I am waiting for Spring, for the sun to warm the earth and melt the snow. I take out my baseball glove from the closet, nestled down there among the winter boots. It has been waiting patiently, pensive and oiled, holding a baseball in the pocket and tied with a rubber band. This bit of tradition may or may not make me a better fielder, but it is one of the rites of spring that we dare not defy. Baseball demands it of us.
Opening Day and all things are possible! The players take a field of green grass under an incandescent blue sky. All around the air hums with the uniquely busy sounds of baseball. I am playing center field this day when my buddy Parker comes up to bat. He is clearly the best 
player on the opposing team and a dangerous hitter. He swings and I see the ball rising toward me and I know he has crushed one. I turn and race back into deep right center. After what seems like an eternity the ball arcs down and I am there with my well-oiled mitt. On the way back to the dugout I pass Parker on the infield. He says, “nice catch”. While hard times surely wait in the unknowable future, on this day all is right in the world. It don’t get no better than that.
Some feel the game of baseball, with its long pauses and elaborate strategies is too slow for the modern psyche; so hard, impatient and driven by the clock. Baseball seems a game lifted wholesale from those old black and white film reels, played by men gone gray in the flickering light. But when you put on that glove and take the field, you glimpse a simpler time and share a moment across generations.
Nice catch.
whoisfenton 