Baseball and Other Perennial Things
This essay was originally posted May 18, 2026 to Substack.
I've been missing my dad for ten whole years now. Maybe that's why I'm finding renewed interest in things that come back each spring.
Dad wasn’t a baseball guy. He wasn’t the kind of dad that always said and did the right thing. He was by no means perfect. But he was reliable, and consistent, and steady in his own chaotic and fun way.
When he passed in May of 2016, it was like a rug had been violently pulled from under me. And ten years later, it feels like I’m waking up from some type of emotional coma. That year I was working on a career pivot—navigating marriage and motherhood, and trying to find the source of this constant buzzing in my soul.
But in the wake of his passing, I needed the type of steadiness only a father who has always been there can provide. So, instead of moving toward that incessant buzzing, I chose to go back to litigation support—something I knew, because I needed my days to be predictable, like manna. Work I could do on autopilot.
Wake up, coffee, commute, work, lunch, work, commute, dinner, sleep.
And that’s how my grieving process looked for the better part of seven years. Until the buzzing became unbearable. And I think that’s why I’m here now. The buzzing softens to a purr when I’m writing. So I keep observing, processing, and writing about what I see. I think it’s healing me—helping me find a source of stability I hadn’t even realized I’d been missing since Dad died, and helping me understand why I haven’t really felt safe since he left us.
As a little girl I liked to hang out by the chain-link fence near the baseball field at my elementary school, where honeysuckle would wind itself throughout the diamond-like pattern. I liked it there because it always smelled nice. Every year the maintenance crew would cut it down because honeysuckle, lovely as it is, can take over a structure like that. And to this day the honeysuckle grows back every year. Isn’t this why we love nostalgic things? They remind us of a time when we felt safe and secure—when we could count on something to be exactly what we expect.
My parents’ love felt golden like that honeysuckle by the baseball field. Secure. Something that would never leave. They were the kind of parents who always kept the bumper pads up and created soft places to land when you fall down. I never had to worry about where my next meal would come from, or if I could drop everything and just go home if I needed to. And when you lose that kind of stability out of nowhere, even as an adult with kids of your own, it takes a while to reorient.
They’re so iconic.
I think about the Old Testament story of Exodus a lot. How Mosaic and Levitical laws, and forty years in the desert, were less about punishment and more about teaching a traumatized nation of human beings how to trust their God and community again. The rituals of daily living. The commands to observe and honor that terminal line separating life from death. A practice of discipline that leads to freedom.
We’re cyclical creatures, aren’t we? The sun rises every morning in the east, and sets every evening in the west. The moon regulates the tides. The seasons shift on cue and time keeps marching on. Whether we realize it or not, we take comfort in the subconscious assurance that the sun and moon will always do what is expected of them.
Since the anniversary of his passing is this month, he’s frequently on my mind. I tell him hello every time I see a cardinal fly by. I feel his presence. I wonder if he’ll be watching in a few days when my daughter walks across the stage to receive her diploma. I think about how proud he’d be as a guitar player to know that she’s studying music, and how if he were still here he’d be front and center at all of my son’s football games this coming fall.
I read a post on Threads today where a vacationing woman gave a play-by-play account of a conversation she overheard at the pool between two moms—their husbands apparently had no idea what to do with their kids while the moms were away. I think one even forgot to feed the children. This shocked me because of the standard my own father set.
He was raised by a working mom, two older sisters and an older brother, and by the time he was a teenager he was helping take care of his younger sisters—that was before he ran off to tour the country with rockstars, but that’s a story for another day. When he was barely an adult he married a single mother and helped her raise my brother, sister, and eventually me.
My dad was the type of man who was already at work when my alarm woke me up for school each day, and brought groceries home in the evening. The kind of man who taught his kids how to cook and clean so Mom wouldn’t have to when she got home from her stressful job.
Teamwork.
Dad wasn’t a baseball guy, though he was an insufferably loyal Dallas Cowboys fan—one who relished the renewed hope we all feel every August, confident this is the come-back year we’ve been waiting for. He loved Stevie Ray Vaughan and The Beatles. And he enjoyed taking care of his yard and cooking for his family, and just being the kind of dad his kids could always trust to come home.
So, while he was not a baseball guy, he did possess the reliability of institutions you can always count on, like baseball and honeysuckle. Something that comes back every spring and regulates your nervous system like clockwork.
Throw the ball. Hit the ball. Catch the ball.
Manna.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing my dad. Grief is proof of love, after all. But I find myself longing for the stability of things that bloom each spring without fail—perennial things I can count on, the way I could always count on him.
Honeysuckle vines and baseball. Words that soften the buzzing. Unconditional love.
Robin Kenneth Miller | 1956-2016
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—Mack
