I was outside playing catch with my kids the other day, and I started thinking about my dad.
Not anything particularly remarkable. Just playing catch.
Throwing a ball back and forth. Taking turns hitting. Running around the yard. The kind of afternoon that doesn’t seem important while you’re living it.
But those are the afternoons I remember about my own childhood.
Growing up in Maroa, it seemed like we were always outside.
Somebody had a basketball. Somebody had a glove. There was usually a ball rolling down a driveway or a group of kids figuring out what game they were going to play next.
And the dads were part of it.
Not every dad. Not every afternoon. But I remember how many of them would come outside.
My dad certainly did.
I remember him playing catch with me even when his knees hurt. He didn’t always feel like doing it. I’m sure he had other things on his mind. Work. Bills. Responsibilities I knew absolutely nothing about.
But he’d come outside.
And when you’re a kid, you don’t really understand what that means.
You just know Dad is there.
You throw the ball. He throws it back. You miss one. He tells you to keep your eye on it. You throw another.
You don’t think about the fact that he’s tired.
You don’t think about the things he could be doing instead.
And you certainly don’t think about how someday you’ll wish you could have just one more afternoon like that.
Now I’m the dad.
And I’m beginning to understand things I couldn’t possibly have understood back then.
Sometimes I’m tired. Sometimes I’ve got a hundred things running through my head. Sometimes the last thing I feel like doing is chasing a ball around the yard.
But then one of my kids wants to play.
And I think about my dad.
So we go outside.
We hit softballs. We play catch. We run around. Sometimes we play golf before school. Sometimes we’re just messing around in the driveway.
And I wonder whether my kids will remember any of it.
I hope they do.
I also wonder whether I’ll ever live up to the example my dad set.
Because when I look back at childhood in Maroa, I don’t remember needing a whole lot.
We didn’t need an organized activity every afternoon. We didn’t need somebody scheduling every minute. We didn’t need an expensive experience to have a good time.
We needed a ball, a yard, a few friends, and sometimes a dad willing to come outside.
I know families still do these things. And I know the past wasn’t perfect.
But I do wonder whether we’ve made childhood more complicated than it needs to be.
We spend so much time trying to give our children opportunities that sometimes I worry we’re overlooking the simplest one.
The opportunity to spend time together.
Not watching something together. Not driving somewhere together.
Actually doing something together.
And here’s what I’ve realized.
My dad probably didn’t know he was creating memories when he came outside to play catch.
He was just being my dad.
Forty years later, I’m standing in a yard with my own children, trying to do the same thing.
And maybe that’s how some of the best parts of childhood get passed from one generation to the next.
Not through anything we teach our kids in a formal way.
But through the ordinary things we remember somebody doing for us.
So if one of my kids asks me to come outside tomorrow, I’m going to try to remember something.
Someday, I won’t be able to go back and play catch with them at this age.
But today, I still can.
And I think my dad would understand exactly why that matters.
