I unwrapped that old scorecard right there in my den, and I had to sit down, because it was filled in, and the names at the top were Earl and me, from a summer night in 1960.
The old groundskeeper who tended that ballpark for decades, a man named Cletus who saw every game from the fence, had left a note with it. He wrote that a ballpark holds a whole towns summers, and that from his spot by the fence he had watched this place fall in love for seventy years, between innings.
The scorecard was from the very night my Earl caught a foul ball bare-handed and handed it to me on our first date, seat 8 on the aisle. Cletus had marked the play on the card himself, and written our names, and tucked it into the frame of the seat.
From his spot by the fence, Cletus watched seventy years of first dates and proposals and young couples sharing a bag of peanuts under the lights, and every time he saw something start in the stands, he saved the scorecard and hid it in the frame of the seat, so the very seat a couple sat in would hold the night they began.
His note said a groundskeeper watches the game, but mostly he watches the people, and that after seventy years he knew the ballpark was never really about baseball, it was about a town having somewhere to be together on a summer night. He wrote that seat 8 saw more first dates than any seat in the grandstand, and that Earl and I started there in 1960, the night of the bare-handed catch, and that if the seat ever came home to one of us, we should have that night back.
Earl and I had forty-three years. He caught that foul ball with his bare hand to impress a girl, and it worked, and I married him, and Cletus saw the whole thing and saved it.
I have the scorecard framed in my den now, beside the seat, our names in an old groundskeepers pencil, and the foul ball Earl caught sitting right there with it.
And I have gone looking for the other couples whose scorecards Cletus tucked away over the years. I found a pair, married fifty-nine years, who started at that ballpark and never knew a man by the fence had saved the night for them.
I bought back the old grandstand seat because the hinge was rusted. It held the first dates of my whole hometown under the summer lights, saved by a groundskeeper who understood the ballpark was really a place a town fell in love, and I have been the one lucky enough to carry those nights home.