by Jack
There is something fleeting in a summer night. Sitting on a porch at dusk in a humid sponge of clipped sentences and car sounds passing from distant to here to distant again, watching a baseball game in a crisply air-conditioned living room hearing the contented murmur of a far away crowd in the focused lulls of the game, moments that seem to pause and stare before passing. Yet even as we bask in this languorous unfolding of the little, there comes the barely perceptible rush of an outward tide stealing away time at a frantic rate. The game is over, the hour too late for idle conversation, back to school, back to work.

Summer becomes precious early in life, it may be the first thing we realize we have squandered. The first summer after kindergarten arrives like morning after a bad dream and is received with relief and casual appreciation. The end of this summer is the true end of childhood.

Now and ever after the season is anticipated; the hours budgeted over the winter and spring months to maximize each precious day, money is saved, plans are laid, strategies formed. Yet summer gets shorter every year. The days may seem longer, the nights perhaps richer, and the evenings bottomless and hypnotic. But summer is fleeting; back to school, back to work. And so we seek to ensnare whatever moments we can, to hold them and discover their secrets, to exert whatever primitive influence we may over the passage of time.The baseball park becomes both stage and studio with which to examine and work these notions, our great abstract of summer in America.

My earliest memories of summer baseball are of Shea Stadium in Queens, NY. I was a Yankee fan, as every kid who sees Pride of the Yankees and learns the legend of Babe Ruth is, and I eagerly looked forward to my first game at the House that Ruth Built. However I had an Uncle who lived and worked in Manhattan. He knew the Bronx was too rough, that Yankee Stadium was patrolled by marauding gangs of wild teenagers. We could see a game in New York but best to be safe and go to bucolic Flushing Meadow. My Uncle was a Mets fan.

So one summer day we took the 7 train to that dull, functional “park” (which I will always love) for a Twi-Night double-header and watched baseball till well past an 8 year old’s bedtime. Duffy Dyer won the first game with his heroic headfirst slide into home. The second game degenerated into making friends with a kid my age in the row before ours and marveling at the freedom of being out in the city as the evening passed to night. And I left the park a Mets fan for life.

Since then I’ve enjoyed countless games. I’ve had season tickets to the Red Sox for a couple of years. Shared with two of my best friends, great baseball fans, those evenings at Fenway drew me into the game as never before and deepened my engagement with my adopted city. We would argue the fine points and make side bets while the crack of Roger Clemens delivering his fastball to Tony Pena’s glove sounded sharp and clear.

I’ve had Minor League and Cape Cod League excursions to remind me of the simple pleasures of the game. On the Cape, Wendy and I set down a blanket on a grassy berm at Nauset Middle School, bought a couple of hotdogs for a buck each (no admission charge) and settled in for a game. With no signifiers but the play to acknowledge the skill level of the teams this was a purist’s delight. Add to that the Rockwellian setting it became one of my favorite baseball discoveries.

Baseball is our mid-year banner, our summer pace car. It arrives to present itself suddenly in spring and marches to an undeniable eminence by the zenith of summer, from there it abides, to mark every day of the season, big or small, with a counting of each minute of each precious summer day in a ledger of balls and strikes. Who could say exactly when the perfectly clipped grass and swept, dusty base-paths of a ballpark came to coincide with our national ideal of leisurely repose, or even which came first, but now these are the elements from which we conjure the season. Where we reawaken the long dormant spirit that elevates these torpid months from drudgery, and pulls our gaze up to a purple black sky to watch a red-stitched white orb sail lazily over a fence.