My mother, the woman who wore white gloves to church, the woman who bleached and scrubbed everything to within an inch of it’s material life, the woman who believed in saving everyone from certain damnation, the woman who obeyed all the rules…was transformed in the face of baseball.

She screamed and yelled from the Mission City grandstands,

“Pitcher’s gotta rubber arm!”

“Ump is blind!”

“Hey batterbatter S–U-H-W-I-N-G….batter swing!”

Sometimes it was my dad hitting a great line drive, sometimes it was just another local team. It didn’t matter. My mother sat close enough to the action so that she could be heard loud and clear. Thinking back, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have mattered where she sat. I’m sure they heard her all the way to the top of the Grand Street hill.

Years later I found out that she’d been a pretty hot baseball player back in Warman, Saskatchewan. An amazing thing for a little Mennonite girl.

Back operations and pain forced her into the stands. And so, like everything else that her church and society told her to do, she stood in the shadows – behind her man.

Mary Jane; always in the background, helping dad with his school board speeches, his Sunday school lessons, always working on everyone else’s life but her own.

But thankfully, she didn’t always stand quietly and for that I am truly thankful.

I inherited her loud laugh and I’ve been known to scream a little too.

Hope you’re yelling loud and long up there Mom.

S-W-I-N-G batter, S-W-I-N-G.