Somewhere Between Biloxi and the Carolinas.

A Note Before You Read

This is one of the most personal stories I have ever written because, until now, I have never really told it outside the circle of people who were there. For twenty four years, I have kept it almost entirely inside that small group and inside myself. It was simply one of the most genuine connections of my life, lived quietly in plain sight during one unforgettable summer and carried in different forms for years afterward. Writing it now feels less like telling an old story and more like opening a door that I nailed shut years ago.

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The summer I was fourteen or fifteen, my dad coached my brother’s baseball team, my brother was eighteen, and those boys simply would not stop winning. In fact, my dad back then was known primarily in Union Parish, so when he received an accommodation from Lincoln Parish for their World Series win, it was a big deal.

Every tournament led to another tournament, every win meant another hotel, and before long my mother and I were following a caravan of teenage boys, bat bags, helmets, coolers, dirty uniforms, and enough testosterone to qualify as a controlled substance across several states. We went to Biloxi, Mississippi, where they won again, and then somewhere else I cannot remember because apparently my brain decided the emotional plot was worth preserving but the tournament bracket could go straight to hell. Eventually, we ended up in either North Carolina or South Carolina. I know with complete certainty it was one of the Carolinas, which is the kind of precise historical record people have come to expect from me. I did not know that somewhere between Biloxi and whichever Carolina we eventually reached, one of those boys was about to become the first person outside my family who seemed to look directly at me and decide I was worth paying attention to.

I remember Biloxi because I ran out of shampoo and had to wash my hair with a bar of hotel soap, which left it with the texture and flexibility of residential insulation. I walked out of the room and into a space full of filthy boys who had just played baseball in the Mississippi heat, and somehow I still thought I was the luckiest girl alive. Those boys treated me like the unofficial team mascot, except I was louder, more demanding, and probably required more snacks. They included me in everything. I was not my brother’s little sister being dragged along. I belonged to the traveling circus, and at that age there was nowhere on earth I would rather have been.

At some point in Biloxi, my dad had to hurry home for work, but my mother and I stayed with the team and then drove with everybody to the next tournament in whichever Carolina had been selected to host our suffering. The drive was around ten hours before my mother’s contribution to transportation planning. We were packed into the vehicle with bat bags, helmets, bases, luggage, and enough equipment to open a sporting-goods store at the next interstate exit. My knees were somewhere near my chin, and every few hours we had to stop and unfold ourselves beside the highway like human lawn chairs.

While we were going through Atlanta, my mother announced that she saw a detour and confidently took it. About an hour later, we looked up and realized we were back where we had started. My mother calmly admitted that it had been a bad detour, which remains one of the most underrated statements ever made about a complete failure of navigation. This was before everyone carried a tiny satellite in their pocket that could scream at them for making a wrong turn, so we simply accepted that we had donated an additional hour of our lives to metropolitan Atlanta and continued toward whichever Carolina was waiting for us.

I was not shy on that trip. At the World Series complex, I climbed to the top of some tower while our team was playing and began calling out their names and numbers like I had been appointed official announcer by a committee that existed only in my imagination. My friend Samantha was there with me, and after I had introduced and cheered for everybody with the restraint of a woman directing air traffic during a national emergency, we finished by singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” I am sure the entire complex was grateful for the free entertainment and not at all wondering why two teenage girls had seized control of the atmosphere.

Somewhere during that run of tournaments, I sat down in a hotel lobby beside one of my brother’s teammates. I knew who he was, of course. Everybody did. He had just graduated from high school, he was about to play baseball in college on scholarship, and professional scouts were already paying attention to him. He was that good. I had never really spoken to him, but apparently I did not consider conversation a necessary prerequisite for what happened next. I sat beside him, put my feet up, and he began massaging them without hesitation, as though this arrangement had been negotiated in advance and approved by both coaching staffs.

Then my dad and his dad walked into the lobby while they were unloading equipment and found us sitting there like an old married couple at the end of a difficult fiscal year. Their faces asked what in the hell was happening before either of them managed to form the words. I do not remember what explanation we gave, probably because there was not one. I remember him pointing at me and saying something to the effect of “she ordered me to massage her feet.” Which, to be honest, I have been known to do from time to time. We had barely spoken before that moment. I had simply put my feet in his lap, and he had accepted his assignment. I did not feel embarrassed. I mostly felt irritated that the adults had interrupted what seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable arrangement.

From then on, we were inseparable whenever circumstances allowed it. He was eighteen. I was fourteen or fifteen. That difference mattered, and everybody around us understood it. We were not dating. Nothing sexual happened. We did not even kiss. There were hugs, arms around each other, endless time together, and the kind of obvious connection that becomes public knowledge within a traveling baseball team before either person involved has figured out what to call it. Everyone knew. My parents knew. His parents knew. My brother knew. His teammates knew. His cousin knew. Another boy on the team knew it so thoroughly that he became jealous enough to hack into my email account and send him a message pretending to be me, saying I never wanted to speak to him again. The plot was discovered, because criminal masterminds operating from teenage bedrooms are rarely known for airtight digital evidence, but it remains the only time anyone has committed identity theft over my romantic availability.

I fell completely in love with him in the enormous, innocent, all-consuming way a girl that age first understands love. It was infatuation, admiration, safety, excitement, and the overwhelming discovery that one particular person could walk into a room and somehow change the temperature of it. The remarkable part was that I did not imagine it alone. He felt something too. There was no speech about it and no dramatic declaration. It was simply obvious in the way we found each other in every room, sat together every chance we got, and moved through that summer as though we had quietly agreed to remain side by side until somebody made us stop.

One night, the entire team and all the parents were leaving the hotel to walk down the street for midnight black-light bowling. My parents were there. His parents were there. Teammates, family friends, and half the town were there. A now-retired judge from our area was there because her son played on the team. We were walking through the hotel parking lot when he suddenly picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and took off running toward the bowling alley like he was competing in the four-hundred-meter dash and I was deeply inconvenient athletic equipment.

I was dangling upside down, screaming, while he ran down the street and everybody behind us laughed until they could barely keep walking. Nobody was scandalized. Nobody thought anything sinister was happening. They thought it was funny and sweet because they had watched us all summer and knew exactly what it was. It was a boy showing off for a girl he liked, a girl pretending to be outraged while secretly believing no human being had ever been happier, and an entire baseball family watching one of those small moments that becomes important only after enough years have passed to reveal what it was.

Then the summer ended, because summer has no respect whatsoever for the plans of teenage girls. He left for college in Mississippi to play baseball, and I went home. We emailed because this was before everybody had a cell phone permanently attached to one hand, and communicating with someone required patience, a computer, and occasionally an entire household knowing you were waiting for the dial-up internet to stop making noises like a dying robot. We stayed in touch, but distance began doing what distance does. The daily closeness disappeared. The team was no longer moving from one hotel to another. There were no lobbies, bowling alleys, or ten-hour drives keeping us in the same orbit.

That October, my mother, my brother, and I came home one evening from somewhere I no longer remember. There was a message on our answering machine, and I saw the number before we played it. It was a Mississippi number, and I knew immediately that it was him. He had called pretending he wanted to speak to my brother, because apparently the only safe way for an eighteen-year-old boy to call a girl he missed was to disguise the operation as a routine baseball communication.

My brother called him back. After a minute, he looked at me with a small smile, held out the phone, and said, “Here’s the phone, Judith.” We talked for two hours. I do not remember everything we said. I remember hearing his voice after missing him so badly, and I remember the relief of knowing I had not been forgotten. For two hours, I had him back, and at that age I did not yet know enough to understand that getting someone back for one night is sometimes how life begins teaching you goodbye.

The closeness did not disappear all at once, though. Life did not slam a door and erase him. For close to ten years, he came home around Christmas, usually when a mutual family friend was playing with his band at the Dawg House in Ruston. We would see each other, catch up, and for the first five years or so, he would take a very active interest in determining which man I was dating and why that man was clearly defective. He did not like a single one of them. At the time, I probably thought he was being difficult, territorial, overprotective, or simply enjoying the opportunity to insult my decision-making with the confidence of someone who had known me before I developed any.

Looking back, I understand it differently. He saw things I did not see yet. He knew me from before I had learned how easily attention could be mistaken for care and chaos could be mistaken for passion. He remembered the girl from that summer, and whether either of us ever said it plainly or not, some part of him still felt responsible for protecting her. He did not own me, and he was not waiting for me to choose him. He had his own life moving forward. He simply kept looking at the men beside me and asking, in one sharp comment or another, whether they understood who they were standing next to.

I remember one Christmas night at the Dawg House when the boyfriend I was with had caused a huge scene and yelled at me. I was frazzled, trying to fix my earring, and probably doing what I used to do so well, which was gathering myself quickly enough to pretend something humiliating had not just happened in front of people. He saw it. He pulled me inside and told me he was about to beat that motherfucker up if I did not leave his ass right then. I do not remember exactly what I said. I do not remember whether I defended the boyfriend, dismissed it, laughed it off, or promised something I had no intention of doing. I know I did not listen. I went back.

He and I had a disagreement over it, and the quiet between us got quieter after that. There was no dramatic final scene and no clean ending I recognized while it was happening. There was just a little more distance where there had once been an easy understanding, and then enough time passed that the distance began to feel normal. I will always carry some regret about that. Not because I believe listening to him would have rewritten the rest of my life into something perfect, but because he was trying to protect me, I was too tangled in the situation to hear him, and something between us became harder to reach afterward.

At the time, it was just another intense conversation in the middle of a loud bar while I was upset and trying to get my earring back where it belonged. Now I understand what he was telling me beneath the threat and the profanity. He was saying that he still saw me. He was saying that whatever time and distance had changed, he still recognized when somebody was treating me like less than the girl he had known. He was saying that I might have become willing to explain away behavior that hurt me, but he had not become willing to watch it happen quietly. It was not a declaration of ownership or some delayed attempt to reclaim a teenage romance. It was protection in the only language an angry young man in a Ruston bar could manage at the time: I see you, I still know you, and I am not going to stand here while someone treats you like that.

The following Christmas, he came home again. Our mutual family friend was playing at the Dawg House, just like always, except this time he brought a girl with him. I had a boyfriend too, so it was not as though I had been sitting around waiting for him or believing we were secretly in some relationship neither of us had bothered to mention. We had never dated. We had never made promises. Still, seeing him walk in with her felt different. She was the first girl he had ever brought home into that little world where, for years, he and I had always found our way back to each other around Christmas.

I do not remember thinking their relationship was especially serious that night. Maybe I did not want to think about it closely enough to decide. A few months later, in the spring, I was sitting in the living room of the house where we lived across from the high school where my mother taught. My brother was sitting in the green recliner when he told me he needed to talk to me. He said my old friend had wanted him to make sure I knew that the relationship was serious and that he planned to ask her to marry him.

I remember exactly where my brother was sitting. I remember the green recliner. I remember the room. I do not remember what I said because whatever answer I gave had to pass through the part of me trying very hard to behave as though the news had no right to hurt. I was in a relationship myself. He and I had never been in one. There had been no betrayal, no broken promise, and no reasonable claim I could make on the life he was choosing. It hurt anyway.

I think what hurt was not the loss of a future we had planned, because we never planned one. It was the quiet closing of a possibility neither of us had ever named. Until that moment, some part of me had probably believed that no matter how much life moved around us, Christmas would keep bringing us back into the same room and we would keep recognizing each other in the old way. Hearing that he was going to marry her forced me to understand that he was no longer simply living elsewhere and returning home once a year. He was building a life, and I was not going to occupy the same private corner of it forever.

I continued to see them for several years after that. Sometimes he brought her with him and sometimes he did not. We spoke, caught up, and moved through those encounters with all the history still underneath them and no reason to disturb it. She became his wife, and he became part of the life he had chosen. I kept moving through mine. The connection did not suddenly become false because another woman became his future. It simply became something both of us had to carry differently.

There was no single final conversation where we agreed to let each other go. We simply saw each other less as adulthood filled in around us. He was drafted and played professional baseball for a few years before an injury ended that part of his career. He became a baseball coach. He married and had children. I built my own life, made some excellent choices, made some choices that should have required adult supervision, married, had children, became an attorney, and kept moving too. Eventually, Christmas stopped bringing us into the same room, and the thread between us became a memory instead of something either of us still reached for.

Now we see each other mostly through pictures on Facebook, which is one of the stranger arrangements modern life has given us. Every now and then, his face appears on my screen. I see the coach, the husband, the father, and the man whose life kept moving through all the years mine did too. I imagine he occasionally sees mine and recognizes pieces of the loud girl from the baseball tournaments beneath the attorney, the mother, the marriages, the children, and everything else that has accumulated since then. We have watched each other become people neither of us could have imagined from opposite sides of a screen, close enough to know the other is still there and distant enough not to know much more than that.

His cousin works at a local bank, every now and then when we see each other, his name comes up, mostly with just a simple “how are they?”, followed by a simple “everyone’s doing good.”

For a long time, I believed that was exactly where the story belonged. Nothing was stolen from us, and nothing failed. We met at the right time and remained connected in different ways until adulthood filled in around us. The summer ended, but the care did not disappear with the hotel rooms and tournament schedules. It lingered for years in Christmas conversations, suspicious inspections of my boyfriends, sharp warnings I ignored, the first girl he brought home, my brother sitting in a green recliner trying to tell me gently that she was going to become his wife, and the quiet certainty that somebody who had known me young still remembered what I was worth even when I temporarily did not. I never needed that connection to become a relationship in order to know it had been real.

Lately, though, I have wondered whether life has gone on long enough for the story to have room for one more conversation. Not to go backward, recreate that summer, or ask an old connection to become something it was never meant to be. I would simply like to know him again as the man he became. I would like to hear about the years between the pictures, the baseball career, the injury, the coaching, the family, and all the ordinary parts of his life that never made it onto my screen. Maybe some people are meant to remain perfect memories. Maybe others are allowed to become something quieter after enough time has passed: two people who once knew each other by instinct sitting down as adults and discovering what, if anything, they still recognize.

That summer gave me dirty baseball uniforms, hotel soap masquerading as shampoo, a ten-hour drive made eleven by my mother’s criminal misuse of the word detour, and a team full of boys who made me feel like I belonged wherever they were going. It gave me the courage to perform from the top of a tower without one moment of concern for whether anyone had asked me to. It gave me the first person outside my family who seemed to look directly at me and decide I was worth paying attention to. It gave me years of learning that some connections do not vanish simply because they cannot become ordinary relationships. Sometimes they change shape and keep quietly recognizing you from across crowded rooms, Christmas gatherings, and eventually a Facebook screen.

I can think of him now and smile from somewhere deep inside myself, not because I am trying to reclaim the boy he was, but because I remember the girl I was when he saw me. She was loud, fearless, sunburned, surrounded by baseball equipment, and completely certain the world had made a place for her. She was fiery on those sidelines too. I cheered for those boys with my whole body, got loud when they needed it, and carried their wins and losses like somebody had accidentally put me on the official roster. He saw that fire in me, and he loved it. He was never trying to quiet it, contain it, or make it easier for him to handle. He wanted to fan the flames, he enjoyed watching me light the matches, hell he even handed me a few.

For one summer, he was part of that place, and I was part of his. For years afterward, even as our lives moved farther apart, some part of him kept turning back long enough to make sure nobody had convinced me I deserved less than what he had seen in me from the beginning.

Some people are never meant to become your whole life, but that does not always mean they are meant to disappear from it forever. Sometimes they become one perfect season, then a handful of Christmas nights, then a familiar face passing through pictures while decades quietly collect between you. Maybe the proof that it mattered is not that it lasted forever, and maybe honoring it does not require leaving it untouched forever either. Maybe life has finally carried us far enough beyond Biloxi, the terrible Atlanta detour, whichever Carolina we eventually reached, the night he tried to protect me when I would not protect myself, and the spring afternoon when my brother sat in that green recliner and told me he was going to marry someone else, for me to reach across the distance and simply ask him how he has been. Maybe it’s time to pick up the phone, or stop by the bank for just a few minutes.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney At Law

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