baseball

A page torn out of the autumns of my childhood might show a picture something like this:

My mother and father have spread out a blanket on the hill overlooking the Little League field and the playground. All the other parents are sitting in the bleachers behind the field, but mine have nine children to watch, and most of them are swarming over the playground equipment.

We spent many, many evenings there. Most of us didn’t care about the ball game, content rather to swing as high as we could, play on the big rocks, and, when we thought our mother wasn’t looking, wade out into the cold Little Tennessee River. We always kept one eye on the game, though, watching for the two teams to make two lines and pass each other, hitting hands, repeating “good game, good game, good game.” That was our cue to come running from all corners of the park. That was time to go home.

During the rare times I would sit on the blanket and try to pick out one of my brothers on the ball field, I discovered something interesting about the two of them. One played baseball like it was the best, last thing he would ever do. He slid into bases, dove for the ball, lived and died with the score. The other was a dreamer. He’d stand, usually with his back to the game, in the far outfield, swinging his mitt, kicking the dirt, watching the sunset or a butterfly. Balls would roll by him, the game would go on around him, and he was in a world completely apart from all of it. He knew someone would tell him when the game was over.

Time, of course, went on, and Little League was left behind in the scrapbook of childhood. I think I can honestly say that I haven’t thought about those baseball games once in the years that separate me from them now. So it was rather a strange feeling to find myself standing this past Saturday, between the ball field and the playground, watching my own son play. How odd, I thought, to have walked back into this scene so precisely the way I left it. It was in a different town, a different state, but everything had been preserved exactly. The air smelled like honesuckle and sunscreen. The parents had the same expressions of concern when their sons were up to bat, and patience when they weren’t. There was the playground equipment, the children playing, and I turned toward the ball field to pick out my son.

There was his number, far in the outfield. I watched as he put one foot over the other, spun around, and stared away over the fields. I saw him kick the dirt, swing his mitt, start singing himself a song. It would seem that he will be that type of player, I thought.

It all reminded me so exactly of meeting back up with a relative that you realize (uncomfortably) that you hadn’t known was even still alive, but whose life has continued unchanged since you last met. It reminded me of an island I used to know in the river near my home, that never changed although the water always rushed around it.

The game ended, and the players lined up. Two teams of little boys marched past each other, hitting hands, muttering “good game, good game…”, and I knew it was time to go home. I shook my head at the strangeness, at the familiarity of it all. In its own special corner, untouchable by time or change, baseball lives on.