It's Just a Baseball Game.

There is something haunting about spaces that are now empty, that once were inhabited by people you know, or knew, or even love. I notice this often. I recently went to the Little league field where I had coached my son for so many late Winters and early Springs. He is 20 now but about 8 years ago I took a photo of him in his new blue and red uniform, leaning against a guard rail near the seats behind home plate. It might have even been Opening Day of our last season. He was a Cyclone that season. Now, on this day, there was no one there. The field was empty.

I love being alone, but for those moments I felt terribly lonely. The large sycamores that had shaded the seats and home plate were still there but they weren’t saying anything that I could understand, though I could hear whispers. The place that had brought so many people together for so many a practice or a game was silent and still. I positioned myself to take the same photo from that same angle at the guard rail, though this time Westy wasn’t there. Where he once stood there was nothing. He was never coming back to stand on those steps or to lean on that guardrail again. No one knew I was there. All those who had stirred up dirt and yelled and cheered and sweat and felt the pang of “butterflies” in their stomachs as they wrestled with their time in the spotlight were completely removed. None of those who were there for the first photo would likely have a reason to ever return.

Those moments were so fresh at one time…they seemed like they were so very far from ending. But, they do end. Each season was replaced with another season until, finally the last season was over. When the last out was made in the last inning of that last game in the last season I didn’t think to get a picture of my son and I, together, with our arms around each other, saying goodbye. I didn’t think of it; it was the end of a beautiful time in our lives. It wasn’t much about the baseball. It was everything that was beautiful and sacred between a father and a son, disguised as baseball. I never even knew just how much Westy liked playing the game. I knew he didn’t dislike it but maybe to some extent he played the game for me….or just to spend time together. No, this was far from being about baseball. This was about being together for afternoons in the sun, or late afternoons when the spring sun was slowly going down on those days that never seemed to end. It was about the moments that stacked onto each other endlessly and perfectly. It was golden. There was so much opportunity to be on the earth together, at that time, at that place. We had forever….but it’s never enough.

Westy has had two full decades on this earth, ostensibly under my wings, and I’ve had two decades right alongside of him. He has two earrings now, and a tattoo on his left forearm of an arrow. He usually has a faint beard, the kind that comes from not shaving for several days. He wears his hair short now, not like his days of summer when his hair was curled and heavy, and full of sweat. Baseball is a faint memory. He has long outgrown the cleats he wore in his last season. No one knows where to find the baseball glove that he wore the very last time he took the field. It was once so important. Could it be at the bottom of a box on a high shelf in the garage? Could it be pressed against a plastic dinosaur collection, the one that was once displayed on the mantle above his bed for so many days and nights? Might it be in the same box with the Halloween costume that he ordered from a catalogue weeks before Halloween and that he wore so proudly through candlelit neighborhoods? He would insist on wearing it to bed that night and for most of the next day.

For so long our lives were linked, like distinct train cars always going down the same track. Now, in perfect synch with the Gods of motion and time, those train cars unhitch from one another…..and go down different tracks, to different destinations.

It is life……just like the Sycamores, and the baseball glove, and the red, white and blue uniform…it is Life.

"Take me out to the ballgame. Take me out with the crowd. Buy me some peanut and cracker jack.... I don't care if I ever get back."