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.
