The Baton Mom Twirled at Homecoming

The girl who dropped it

I should tell you who we are, so you know how all of this sits.

I’m Dana Rowe. I’m 50, and I’ve been a pharmacy tech at the drugstore out by the highway for twenty-two years.

I count pills, I run insurance, and I know half of Garvin County by their birthdays.

My mom is Patsy Rowe. She’s 78. She grew up on the same quarter section where she still lives, a little white house with a hayfield behind it that runs down toward the tree line along the Washita.

My dad was Lee Rowe. He played the snare drum in that 1966 band, three rows behind Mom, and he married her two summers later.

He passed in 2019, and Mom has lived alone in the house since.

Teri is my older sister. She’s 53, she’s married to Duncan, who works shifts at the refinery over in Wynnewood, and she has always been the one who organizes everybody, the one with the list and the calendar.

I love my sister. I want that said plainly before anything else.

When Dad was dying, Teri was the one who kept the schedule of who sat with him and who brought supper, and she never missed a single day.

Here is the part that matters for this story, though. I twirled too, once.

Mom taught both of us in that same hayfield when we were little, but I was the one who loved it.

I made the twirling line as a freshman. And at my first homecoming, in front of the whole town, I threw my baton up on the toss and it came down six feet behind me and bounced off the track.

Somebody in the student section laughed. Then a lot of somebodies laughed. I picked it up and finished, but I turned in my uniform that Monday and never twirled again.

I was fifteen. I’m fifty now. I hadn’t had a baton in my hand in thirty-five years, and I had told myself for most of those years that I didn’t care.

Driving home that Sunday night, I found out I did care.

Hearing Teri laugh at Mom put me right back on that track, with that baton bouncing, and I hated the way it felt.

The phone calls

Here is the thing about my job. I’m not a doctor and I’m not a pharmacist, and I would never pretend to be.

But I’ve spent twenty-two years watching what makes old people dizzy.

So before I said one word to Teri, and before I said a word to Mom, I did the sensible thing.

On my lunch break Monday I called Mom’s doctor’s office and asked for a call back.

While I waited, I thought about Mom’s fall. It happened in April, on her back steps, at about nine in the morning.

She bruised her hip badly and sprained her wrist, and nothing broke, thank the Lord.

Nine in the morning. Mom takes her blood pressure pill with her breakfast, at eight. I had known that for years and had never once put the two things side by side.

I asked the pharmacist I work for, a careful man named Mr. Wills, whether that pill could make a person lightheaded when she stood up fast. He said yes, especially in the first couple of hours.

When the doctor called back that afternoon, I told him what Mom wanted to do and I told him about the timing of the pill.

He was quiet a second, then he said he wished somebody had caught that in April.

He moved her pill to bedtime. Then he said something I have thought about a hundred times since.

He said, “Dana, a 78 year old woman who wants to walk out on a football field is a woman worth keeping on her feet.”

He gave me three conditions. Flat shoes with good soles. Real grass, not the artificial turf some schools have now. And somebody close enough to catch her elbow if she wobbled.

The field in Pauls Valley is real grass. That was one. Mom owned a pair of white sneakers she wore to walk the track at the park. That was two.

For the third, I called the band director, Mr. Hensel.

He’s a young man, maybe thirty-five, with more patience than anybody I have ever met, which you would need to teach high school brass.

He was thrilled. He had sent that letter to Mom himself, he said, after finding her picture in a 1966 yearbook in the band room. He hadn’t been sure she’d write back at all.

I asked him if the band could walk out instead of high-stepping out, just for the first stretch, so Mom could set the pace.

He said the band would walk at whatever speed Mrs. Rowe walked.

Then I asked if my son could march on the end of the front row, the spot closest to her.

Mr. Hensel laughed and said Jesse had already come and asked him the same thing that morning before first hour.

I sat in my car in the drugstore parking lot for a minute after that call and cried a little.

My boy had gone and asked on his own. He had heard his aunt laugh and he had done something about it.