Hannah Kahn

Mary may be the gatekeeper at Nelson Field but she has a much more important job making enchiladas for her 31 grandchildren.

It’s been raining all day. A constant dreary drizzle. The fog is rolling in and the rain is picking up.

The gates at Nelson Field stand open. The people come with their tickets, get sent back to their cars because they don’t have clear bags. They get mad at the woman who tells them the rules, then they walk past. They may say, “How are you?”, but they are not in it for the response. They are into the stands to cheer for a sibling, a grandchild, a friend.

But she stays. Her name is Mary.

She’s not trying to be rude. She’s doing her job. She’s been doing her job for six years. She found herself sitting on a black fold-out chair at the gates to sporting events wearing a turquoise A.I.S.D. Athletics T-shirt through an invitation from her brother-in-law after completing work with the Internal Revenue Service.

She told people the rules there, too.

But really, she’s a woman with a love for shopping and occasionally gambling and a dream of one day moving to Hawaii if it weren’t so expensive. Hawaii because of the blue waters and sprawling sands. Hawaii because of the swimming, even though she’s not a swimmer. Hawaii because of the turtles.

At home, she cooks. Enchiladas for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren—31 in all. She watches them meet the generations of their family.

“That’s the main thing—to remember your parents and where they came from,” she says.

The game ends. The players celebrate and the parents congratulate them, then part with a “Goodbye” and “See you at home!” They walk out the gates they came in, this time past an empty black fold-out chair.

They don’t notice.

She left at 8:30.

Editor’s note: The digital media students wrote 300-word stories that emulated the feature profiles written by Brady Dennis for the St. Petersburg Times in the mid-2000s. Shield co-editor in chief Alice Scott prepared a master class on Dennis’ stories for the newspaper staff, and adviser Dave Winter was so impressed with the lesson that he changed his feature profile assignment based on what Scott taught the staff about Dennis’ stories. As a result, we have a collection of wonderful short profiles—including this lovely profile which illustrates that Mary is so much more than just a Nelson Field stadium attendant—that are well-crafted, powerful and straight from the heart.