My father never played catch with me when I was a boy — a tomboy, that is. I played catch for hours after school with Skipper, Evan, and Sammy, my friends from the neighborhood. And when they moved away, I played catch with myself, bouncing a tennis ball against the garage wall. But my father never played catch with me.
He played catch with my small half brothers. He was in his sixties when they were born, but he played catch with them. When I was born, he was a very young man, and when I was a child, he played softball with other men on summer Sundays, but he never played catch with me.
