I was on my knees next to Humphrey, in the field, in the park. This was a post-dinner, pre-dark outing, Saturday night, two days after Opposite Day.
“Okay. You want to sort of—tee it up. Tee it up here in your hand. Then launch it away from you.”
“I can do it,” Humphrey said. “I know I can.”
I walked about ten paces away. “Launch me that spiral!”
It rolled out of his hand, dribbled on the ground. He pounced on it, readied it in his hand, attempted launch, and it rolled again. And again, five more times.
“Look, forget about teeing it up. Forget about launch,” I said. “Let’s see what you do when you just throw the football any old way.”
It didn’t go any old place. At all.
“I know you can teach me, Danielle,” Humphrey said sweetly.
I wasn’t so sure. Still, he was a good sport and I wanted to encourage his good attitude. “One way I can teach you to throw is to throw to you, Humphrey,” I said. “That way, you get practice catching—”
“Oh, I can already catch.”
“—and you get to watch how I throw.” I told Humphrey to catch the ball, then run it to me. “As if you’re running the ball down the field and I’m the goalpost.”
I threw spiral after spiral. I threw as softly as I could, but he couldn’t hang on to a single catch. He stood there waiting for the ball, or, if the throw wasn’t right on target, he moved to get into its path—and then, basically, he tried to clap it. That’s what it looked like to me, like Humphrey had been told to clap the ball. I studied him more closely. Maybe it wasn’t so much that he was trying to clap the ball, as he was trying to grab hold of it with a pair of tongs, or tweezers.
“I almost caught that one!” Humphrey said.
No, he didn’t.
It wasn’t that hard to catch a well-thrown football.
“Humphrey, you’re clapping at the ball,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” he said.
“You’re slapping at it. You’re slapping it away.”
“No, I’m not.”
I had taken a couple of juice boxes from the Dankers’ refrigerator, and now he took them out of my backpack.
“Why do you want to slap that poor ball, Humphrey?” I said. “What did that poor, funny-looking ball do to you that makes you want to slap it?”
There went those gears clicking away in his head. In my three weeks with Humphrey, I had found I could best make a point by being funny and by playing with words.
“I’m slapping the ball because it’s been bad. Very, very bad.” Click, click. “It runs away from me when it’s supposed to hold my hand. And it hangs on to me like a baby when it’s supposed to run and get its exercise.”
“What shall we do about these problems,” I said, “other than slapping the ball?”
“I don’t know,” Humphrey said. “I think I’m just going to have to keep slapping, slapping, slapping.”
“Ouch,” I said. “Poor, poor, pitiful ball.”
“Poor, poor, pitiful, poopy, poopified, putrid ball!”
“Wow. Putrid. That’s not your everyday p word.”
We drained our juice boxes. “Back to this football,” I said. “I have an idea that might help you catch it. You know how you said the ball is running away from you when it’s supposed to hold your hand?”
He nodded.
“Think of the ball as a baby. I mean, a little baby-baby. It doesn’t know it’s supposed to hold your hand. So when I throw it to you, you have to cradle it in your arms to catch it. You have to cradle it like it’s a baby. Like this.” I tossed the ball up and caught it in a cradling way.
“Like a baby,” Humphrey said.
“Rock-a-bye baby,” I sang out.
“In the treetop,” Humphrey responded, also singing.
“In your arms, the football cradle,” I said. He started to run out for a pass, but I stopped him. “Just toss it up, right here.” He tossed it maybe five inches into the air. “A little higher,” I said. He followed my instructions.
“Toss and cradle. Toss and cradle. That’s good,” I said. After a while, I took the ball and tossed it to him from just a couple of feet away. Then I moved a few more feet away.
“You slapped it,” I said when the ball escaped Humphrey’s arms.
“Because it’s bad,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I called out in a singsongy voice. “Cradle that baby.”
He did. I tossed it to him from six feet away, ten feet, fifteen feet. He cradled the baby and ran it back.
“Good. Great! Now go long!” I said, at the same time thinking, Listen to me with the football lingo.
He didn’t know what “go long” meant.
“Go long—it means ‘run far’! Then stop and look back for the throw.”
Far, in Humphrey’s case, meant running maybe twenty-five feet away. He turned, expectantly. I launched a sweet, gentle spiral his way. “Cradle it!” I yelled.
“Yes!” he rejoiced. He ran the football back. “Again!”
He didn’t catch it every time. But he caught it enough of the time.
“I’m a football catcher!” he said.
The sun had disappeared behind the trees that rimmed the park. Time to head home.
He didn’t want to go. “I still have to learn how to throw a spiral,” he said.
“You do, and you will,” I said. “Just not tonight. You don’t want to be here in the park when it’s dark, do you?”
“I like the dark,” Humphrey said.
“I like it, too. But we need to start walking home. Look—you can already see stars.”
I knew that the low-hanging white discs in the darkening sky were Venus and Saturn, although I didn’t know which was which.
“Which one came out first?” Humphrey asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did one come out first?”
“Well—yeah.”
“How come I can never see the first star?” he asked. “Whenever I look, there’s always more than one.”
“I guess you’d have to pay really close attention,” I said. “You’d have to just sit down and say, ‘Okay, I’m not going to do anything but look up at the sky and wait for the first star to come out.’”
“Let’s do that next time,” Humphrey said.
“Okay, but—it’s probably about as exciting as watching paint dry,” I said. “If you catch my drift.”
“I catch your drift,” Humphrey said. He skipped a little to catch up with me on the path leading out of the park. “And now I can catch your football, too.”