One of the most vivid memories of my youth is playing catch with my father. Footballs, Frisbees, baseballs: whatever we had, we threw, over the course of two different backyards. Even when each of us was angry at the other, we found a way to talk, by throwing.
There are many traditional father-son activities that we did not do. My dad was not a hunter or a fisher. And he was not mechanically inclined, so I never passed him any tools to help him as he looked underneath any of the cars I remember us having. His was a white-collar job, and I don’t remember ever visiting it until I was in my teens and his office was just up the street from our house.
He was a city boy, who grew up with a passion for the Brooklyn Dodgers and a love of sports, and that meant showing his kids how to swing a stick for a bat, and teaching us to “take two and hit to right.” He was my brother’s little league coach. I played soccer a few years, both indoors and outdoors. And my sister played basketball. Because of our age differences, dad didn’t have to worry about too many schedule conflicts, so it never seemed like we were running around. Each of us had his or her own turn. (My brother was much older than I was, and there was a different feel for me when we played catch than I bet most brothers feel – he was pretty much another adult as far I was concerned.)
But whatever the season, there was always the backyard, and there was always the tossing back and forth.
I preferred tossing the football; it was bigger than a baseball, required no extra equipment, and sometimes I’d run patterns to get my self ready for the days when the neighborhood kids would play out in the street. I loved Frisbee too, especially when we moved to a house with a bigger yard and could anticipate the disc’s unpredictable movements, but football was always tops. When I was old enough to develop a sense of fandom, my dad would call out the names of quarterbacks, and when he’d call out the names of those whose teams I hated, I’d deliberately drop the ball, much to my dad’s hysterical laughter.
Eventually I’d outgrow such behaviors, and even as my own rooting interests have dissipated over the years, we’d still be out there, throwing the ball, talking about stuff that might have mattered to us most at the time: my work, local news, and now, the kids.
There’s something very pure about playing catch. It seems elemental. You just get into a rhythm and you go back and forth. Probably more than a few heavy conversations about life have taken place between men as they tossed a ball back and forth: advice sought and given, debates engaged and settled, even job or business opportunities contemplated. It may not have been the golf course, where lots of big-money deals have gone down, but playing catch is often more intimate than golf, which usually involves a foursome. Yes, you can play catch with as many people as you have on hand, but if you so many people – four, five, six – usually someone has a hackey sack. “Hack” is communal. Catch is personal. And you’re never gonna play hackeysack with your dad.
My sister, the basketball freak, rarely played with us. This is probably part of my own selfishness, wanting my time with dad – she got hers when he’d take her to the playground to shoot hoops, at the one rim that was lower than the rest. The girls and I do play ball together, but both are still working on their throws. The little one has a pretty good arm, in fact. And yes, my oldest finds it hard to share the time with her baby sister, just like I did with mine. It’s fun to watch them play in my parents’ backyard when we make the drive to visit. They love collecting nature objects, so the interest in throwing around a ball or Frisbee dissipates pretty quick.
I don’t know if we’ll us the tossing as a form of communication, but I hope I can offer some fatherly advice will kicking a soccer ball around, about boys, about teachers, and about how great it is to be their father, as great as it is to be my dad’s son.