Earth Works: Selected Essays

Reasons of the Body

81 y son has never met a sport he did not like. I have met a few that left an ugly tingle—boxing and rodeo and pistol shooting, among others—but, then, I have been meeting them for forty-four years, Jesse only for twelve. Our ages are relevant to the discussion, because, on the hill of the sporting life, Jesse is midway up the slope and climbing rapidly, while I am over the crest and digging in my heels as I slip down. “You still get around pretty well for an old guy,” he told me last night after we had played catch in the park. The catch we play has changed subtly in recent months, a change that dramatizes a shift in the force field binding father and son. Early on, when I was a decade younger and Jesse a toddler, I was the agile one, leaping to snare his wild throws. The ball we tossed in those days was rubbery and light, a bubble of air as big around as a soup bowl, easy for small hands to grab. By the time he started school, we were using a tennis ball, then we graduated to a softball, then to gloves and a baseball. His repertoire of catches and throws increased along with his vocabulary. Over the years, as Jesse put on inches and pounds and grace, I still had to be careful how far and hard I threw, to avoid bruising his ribs or his pride. But this spring, when we began limbering up our arms, his throws came whistling at me with a force that hurt my hand, and he caught effortlessly anything I could hurl back at him. It was as though the food he wolfed down all winter had turned into spring steel. I no longer needed to hold back. Now Jesse is the one, when he is feeling charitable, who pulls his pitches. Reasons of the Body 82 Earth works Yesterday in the park, he was feeling frisky rather than charitable. We looped the ball lazily back and forth awhile. Then he started backing away, backing away, until my shoulder twinged from the length of throws. Unsatisfied, he yelled, “Make me run for it!” So I flung the ball high and deep, low and wide, driving him over the grass, yet he loped easily wherever it flew, gathered it in, then whipped it back to me with stinging speed. “Come on,” he yelled, “put it where I can’t reach it.” I tried, ignoring the ache in my arm, and still he ran under the ball. He might have been gliding on a cushion of air, he moved so lightly. I was feeling heavy, and felt heavier by the minute as his return throws, grown suddenly and unaccountably wild, forced me to hustle back and forth, jump and dive. “Hey,” I yelled, waving my glove at him. “Look where I’m standing!” “Standing is right,” he yelled back. “Let’s see those legs move!” His next throw sailed over my head, and the ones after that sailed farther still, now left now right, out of my range, until I gave up even trying for them, and the ball thudded accusingly to the ground. By the time we quit, I was sucking air, my knees were stiffening, and a fire was blazing in my arm. Jesse trotted up, his T-shirt dry, his breathing casual. This was the moment he chose to clap me on the back and say, “You still get around pretty well for an old guy.” It was a line I might have delivered, as a cocky teenager, to my own father. He would have laughed, and then challenged me to a round of golf or a bout of arm wrestling, contests he could still easily have won. Whatever else these games may be, they are always contests. For many a boy, some playing field, some court or gym is the first arena in which he can outstrip his old man. For me, the arena was a concrete driveway where I played basketball against my father, shooting at a rusty hoop that was mounted over the garage. He had taught me how to dribble, how to time my jump, how to follow through on my shots. To begin with, I could barely heave the ball to the basket, and he would applaud if I so much as banged the rim. I banged away, year by year, my bones lengthening, muscles thickening...