Baseball and Daylight Saving Time
It is a tired night. My eyes are heavy but then again they woke up that way. Em slept until 8:00a so that was something. When you stay up until all hours of the night and early morning searching the walls and crevices for answers and then finally again for the original questions, your Boy waking up a couple hours later isn’t necessarily the gift it should be. But I’ll take it just the same.
We had a pretty good day. It was rainy and windy and cooler than I prefer but I somehow managed. Em and I went to the “germ-pit” at Bellevue Center and he got to run around some. (Los Lobos is playing on my mixed CD…That dark night alone in America…) He saw two brothers I recognized from daycare. I was glad for that as he typically plays there by himself. But he got to chase and be chased and had fun. From there we went across Hwy 70 to the Dollar Tree where Em got to spend $5.00. One plastic Jigsaw, a second FBI kit, a bag of bugs, a hammerhead shark for the bath, and a purple flute later and Em was a happy boy. He was a fucker and a half at bedtime (down literally minutes ago), but a happy boy prior.
Good things on the horizon. Baseball season begins this weekend. The BoSox and Yankees play on ESPN tomorrow night. I am a National League guy, but a Sox/Yanks series is always a well-needed boost. I’ll likely bore the shit out of these pages with periodic baseball-related posts over the next seven months but so be it. I love the sport and get much pleasure from it. There aren’t many things like that in a guy’s life so seize upon it I will. I’ll be guilty of drawing poetic analogies all season long, I know. I likely will drop comparisons to chess and boxing and fishing and raising a son and love and sex and thunderstorms and travel and film and theatre and self-discovery and any other thing that makes me happy. And I will maintain my stance that the answer to any query can be found in a single game of baseball—if you look hard enough. It will be delivered on a field of play amongst more grace than you can find in a bullfight. That’s good enough for me.
And tomorrow is Daylight Saving Time. Fuck me if I can afford to lose the hour of sleep; but fuck me twice if I won’t be grinning at the premise of longer days and more light and nostalgia-laced evenings when the sun drops behind the trees around 8:00p. It is on those nights when I sit on the front porch with a drink and often a cigar that I will drift back to sticky Georgia evenings of kiss-chase and red rover, the last train of the day sounding in the distance. Lightning bugs dancing on the air all around me. Katy-dids whining on the breeze. Headlights sweeping the neighborhood streets and the late parents return home; kids scattering behind bushes and backyard sheds. “So long. See you tomorrow,” hanging in the thick stillness as best friends try to beat total darkness to their front doors. I am now (and will always be) a nostalgia whore. I like that stutter-step in my chest when I think of the past. Because nine times out of ten, I will have so romanticized the event that it ends up bearing little resemblance to reality but will instead be utterly perfect in every way—just the way I would have liked it the first time.
And so it is.
We had a pretty good day. It was rainy and windy and cooler than I prefer but I somehow managed. Em and I went to the “germ-pit” at Bellevue Center and he got to run around some. (Los Lobos is playing on my mixed CD…That dark night alone in America…) He saw two brothers I recognized from daycare. I was glad for that as he typically plays there by himself. But he got to chase and be chased and had fun. From there we went across Hwy 70 to the Dollar Tree where Em got to spend $5.00. One plastic Jigsaw, a second FBI kit, a bag of bugs, a hammerhead shark for the bath, and a purple flute later and Em was a happy boy. He was a fucker and a half at bedtime (down literally minutes ago), but a happy boy prior.
Good things on the horizon. Baseball season begins this weekend. The BoSox and Yankees play on ESPN tomorrow night. I am a National League guy, but a Sox/Yanks series is always a well-needed boost. I’ll likely bore the shit out of these pages with periodic baseball-related posts over the next seven months but so be it. I love the sport and get much pleasure from it. There aren’t many things like that in a guy’s life so seize upon it I will. I’ll be guilty of drawing poetic analogies all season long, I know. I likely will drop comparisons to chess and boxing and fishing and raising a son and love and sex and thunderstorms and travel and film and theatre and self-discovery and any other thing that makes me happy. And I will maintain my stance that the answer to any query can be found in a single game of baseball—if you look hard enough. It will be delivered on a field of play amongst more grace than you can find in a bullfight. That’s good enough for me.
And tomorrow is Daylight Saving Time. Fuck me if I can afford to lose the hour of sleep; but fuck me twice if I won’t be grinning at the premise of longer days and more light and nostalgia-laced evenings when the sun drops behind the trees around 8:00p. It is on those nights when I sit on the front porch with a drink and often a cigar that I will drift back to sticky Georgia evenings of kiss-chase and red rover, the last train of the day sounding in the distance. Lightning bugs dancing on the air all around me. Katy-dids whining on the breeze. Headlights sweeping the neighborhood streets and the late parents return home; kids scattering behind bushes and backyard sheds. “So long. See you tomorrow,” hanging in the thick stillness as best friends try to beat total darkness to their front doors. I am now (and will always be) a nostalgia whore. I like that stutter-step in my chest when I think of the past. Because nine times out of ten, I will have so romanticized the event that it ends up bearing little resemblance to reality but will instead be utterly perfect in every way—just the way I would have liked it the first time.
And so it is.
posted by Ryan at 11:11 PM
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