It's incredible how deliciously a child's baseball game, played in the kind warmth of an April sunset, can redeem even the busiest of days.
I love watching my tall nine year old, gloved hand, feet apart, team hat slung low over his eyes, waiting to make that crucial catch.
As a kid growing up in New York, I didn't really understand the wizardry of amateur baseball. After all, Park Slope, Brooklyn, was hardly "Field of Dreams." Sure, we were baseball fans. But we were baseball fans in a big city who shared our ups and downs with tens of thousands, maybe millions of other neighbors and strangers.
After all, if you had taken the train to Shea or Yankee Stadium you wanted to see great baseball-or even really horrible baseball. It was exciting, wonderful, catastrophic-anything but calming. Watching professionals play is not soothing-it's not only the family pride that is at stake, but the pride of New York-ya think we New Yorkers don't know how other people feel about our baseball teams?
Well, it could be worse-we could have teams that haven't won a series in 60 years.
It is so much sweeter to observe third and fourth grade boys steal bases, or fumble catches, or hit balls behind them-so that they soar over the dugout. There are few things more lovely, on a spring evening, than watching the boys of summer.
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