the ball would drop into his glove and he would look into the pocket to make sure of the miracle that had just taken place.
Then he would fling the ball as high into the air as he could, which was not very high, and sometimes I would show off and catch it behind my back or between my legs, and I would feel the vanity in that and feel also the first stirrings of that tension between fathers and sons, that tension between love and dominance.
He grew, and soon could catch and throw as well as me, and by the time he had reached his late teens our games of catch would grow into tests of wills, and the speed of our throws would accelerate and we would end up throwing at each other as hard as possible, and sometimes I would catch one of his throws too low in the pocket of the glove and the ball would hit my palm hard enough to bruise the bone underneath, and I’d think, goddamn, that hurt, though I wouldn’t let on to the pain.
I would throw back so hard that my arm would throb for days afterward, and my wife would give me that look that wives do and shake her head at me for being an idiot.
He went to university, travelled, started work. Our games of catch dwindled, then stopped altogether. He met a girl. He is to be married in August.
Yet here we were out on the street playing catch again, and this time we threw the ball back and forth easily to each other — no fastballs, no showing off — and we just talked, happily, I couldn’t tell you about what. It was a lovely evening, and we would stop occasionally to let the cars go by, and then we would start up again and continue talking. And I felt it: The game of catch was not just between father and son now but between man and man. Some kind of equilibrium had been reached.
The ball went back and forth, its arc describing a bridge, and that bridge was for me both love and melancholy, of the connection between us, and the distance, too.