As a former baseball player, when the page on the calendar flips to April, there is still a sense of excitement. Not so much for the start of another season, but for the memories of those starts to the seasons years ago and just how special were those times. The other day, as I approached an intersection with a right turn lane, I stopped and inched forward of the car next to me to look left. I caught the eyes of the passenger in the car and he looked right at me – a 10 or 12 year old boy, still young enough that his mother was driving him to baseball practice. His right elbow crooked and perched on the door of that open windowed car. The freckled face. The brown hair and eyes. The straight teeth. It was like staring into a mirror with a 50 year lag in reflection time. I smiled, then completed my turn and drove away. (PLEASE CLICK ON THE TITLE ABOVE TO CONTINUE READING.)
|
But I couldn’t shake it. I laughed as I thought about what thoughts, if any, crossed his mind. Would I even register on the radar of a stranger with eye contact that lasted less than a second? I projected back – at that age did I even think about what I would be doing 50 years later? Surely if I did, what I am doing now wasn’t it! It was an early Saturday morning, and I wasn’t headed to a ball field to play, coach, ump, announce or even just sit there and be a fan. I was actually headed to the dump to begin a series of regular household chores on that beautiful spring day. And I looked the part. Then, my thoughts turned heavier as I thought about who I am, the man I’ve become through all these years. Would the qualities of a grown-up such as me even be something that a young boy would think about? Did I ever think about it back then? Nope. On the cocktail table in our living room sits a cube frame with five photos of our son in his childhood years and one drawing, pulled from a greeting card years ago. The photos haven’t changed in years. The image of the drawing from that card now framed and sitting on our table is of little leaguers standing behind a backstop. What hit me at the time I first saw it is the posture of two of the kids in particular, the set of their hands, the way their arms hang, the way their heads are slightly cocked and the attitude about each it projects. In my mind it was clearly my son and me as a kid, inked by some random artist to be teammates at a similar age. I have thought about that image many times over the years and what kind of teammates and friends we might have been. How would that impossible experience have changed the way he looks at me today, and I him? Now, like all the times I have walked away from that frame and drove away from that stranger in the car next to me headed to baseball practice, I think that a cherished artistic theme would be capturing in art the time warp projection of parent and child at the same age engaged in an activity about which each had a shared passion. Who knows? 43 picked up painting when he retired to considerable acclaim and therapeutic benefit. Maybe someday I’ll pick up my brushes again, sip on some red wine from a Mason jar and paint the way I once did with this theme as my focus. To complete my story, I did stop by a ball field on the way home from my errands that Saturday morning and just watched for a while as the kids played ball. And I heard the voices from long ago so familiar in the chant of baseball chatter. |