23. Sports page

So I invited Facebook friends to suggest a category for today's gratitude list. The first responder, my favorite librarian, Deb Bloom, threw me a curve ball.

Sports.

I don't play sports, and I don't have a TV, so I seldom watch sports. But I believe that, with practice, gratitude is boundless, so no topic should be out of bounds. And I want to be a good sport. In no particular order, then, my roster of standout sporty things and moments.

I am grateful:

That Little Rock has a minor league baseball team, so fans can have someone to root for and can enjoy attending local games and also all the silly promotions that provide entertainment during games, like Clunker Car Night, bingo, the dizzy bat race, shooting midgets out of cannons (not sure they still do that one), and the custom of singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh-inning stretch. I fondly remember the now retired organist — what was her name? — who was so quick and witty and skilled in the little things she played to go with various players' names. And even if I don't know it's a game night, I know whether they've won, because they celebrate with fireworks, which I can hear from my home and see from my balcony.

For the pleasures of listening to baseball on the radio, even if I'm using it as a prelude to a great afternoon nap, and for getting to hear Bob Prince call Pirates games way back in the day. Also going to a few Pirates games with my great-aunt, and also with friends in grad school on Buck Night (admission, Cokes, hot dogs, all $1 each).

For friends who will have me over for dinner and a show during the Olympics, the time when I most miss TV.

For the discipline-building involved in being on the basketball team my freshman year in high school, especially since I spent most of my time on the bench, and for the one thing I was good at: discipline in running however many laps the coach told us to run after practice, around the gym-auditorium, up the back steps and through the balcony and down the other back steps, never stopping to skip a lap in the stairwell.

For many memories associated with the years my daughter played softball.

For some of her turns of phrase when watching sports, like calling a neighborhood pickup game of football "a swarm of boys" and naming the place where figure skaters await their marks "the skating dugout."

For Frito pies at concession stands.

For my uncle's hand-me-down tennis rackets when I was in junior high, and for being allowed to hit tennis balls over and over and over against the back of our wooden garage.

For occasionally getting to see my nephews play ball over the years, especially getting to see one play baseball this summer the weekend the other was graduating from high school.

For that October Saturday afternoon the last time (though we did not know then that it would be the last time, did not know the cancer that would kill him 10 months later was probably already in his lung) Dad was vacationing in Branson and I'd gone up for the weekend, when he and I had been out for breakfast, just the two of us, and we'd ambled through the five and dime shop on the square, and we got back to the fishing cabin before everyone else, and I kind of wanted to talk, but he was content to just be, and he turned on the TV to watch some football game, and after a moment of private disappointment I decided that it was OK for us to just be, too, and I released my desire, and even asked him a few things about the game, and he answered, and when a player did something amazing, he exclaimed and called me babe, and honestly, being alone together on that nubbly plaid cabin sofa in mutual contentment was better than whatever I had thought I wanted.

And you? What sporty thing, even if only tangentially related, is in your gratitude hall of fame? 

Morning on the boat dock at the fishing cabins on Lake Taneycomo in Branson, October 2012.