The Tournament I Called Behind the Plate

Mom in the Lawn Chair

The next Saturday my mother showed up at the Boone County diamonds at nine in the morning in a straw hat and sunglasses, carrying a folding lawn chair and a little cooler.

She set up behind the backstop of whatever field I was working, and she stayed all day.

She was something to behold. She did not understand a single rule of baseball and she did not pretend to.

She just watched her son in the blue shirt, and every time I pointed and barked a strike she would clap and call out, “That’s my boy, that’s the umpire,” until the parents around her started laughing and asking which one was hers.

“The one behind the plate,” she would say, proud as if I had hit a home run. “He’s my son.”

I would have been embarrassed if it had not meant so much. There is a thing that happens to a divorced man where he starts to feel like a problem everybody is managing.

My mother sitting in that chair clapping for strike three undid a little of that every Saturday.

On the third Saturday she brought Hayden. He had a bye in his own schedule that morning, and she drove over to Thorntown and picked him up and planted him in the chair next to hers with a bag of sunflower seeds.

My boy watched me work a game between two teams he did not know and kept score on a napkin.

Between games he came and found me in the shade by the fence while I drank a Gatorade.

“Dad,” he said, “you missed one. The slide at third. He was out.”

“I know it,” I said. “I was straight-lined. Could not see the tag.”