It was all over in a split second.

These youngsters were depending on me to deliver a verdict. Decades of conducting business meetings held little sway here. Family squabbles about who should inherit what didn’t matter. It all came down to timing, contact, and sequence.

BEYOND THE TREES BY MARTIN PERLMAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 111

Every other Sunday Betty and I took the Buick V8 to Cordova, the newer part of Memphis, for lunch at my daughter’s or my son’s house. If we were at my daughter’s then my son and his family came over.

In summer after a late lunch when there was a baseball game, maybe Mickey Mantle and the Yankees, my sometimes-thoughtful son and my talkative son-in-law, drinks in hand, gravitated to the TV in the den. For my money, if I happened to be in St Louis, I liked to take in a Cardinal’s game.

The women did most, actually all, of the cooking and cleanup. Then they sat in the living room and talked, about what I don’t know.

I’d play with the grandkids, bounce the littler ones on my knee, call them schmaltzkup and tickle them. They were always vibrating. They darted off and started their own made-up games.

I was still trying to figure out how the family got there. When did mediocre Sheldon and shy Selma become adults and have children of their own? How did Sheldon end up with a honey-blonde, Jewish bombshell of a bride from Los Angeles? How were we able to find a willing husband in the form of a distant Detroit cousin for Selma? I had no idea.

Directly across the street from the house was a stand of pines and beyond it a dirt field, next to the grammar school, where the kids played softball. I headed over there.

I may be wrong but no-one really seemed to care I was gone. They might ask me where I’d been and I’d report, “Across the street to see the boys play ball.”

This particular day the late springtime sun beamed warm, not summer hot, with a slight breeze. The kids didn’t seem to mind me. I stood in the background and smoked a cigarette. If a foul ball rolled near, I tossed it back.

I’ve always preferred the present to the past and do my best not to think back, but maybe the past has a mind of its own. Anyway my mind wandered back to pulling my horse through the mud somewhere in France in the last days of the Great War, and dropping out of college to work full-time for the family business.

“Mister, mister,” a kid called out. “You’ve been watching us. Do you wanna ump for us?”

“Call balls and strikes?” I asked.

“That’s okay, we don’t need that kind of ump. We need you to say whether a runner is safe or tagged out. That’s when we get into arguments.”

I asked where I should stand, and he said just outside first base, and I could move around if a runner was somewhere else.

“Tell us to play ball,” he added as he skipped and hopped to second base. “It’s the bottom of the sixth.”

“Play ball,” I said, trying to sound professional.