Lilith and my tee ball player

We crossed the street to avoid two little dogs that Lilith didn't want to see. Three young men were walking on the other side, coming back from the pool with their towels. One of them greeted me; he'd been on my tee ball team when he and my son were five years old. Since then, he'd been in the Navy. Now? "Doing lots of LGBTQ stuff and singing in the Honolulu Gay Chorus," he said. His mom had a knee replaced a month ago, and is only now driving again. And your dad? I asked. Even then, he and the young man's mother were divorced; he did baseball duty with his son. "You know what your dad said to me once?" I asked. "He told me not to let you act like a girl. I said that was not my job, nor did I think acting like a girl was a bad thing." He said his dad had taken him to try out for another team and had thrown the ball--hard--at him. Hit him three times in the head. Never played baseball again. (And then I remembered the young man's name, because it comes after "the Eskimo" in a Bob Dylan song.) He smiled, said his dad had died of cancer a few years ago, but had always had to remind himself that his son was gay. You could watch the gears moving in his head, he said. Smiled.