“You’re out!” the ump shouted as the right fielder caught the ball my brother had hit. I loved watching him play Little League baseball when we were growing up in the sixties.
John’s coach congratulated him for the “sacrifice fly.” I wondered what that meant. I learned a “sacrifice fly” could help John’s team win. The time it took a long fly ball to be caught allowed the kid on third base to tag up, then race to home plate and score a run.
I became enamored with the game--hearing the slap of the ball in the catcher’s mitt, watching a homerun ball sailing over the fence, and cheering on the runners charging home. I wanted to play, too. More than anything. But girls weren’t allowed to play on the boys’ teams.
John taught me how to catch and throw with his hand-me-down fielder’s glove. But it was a right-hander’s glove and I was a lefty. The awkward catch, drop, and throw worked OK bouncing a ball off the back of the garage, but I longed to be on a team. I needed a lefty’s mitt.
Finally, in my twelfth summer, a girls’ softball team was organized in my neighborhood. I tried out for catcher to be like my brother, but the team didn’t have catchers’ equipment.
“I can’t play on the team unless you get me a left-hander’s glove,” I said to my parents.
But my dad, like many men of his generation, didn’t think it was appropriate for girls to play sports. He said, “No.”
My mother must have noticed how much I loved the game as I’d cheered on my brothers, because she did something for me then that I’d never seen her do before. She defied my father.
In the sixties, customers earned trading stamps when they bought gas or groceries. Mom, a stay-at-home mother of six children, pasted her stamps into matching books to trade for special treasures.
While Dad was at work, Mom drove me to the Top Value stamp redemption store. She gave up several books of stamps and dreams of her own to pay for my lefty’s mitt. I don’t know how much more it cost her in marriage currency.
I played catcher every game that season. It didn’t matter that my glove was made to catch baseballs, not huge softballs. It was mine and it fit. It gave me the courage to reach for every ball as bravely as my brother.
A couple of years later, Mom would go back to college and was soon earning her own paycheck. My mother’s sacrifice made my dream come true, but I wonder if she felt empowered by it, too. | 
