The Baton Mom Twirled at Homecoming

The hayfield

The hayfield behind Mom’s house had been cut and baled in September. The round bales were lined up along the north fence, and the stubble was short and stiff and full of grasshoppers.

Stubble is no place for an old woman to practice footwork, and my husband, Neal, knew it before I did.

Neal drives for the county road crew and he notices ground the way some people notice weather.

The first evening, he came over after his shift with our riding mower in the back of the pickup.

He mowed a strip about fifty yards long, then turned around and mowed it again, lower.

When he was done it was as smooth and flat as the practice field at the school.

He walked it twice end to end, looking for gopher mounds and stones, and kicked a few clods off into the stubble.

“That’s your football field,” he told Mom. “Fifty yards. Don’t need more than that.”

Mom stood at one end of that strip in her white sneakers and an old pair of slacks with the baton in her hand.

The sun was going down over the Washita trees, and the whole field had gone gold.

“Well,” she said. “I haven’t done this in forty years. Somebody count for me.”

I counted. She did a wrist twirl, a simple one, the first thing she ever taught me.

The baton went around once, twice, then slid right out of her fingers and landed in the grass.

She picked it up. I counted again. She dropped it again.

The first night, she dropped it eleven times. I wrote it down in the little notebook I keep in my purse, because I’m the kind of person who writes things down. Eleven drops.

The second night, she dropped it nine times. The third night, nine again. That one bothered her.

She stood at the end of Neal’s strip with her lips pressed tight and I thought she might quit.

Instead she held the baton out to me. “Show me,” she said. “Show me the figure eight. My hands forgot it, but I bet yours didn’t.”

I didn’t want to take it. I hadn’t held one since I was fifteen years old, standing on that track with everybody laughing.

But she was holding it out, and she was my mother, and I took it.

My hands did remember. Not well, not pretty, but the figure eight came back like riding a bicycle.

I did it slow, then a little faster, and Mom watched my wrist the whole time.

“There,” she said. “That’s it. You always had a better wrist than me. I used to tell your daddy that.”

Then I dropped it. Right in the grass at my feet. And there was that old feeling, the hot face, the whole stadium laughing in my head.

Mom bent down, slow and careful, and picked it up and handed it back to me. “A drop isn’t the end of the routine,” she said. “You pick it up and you keep marching. That’s the only rule there is.”

She had said those same words to me in 1991. I hadn’t listened. I listened this time.