I’ve thought about this more than is strictly reasonable in the years since because I like that my wife catches. I did not and I wasn’t ready to hazard a guess. After she caught it and twisted off the top without comment, he turned to me and asked a rhetorical question that young men with girlfriends don’t generally want to hear from their fathers: “You know what I like about her?” My future wife was helping him prepare steaks and he threw a bottle of Worcestershire sauce at her from the top of a set of stairs maybe 20 feet from the grill. But I know he figured it out over the years because of an exchange we had the better part of a decade ago. A husband and wife that play catch together know something about each other that a husband and wife that don’t play catch never will.ĭid my father understand that going in? Almost certainly not. It is also impossible to play catch with someone many times over the course of many years and not come to sympathize with their motion and, in so doing, anticipate them. For that reason, it’s impossible to play catch without considering how someone else’s body works and how they move through space. And catchable means different things for different people with their different arms, reflexes, and levels of awareness. It requires that participants have an understanding of what “catchable” means. The second is where things get interesting. The first understanding represents the difference between bonding and assault. I think they only found out later that catch goes deeper than that.Ī good game of catch is based on an implied understanding that the participants are:Ģ) Willing to make an effort to throw catchable balls and to catch even uncatchable balls. I think that my father and mother played catch because it was fun and because my mom couldn’t hit a jump shot. Do I think that my father arranged this so he wouldn’t have to walk across the living room to give my sister the remote? I do not. When I got a bit older, we would all shag flies. They played catch in the front yard before I could participate and by the time I was hitting off a tee, the four of us were throwing the ball around at a velocity that probably unnerved the neighbors. He’d masterminded our training, helping my mom break in a glove years before my sister and I were in Little League. When they weren’t, the problem was diagnosed as either “bad throw” or “bad hands.” Sometimes, “good hands” made up for “bad throw.” But receptions were the rule - so much so that I didn’t consider the familial completion percentage for the unusual achievement it was until I was in my mid-twenties. My parents threw things at each other and at their children with the expectation that those things would be caught. That might sound like a basic lesson and it is, but re-education takes time and I’d spent my entire childhood tossing stuff: salt shakers, apples, cans, flashlights, packages. That incident played out with different roommates (the freshman relationship never recovered) and friends maybe a half a dozen times over the ensuing years before I learned to stop throwing stuff at people. Precisely one thought ran through my goateed head: “He should have caught that.” Being 18, very stupid, and deeply insecure, I didn’t think to apologize. Now I’d gone and fragged a burgeoning brotherhood with a $1.99 Home Depot hand grenade. We’d exchanged pleasantries and spent a night in adjacent twin beds. There was a long silence as we watched the nails and then as I watched his face contort into an accusation. I’d never really considered what throwing and catching meant - the unsimple significance of a simple arc - until I tossed a small box of nails to my freshman year roommate, whose panicked hands swatted it into the ground, spilling aluminum spikes across a serape rug.
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