The Shoebox Full of Box Scores

Baseball season in Minnesota is that same three weeks, plus a few more. The high school schedule starts the second week of April, if the snow is gone off the field, and it runs right through planting and into spraying.

The year Travis made varsity as a sophomore, my dad had his stroke. That was the spring of 2014. Dad had run the planter on our place for forty years, and in March of that year he could not lift a coffee cup with his right hand.

So it was me and a hired man named Jeff, who was good but young, and 900 acres, and a banker who wanted to see the operating line paid down by fall.

I ran the planter. Jeff ran the field cultivator ahead of me. We went from first light until the dew came down.

I told myself it was only spring. I told myself I would make the summer games. Then summer came and there was spraying, and the alfalfa, and Dad in the nursing home in town, and I did not make those either.

That is how it went. I am not proud of it, but it is how it went. A man makes a hundred small choices in a row, each one of them sensible, and one day he looks up and he has a son giving a toast.

Travis sat down to a big round of applause. Jenna kissed his cheek. The best man stood up next and told a story about a fishing trip and a pontoon with no gas, and everyone laughed again.

Lori leaned over to me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “That was a good toast.”

“Ron.”

“It was a good toast, Lori. He’s right.”

She looked at me for a long moment, the way she has looked at me for thirty-one years, and she did not say anything else. She did not have to. She was the only one in that room who knew about the radio.

It started by accident, the radio. That first spring, I was planting the Johnson eighty along the county road on a Tuesday afternoon and I had the tractor radio on for the markets, the way I always did.

The markets ended at a quarter after four, and the station went to the high school game. KWLM out of Willmar carried the area games back then, with a man in the press box who had been calling them since before I was in school.

I almost turned it off. Then he said, “And leading off for the visitors, a sophomore, number four, Travis Albrecht,” and I about drove the planter into the ditch.

I did not know Travis was leading off. I did not even know he was starting.

Lori had told me at breakfast, I am sure, and I had not been listening, because I had been thinking about the planter monitor and a row unit that was not dropping right.

I slowed the tractor down so I could hear over the engine. He struck out his first time up. I said, out loud, alone in the cab, “That’s all right, bud. Shake it off.”

His second time up he hit a line drive into right field for a single, and the announcer said the Albrecht kid had quick hands. I hollered.