The boys had haircuts on Saturday. Should I cut their hair myself? My mother used to shampoo us, pin a bath towel around our necks, lay newspaper on the floor and have us climb onto the kitchen stool in the center of the paper. Then she stood behind us, measuring, or, once, across the kitchen from us, taking a photograph. Somewhere there is a picture of my sister, eyes and hair dark, sitting on the stool, waiting for the scissors.

We had to sit still, and stare at the oven clock. Time moved slowly, but not, it turns out, as slowly as I thought it did. It is unlikely that I will start cutting my own sons’ hair. I’m not going to make their clothes, as my mother did for us, or even their Halloween costumes, or teach them to ski. I have to offer them something else: I will tell them true stories about the old times, long ago, when life was different, but not very different from how it is now. I was them and my mother was me.

Obviously there’s a point, when you’re watching your son play baseball, and his team is getting shellacked, and your husband, who is a coach, and so pitches, at this level, to his own players, strikes out his first-born son, and the ball falls between three players, and they all chase it around like hens, and then no one picks it up and throws it anywhere, and the bottom of the first inning is called because the other team has made six runs and there is a mercy rule, that you worry for your son, and the sons of the people around you, and imagine that they are undergoing some kind of searing experience that will scar them. But this moment passes, it passes quickly, and when you look down to the playground and see that most of the lineup has climbed the jungle gym and is going down the slides, oblivious to what’s going on out on the field, and when you look into the outfield during the bottom of the inning, and see three of them moving their arms around strangely, and either carrying on a conversation or maybe each just talking to himself, out loud, and then the next time someone does something particularly boneheaded on the field you and some of the other mothers laugh, kindly or unkindly—both and neither—you realize that you are not watching a game, or even a representation of anything, you are watching a thing, that thing is irreducible, it is physical and non-physical, it is plastic, it is small and it is large, it is love and the absence of love, it is baseball and it is most certainly not, I repeat, not baseball at all.