The Valentine's Day Baseball Game

                Elementary school holiday parties were festive times that grade school kids anticipated when my sister and I were students at Ralston School. Parties were planned each year for Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter.

                Our mother always chose to provide refreshments for our Valentine’s Day parties. Angie always looked forward to Mother coming for the Valentine's Day party. On Valentine's Day, Mother arrived, parked in the front of the school, carried her tasty goodies in the school building, and deposited them in Angie’s classroom.

Angie's Class from the 1969 RHS Yearbook

Mother then exited the building to the playground where Angie’s class enjoyed a recess before they exchanged valentines and enjoyed the treats their mothers prepared for the special day. Just as Mother arrived on the playground, one of the boys had batted what would have been most likely a home run, but Mother in her heels and suit of pink-flecked navy caught the ball with her bare hands. (Mother swears it came right to her and she instinctively snagged the fly. No elementary children were knocked down for her to retrieve it.) Angie’s mom became the star of the Valentine's Day baseball game. Bernyce Gates’s stock went up with the boys playing the recess baseball game. I recall being told John Powell, the son of Owen and Clara Powell, was wowed at the athletic capability of “Angie’s mom”! I guess it did not matter what she was wearing! Ironically, her own name was not lauded but just her moniker, Angie’s mom.

Mother in the suit created by

Grandma Gladys with Angie -

cropped from a family photo.

Often women of yesteryear became mothers committed to the well-being and success of their families. Realizing they couldn’t maintain their involvement in hobbies and still meet the demands of children, the personal interests were often given less and less time. They loved their husbands and children and made their primary goal creating a home, a sanctuary to which each family member could return after a taxing day.

Mother, as a gifted musician, relinquished all time for practicing the piano. She had been so active in playing basketball and softball and running track – all of which she loved to do. Much like her mother-in-law, our grandma, Mamie Irene Tripp Gates, most of that faded away. Ella Gates Bledsoe, my father’s oldest sister, lamented that her mother most desired to draw and make music, but her time and energy were devoted to raising her large family.

Both women, my mother and paternal grandmother, prepared three meals “from scratch” without dishwashers or microwave ovens. Laundry initially was done in a large tub with a washboard and must be dried on a clothesline. Summer, a labor-intensive season, involved processing garden vegetables and domestic and wild summer fruit, primarily by canning over a hot stove in a kitchen without air conditioning. Both processed the milk from the cow’s twice-a-day milking, skimming cream, churning butter and sometimes making cottage cheese. Almost everything my mother and grandmother did was for the benefit of someone else, whether sewing, mending, or patching or the 101 other family needs.

                I admire mothers (and fathers) who place the needs, whether physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual, before their own personal desires. In so many children’s lives, mothers and fathers exhibiting this sacrificial attitude toward their children is sorely lacking.

                May all of us, even if not parents of little ones, live out this inspired admonition of the Apostle Paul penned in the letter to the Romans, chapter 15, verse 1 as translated in the Tree of Life Version.

Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of the powerless and not just please ourselves.