The showdown
image courtes of photobucket.com
Scene One:
A father and his son are in the backyard of their home. Forty feet separate them. On the boy’s left hand is a baseball glove. In his right, a genuine imitation major league ball.
His father stands under the shade of a maple tree. In his hands is a bat made for someone a third of both his age and size. He bends down and with the bat taps the trash can lid that serves as home plate.
Both have done this many times. Baseball is the boy’s favorite thing to play. The father’s, too.
The boy looks in for the imaginary catcher’s sign. Fastball. He has thrown many fastballs to his father, and his father has hit them all. Hard. (Far, too. Once over the willow and into the garden in the neighbor’s yard. A mighty wallop.) The son knows that nowhere in the history of the universe has there ever been a better striker of the ball than his father.
But.
The impossible is in the process of happening. The son has thrown two pitches that his father has swung and missed. Amazing! How is this possible? the boy wonders. Surely his father’s skills have not deteriorated. Just a few moments ago he had tossed a ball into the air and hit it even farther than the neighbor’s garden. And he wasn’t even trying.
Could it be, then, that the son is becoming just as good his father? And maybe just a tad better? Is such a thing possible?
He doesn’t know. But he knows that he will soon find out. He has one more fastball to throw, and if he throws it hard and true enough, he will do the unthinkable: he will strike out his father.
He winds and throws. The father, intensity on his face, steps into the ball and swings from his heels. The ball zooms past him and into the soft grass behind.
The son has done it. For the first time, he has beaten his father. He throws his glove into the air in celebration.
Scene two:
Ten years later.
Son and father are again in the backyard. This time, it is the father who is pitching and the son who is at bat. The father is older now. His shoulder hurts and his face is sweating. The son is older, too. And stronger. And taller. He’s been playing baseball a long time and gotten pretty good at it.
But.
The father still has a thing or two to teach his son. He isn’t as old and washed up as some may think. Because the impossible is in the process of happening. He has just gotten two strikes on this hotshot kid. One more and he reclaims his rightful title of Better Player. He winds and throws, the ball sailing out of his hand toward a different trash can home plate.
While the ball is in the air, the son remembers that day long ago when he struck his father out. He’s learned a thing or two in the meantime as well. Things like pride and accomplishment. Things like having to hang on to some things and having to let go of others.
He’s learned, too, the truth about that day.
His father didn’t just swing and miss. He swung and missed on purpose.
Just like the son had missed those first two pitches just now from his father. And just like he misses the third one, too.
The father smiles at his son. “Don’t ever think you’re better than your old man,” he says.
***
True stories, both of them. And I can vouch for that fact. Because, you see, I was the boy in both of those scenes.
I remembered all of this the other day as my own son and I were playing in our own backyard. I was batting. He was pitching. And for the first time, my son struck me out. He threw his glove into the air and whooped just like I once did.
As I stood there, feigning anger and defeat, I saw myself in him and my father in me. It was a powerful moment. For the both of us.
But I could see, too, that on some faraway tomorrow my son swinging and missing on some feeble pitch thrown by his father, allowing me to reclaim a bit of youth that time and age had taken away.
Such are the gifts we bestow to our children and our parents. Over and over.
***
This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Approved, hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. To read more on the topic, please visit him at PeterPollock.com
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