Soft Hands

 Soft Hands

    A type of psychotherapeutic activity among good friends is playing catch with an object while bearing your hopes, fears and ability to catch and throw. Many times I have performed this toss therapy and with Greg it was done mostly with footballs and baseball. They did not have to be regulation but miniature or nerf versions were just as good. When using whiffle balls or nerf footballs the throws could be more spirited since they normally would not caused damage in a home or office. Instead of sitting in a chair with eyes watering or grimacing you just catch, throw and talk. As a man who has been in a psychiologists chair many times I always found tossing a ball with Greg to be a healing exercise for both of us. He was not a touchy feely guy but when he let his feelings go they could gush out unexpectedly. An example was one warm afternoon in the Fall of 1975 when I was alone in my Dad's ticket office and sport museum. It was a slow day and I was fighting boredom by trying to learn Tai Chi and was delighted to see the little Greg Datsun pull up in front. He had come for council and was rather fidgety when he came behind the counter and settled into a chair in the back portion of the office that was filled with sport memorabilia. On a bench there was a nerf football about a 3rd of the size of the actual pigskin and it spurred on a game of catch/therapy. At first the topic was the skill of catching a football as we learned from hearing the descriptions of our hero ends in hundreds of hours of time-wasting sports study. The key I told him was "soft hands" when reaching for the pass so the the ball would not richochet off the stiff fingers and fall incomplete. Somewhere in the brisk tossing he came clean about his true purpose which was to release his sorrow over being dumped by some crazy chick he lusted after for a while. He was living on Saturn street with his room-cat and she tantalized him a bit but remained elusive. Ann Laner was the lady's name and she was actually a Pi-Hi girl who had a mysterious quality and blonde good-looks. As we tossed he began to cry big crocodile tears and as they poured out we kept throwing. Greg was not an openly emotional guy and this was one of the few times I saw him cry. We maintained "soft hands" and threw back and forth until he calmed down, then apologized. Throughout his life he self-mortified over these waterworks even though I found it to be completely warranted and natural. Also, he never failed to shout "soft hands" whenever we found the opportunitty to toss balls back and forth.