In Judy Lynn (née Van Sickle) Johnson’s memoir on growing up with baseball, I expected a lot of baseball, but as in life, there is more. A lot more. The tale of a preacher’s daughter coming of age in the 1960s—and an affiliation with a very Dutch background—surprised me. A lot of things surprised me about this book, and that’s a good thing. If you read a book that is exactly the way you expect it to be, well, that doesn’t teach you anything, or take you outside your comfort zone.
Judy, raised a New Jersey girl, is an English professor, graduate of Mount Holyoke College with a PhD in English literature from Brown, who formerly taught at several boarding schools. I came upon her work during the Hofstra Mets Conference, the father of the now annual Queens Baseball Conference. The New Yorker took notice, too.
Watching the Game: Meditations from a Woman’s Heart is a fine book by someone who knows how to write, who sees the poetry between spaces of words like the poetry between pitches, when the game is moving like it should and the air is filled with anticipation. She ties the act of sitting in the stands with something deeper, because we all know it is. Johnson is a dedicated fan, no, student of the game, dedicated enough to get broadsided by a car on the way back from a Cape Cod League game and still think about getting back there as soon as possible. This book will make you leave the phone in the car (or at least buried in your pocket or purse, where it belongs) and appreciate where you are. You never know when you’ll run into someone who is at their first game, or their last. Make every pitch count. Watch the game!
This Mother’s Day—or if Mom isn’t quite into baseball to this degree, this Father’s Day—Watching the Game makes a great gift. It’s like the gift of baseball, only you can read it during a long rain delay.