The nine-year-old boy next door lost his father in an industrial accident two springs ago. Every evening after school, he threw a scuffed Rawlings baseball against his wooden fence. Thud. Thud. Thud. Hour after hour until dinner. In my culture, one trains with the wooden sword in silence. But a wooden fence never throws the ball back. I bought a twenty-dollar Wilson leather glove at Walmart. The next afternoon, I stood on the asphalt twenty paces away, put on the stiff leather, and raised my hand without saying a word. He stopped. He lowered his glove. He threw. Snap. I caught it. I threw it back to his chest. We did not introduce ourselves. We did not speak about sorrow. For seven months, from April to October, we played catch until the yellow streetlights hummed to life. Thirty minutes every evening. Just the dry pop of leather in the autumn dusk. Last Saturday was his Little League regional championship. I stood behind the chain-link fence by the right-field foul pole, alone, arms crossed. Bottom of the sixth. Two outs, trailing by one. He drove a low fastball clean over the centerfield wall. The bleachers went wild. While his teammates piled onto him at home plate, he wriggled out of the dogpile, ran past the dugout, and jogged all the way down the foul line to the fence where I was standing. He didn't say a single word. He pushed the red-stitched, scuffed leather ball through the diamond gap in the chain-link fence and pressed it firmly into my palm. I took the ball, touched the brim of my cap, and nodded once. He wiped his dusty forehead with his jersey, smiled, and ran back to his mother. A boy does not need a philosophical lecture on resilience. He needs a man who never drops the return throw.