Katherine's Baseball

My mom and I visited the cemetery this weekend to decorate graves. During our visit, we went looking for the headstone of a couple of relatives – a husband and wife – we’ve never visited because we didn't know for sure where it was. But I had a general idea of where it might be and we had some time, so we gave it a shot.

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 the 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?

Oh, if baseballs could talk!

After stopping for a minute to snap a photo of Katherine's baseball with my Blackberry, my mom and I found the headstone we were looking for. I made a mental note of where to find it in the future. And when I visit it, I’ll be looking for another baseball on the headstone nearby.