The Baton Mom Twirled at Homecoming

The cedar chest

That Tuesday evening I drove out to Mom’s after work. She was out in the front yard, pulling the last of the dead zinnias out of the bed along the porch.

“Mom,” I said. “The doctor says yes. The band director says yes. Jesse says yes. And I say yes. So it’s really just up to you.”

She stood there holding a fistful of dry zinnia stalks. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Teri won’t like it.”

“Teri loves you,” I said. “She’s scared. That’s different from being right.”

Mom went inside, and I followed her as far as the bedroom door.

She knelt in front of the cedar chest at the foot of her bed, the one Dad bought her the year they married, and opened the lid.

That smell came up out of it, cedar and old wool and something like dried roses. Under two quilts and her wedding veil, wrapped in a pillowcase, was her baton.

We took it back out to the porch to look at it in the light.

It was the old kind, a chrome shaft with a white rubber ball on one end and a smaller tip on the other. The chrome had gone soft and cloudy in spots.

And tied around the shaft, right up near the ball, was a tassel.

A graduation tassel, red and black, faded so badly that the red had gone nearly pink. A little brass charm hung from it that said ’66.

“Your daddy tied that on,” Mom said. “The night we graduated. He took it off my cap in the parking lot and tied it on my baton and said, there, now you’ll never lose it.”

She turned the baton over in her hands. Her thumb went across that tassel and stopped there, and stayed.

“I never untied it,” she said. “Not once. I didn’t twirl again after that last season. Then you girls came along, and I only ever twirled it to teach you.”

I sat down on the step beside her. “Then let’s teach you,” I said.