The Seat I Was Sitting In

My daughter played softball from the time she was nine until she was seventeen. Second base. Not the best on the field and she knew it, but she was the one who never once dogged it down the line.

I want you to know I went. I did. I have a folding chair that lived in the trunk of a Buick for eight years and it went to every field in the county. Ask anybody. Sal was there.

She and I talked about it a few years back, and she said something I have not been able to put down since. She said, Dad, you were always in the chair. You were never in the game.

She was right and I knew it the second she said it. Because for most of those eight years I had a number in my head. Something riding on a game somewhere else, a call I had to make by a certain inning, a total I was doing math on while my kid was standing on second base looking into the stands for her father. My body was in that chair. The rest of me was two hundred miles away watching a scoreboard she could not see.

That is the part nobody warns you about. You think the cost is money. The money is the cheap part, and I say that as a man who lost a house. The expensive part is that you were sitting right there and you missed it anyway. There is no winning that back. There is no rack you run that returns a Tuesday in April 1987.

She has kids of her own now and she is a better parent than I was, which is exactly how it is supposed to go.

If you are reading this in the stands with your thumb on something, I am not going to lecture you. I would just ask you to look up. Whatever is happening down there on that field is happening once.

And if looking up is harder than it should be, 1-800-MY-RESET, any hour.

Be in the game.

Sal