A Cup of Kindness (Blast From the Past 4)

I was picking up my girls from school and caught the end of a baseball game yesterday-- I love baseball and Spring and the sound of the metal bat when it makes contact with a fastball and I was reminded of one hectic afternoon many years ago. So in honor of Spring and baseball season and my promise to bring you my randomly regular blasts from the days before Al Gore invented the internet or even global warming, here's the latest installment of Blasts From the Past.

*****************

I remember that I was struggling to get my son ready for his Little League baseball game one Saturday afternoon. As you recall, I had a passel of kids (that's a country word I've learned, along with "yonder") and things never ever ran smoothly. On this day the clock was ticking and we were just about to leave when panic set in because our son could not locate the most important piece of baseball equipment a kid owns. Nope, it was not the baseball glove, not the hat, not even the bat. This item is one rarely seen by the general public unless the general public happens to be a mother who does her son's laundry. Without going into too much detail, let's just say that if I was planning to have any grandchildren, we could not leave the house

without this all-important, "don't-even-think-about-playing-infield-without-this" vital piece of body armor.

"Mom, where's my cup!? I can't find my cup anywhere!!" [Moms are somehow supposed to know where everything is at all times.]

The family scattered and five of us frantically looked in all the usual places (and by usual I mean all the places a 10 year old files his really important treasures: under furniture, in the laundry, behind his dresser, and under his bed). During the mad-dash to find the necessary piece of equipment, my 3 year old looked on with fascination and finally offered her help too. [Now you have to know that on occasion my baby was known to help "clean" for me and often put things is odd places. There's a part of my vacuum cleaner that I've never found and once she even locked Friendly in a cabinet and then remembered him several hours later. It didn't help that we were 30 minutes from home at the time.]

Anyway on this day she looked on with an odd sense of incredulity at all of us scrambling around, and then opened one of my kitchen cabinets, reached in and said, "Here's yo' cup, Bruther." Relieved, we all turned around, but instead of the missing baseball equipment, she was holding an ordinary plastic drinking cup.

Eventually we found the right cup, made it to the ball field on time, and my chances of having grandchildren are still intact.