A Grave Encounter
How a weathered baseball near a headstone made my mind race to fill in the gaps.
In 2011, my mom and I visited the cemetery on Memorial Day weekend to decorate the graves of loved ones. As we browsed the rows of headstones, I stumbled across a headstone that stopped me in my tracks.
Her name was Katherine. She was born in 1911 and died in 1999. I stopped because somebody had placed an old beat up baseball where flowers or flags would ordinarily go – at the top of her headstone.
Obviously, Katherine must have been a baseball fan. Growing up in the 1920s, she would have had the chance to gather around the radio with her family and listen to broadcasters paint beautiful pictures of players such as Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby and Lou Gehrig in action.
I couldn’t help but wonder about the story behind the baseball itself. Did it belong to her? Was it autographed? Did she play catch with her grandkids with it? Did she catch it at a baseball game? Did one of her grandkids inherit it and decide to part with the treasure to honor her?
Oh, if baseballs could talk!
Yeah, my mind raced to fill in the gaps in Katherine’s life. Surely she must have been a baseball fan – so much so that eleven years after her death, a loved one left a baseball on her headstone on Memorial Day weekend.
One of my sisters had a different take when she heard the story.
“OK, well the first thought I had was that maybe a dog just happened to drop the ball there?” she said. “It looks pretty beat up! But your version of the story is much better!”
Isn’t it funny how two people can see the same situation so differently? That’s probably a pretty good lesson for all of us to remember.
Here are some tidbits you might find interesting this week:
Did you hear about the unknown C. S. Lewis poem that was discovered recently?
Author Austin Kleon is making mixed tapes again. And I have to admit, it holds a certain appeal to me as well.
Food for thought from author Erin Loechner about technology: “Technology broadens our experiences. But what will broaden our capacity to actually be in those experiences? To witness them? To see them, to live them, to attest to their reality? How can we begin to reject the idea that we must capture a moment so that maybe, possibly, wonderfully we might allow a moment to capture us?”
“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant … As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.” -C. S. Lewis, from “Surprised by Joy”
Some thoughts on silence by Hadden Turner.
When Lee isn’t writing essays, devotional books, or Christian fiction, he is a freelance editor, as well as a freelance journalist who has written hundreds of articles for various newspapers and magazines. He’s also a fan of NASCAR, baseball, tennis, books, movies and coffee shops.
And here I thought it was going to be that some children were playing baseball long long ago, and one of them threw the ball into the graveyard but nobody had enough courage to go get it, and it was their only ball, and they couldn’t afford another one, so they never played baseball again. (Okay, what would you do with this one? My husband and I were driving on Scenic Highway the other day, a highway near our house, and in this little park, we thought we saw a rooster disappear into the overgrown brush. And two teenage boys were chasing it while what appeared to be their mother looked on as she stood at her car in the parking lot. We did catch one more glimpse, and it was a rooster. What’s the story?! I love making up stories for these kinds of scenarios.)