I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac. - Anne Lamott

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.

Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.