The Bull-Headed Man in the Baseball Hat

I sit on the porch watching my grandson run across the yard, his baseball cap falling off as he rounds the imaginary bases. Just like his grandfather used to do, I think, though Walter never ran unless something was chasing him—or unless he was late for supper, which happened often enough.

"Grandma, want to play?" Toby calls out, holding up a worn leather glove that belonged to Walter. The glove's got stories in its creases, just like the laugh lines around my eyes.

"In a bit, honey," I say, patting my white hair. It used to be brown as the soil we tilled, until time and seven children turned it the color of winter snow.

Walter was bull-headed, that's what everyone said. stubborn as a Missouri bull, his mother used to tell me when we were courting. But that same stubbornness built the house we raised our family in, kept the farm going through the drought of '58, and taught our children that quitting wasn't in their vocabulary.

I remember the day he bought me this hat—a simple blue baseball cap with "FERN" stitched across the front. I'd complained about the sun burning my neck while working in the garden. Next day, he came home with it, acting like he'd picked it up by accident at the hardware store. That man, bull-headed about everything except showing love.

Toby runs over, breathless. "Grandma, tell me about Grandpa's bull-riding days again."

I laugh softly. "Your grandfather never rode a bull in his life, sweetheart. That was just a story he made up to make the farm sound exciting."

But wasn't that just like Walter? Creating legends out of ordinary life, making our simple existence sound like something out of a picture show. The stories grew in the telling, until the truth hardly mattered anymore.

"What was he really like?" Toby asks, sitting beside me on the swing.

I think about how to explain a man who was more complicated than he appeared. A man whose hair stayed thick dark until his sixties, who worked from sunup to sundown, who never said 'I love you' but showed it in a thousand ways.

"He was like this old porch," I finally say. "Solid, dependable, weathered but still standing. And he loved you more than anything in the world."

Toby leans his head on my shoulder, and I think that's legacy enough—to be remembered not for the bull-headedness, but for the love underneath. The rest is just details, scattered like baseballs across a well-worn field.