The radio traffic reporter called me “honey bunny” this morning.
Okay, not me specifically. It was all part of her goofy on-air banter, her way of making her usually dismal news to us groggy Beltway commuters a little less soul-crushing. As much as I loathe my commute, I always love listening to her.
Truth is, the traffic report is pretty much all I can stand listening to anymore. Everything else sounds jumbled, confusing, off-key. Podcasts wash over me, the words trickling through the cracks in my concentration and flowing away without leaving any trace of their passing. Music? Dissonant and irritating, like pebbles stuck inside my shoes.
So I drive in silence most of the time, and I keep my brain from straying to places I’m not yet ready to go by watching the world as it zooms past Sammy’s windows. This morning it was all the joggers. Like the lovely older Asian man who jogs with the precision of Swiss watches. It’s not just his predictable punctuality but his movements as well. Strides perfectly measured, syncopated arm swings, even the towel always tucked around his neck seems to flop in pre-planned rhythm.
Or the gaggle of college girls crowding others to the side as they dominated the sidewalk, trotting along like sun-dappled mares with their upswept ponytails swinging in hypnotic unison.
It’s enough to make me wish once more that I jogged. Only problem is that my knees and back used to play softball in high school. I suppose the rest of me played as well…but my knees and back still remember those years the most. Still feel those years.
Sometimes I miss playing softball. I’d like to think I was good at it. I won a few awards from those years and when I was finished, I’d made it to shortstop, which I’ve been told is a pretty important position. Really, though, I played because it was in my blood. One of the first gifts I remember receiving was a whiffle ball and bat set and a little lefty glove from my three aunts, two of whom played on various softball teams for most of my childhood.
And then there were the hours that my mom and I spent playing catch. Even when there was very little else we could do together without tempers and tensions flaring, this was our oftentimes silent truce. I can still see our gloves in the hall closet, her full-sized righthander’s leather glove with my little pee-wee league lefty glove nestled inside it.
I remember how, for my birthday after the first year I made the school softball team, she had my dad drive her all over the place (this was well before the days of Sports Authority or Modell’s), trying to find a new lefty glove for me. She wanted to make sure I was ready for the next season, ready with a grown-up glove to finally replace the one I’d been using since 2nd grade.
I can still smell that clean, new leather, still feel the supple give of the grain as I slipped my hand into the glove for the first time. I stopped keeping my glove in the hall closet. Instead, it stayed in my room, usually with a softball tucked into it to keep its shape. I’d oil it regularly and often sit in my computer chair in the evenings, absentmindedly tossing a ball into the glove as I watched television. During softball season, I was very rarely without that glove on my hand.
It was around this point that my mom stopped wanting to play catch. My throws, even when I tried to moderate them, were too hard, too fast, and she was too proud to admit this. So she simply stopped playing.
I remember not long after I moved out, I was visiting my parents and needed to look for something in the hall closet. I happened to look down and there was my mom’s glove, still sitting at the top of the junk bucket, empty except for the dusting of cobwebs across the ball pocket. Too many years had passed by that point, but I still remember wishing that I’d had my glove with me, that we could go play catch once more.
I never saw her glove again after that. I’m not sure what happened to it after my parents moved a few years ago, although I strongly suspect that my dad might have tossed it during their pre-move cleanout. He views sports equipment with a special disdain usually reserved for politicians or fundamentalists (not hard to imagine I’m his daughter, eh?).
Perhaps I’ll ask him where her glove is next time I visit. Perhaps by then I’ll be back to listening to music and podcasts. Perhaps by then even innocent random observations won’t lead me down the very pathways I’d been trying to avoid through the observations. Perhaps.
