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Heaven Adjecent
By Milt Abel | June 20, 2010
| June 20, 2010Heaven Adjacent
Two blocks from my house two elementary schools abut each other at their playing fields. Each has enough turf to host concurrent soccer games and the attending barnacle-like ring of parents and their folding nylon chairs. The far elementary school also has the community baseball field, complete with a two-story snack and announcer’s booth, bleachers with seating for eighty, and night lights so incongruously high and powerful, for so humble a baseball field, you’d think city planners had watched Field of Dreams and set about enjoying such a thing for themselves.
This June has been rainy. It rains in Oregon and people joke about and shrug it off. I have a joke in my act about the rainy Northwest…
“One time I was in Seattle for four days and it stopped raining for
only twenty-minutes; I was in the shower at the time.”
But this year it’s as if the weather felt it was being taken for granted and made a point of showing it could shower whenever it damn well pleased. My wife shared a comment from the local paper that this was the wettest June since Larry Bird’s Celtics won the NBA tittle. I’m not sure what year that was, decades ago for sure, but I was more curious about how a sports reporter got transferred into the section weather. It made you wonder what kind of metrics awaited us in future weather reports: “It hasn’t been this hot since David Ortiz went 42 consecutive games without washing his lucky jersey -nor as humid.” Perhaps the sports and weather reporters switched assignments, and the sports page would have a new tone: “The Seattle Mariners have a 70 percent chance of winning tomorrow.”
All this precipitation has cause the little league teams to play make-up doubleheaders whenever the rain gods stop for a breath. On fair evenings, after diner, I can walk the short distance to Empey Field and usually catch the end of the opener, then a full five, or seven inning game (depending on the age bracket of the players). It’s an undiluted joy for me to watch these games stretched across a few rows of the bleachers, using the seat behind me as a backrest and bench in front of me as a foot stop. There’s plenty of room, though the players’ parents are there, they sit behind the backstop and down the foul lines in their folding chairs as if there’s no choice what you sit it if you have a child participating: it’s the basic equipment of any game; game ball, protective gear, and folding chairs for the folks.
A couple autumns ago I drove to the local high school’s athletic field to pick up my son from his evening football practice. A night fog had set in, and having to park against the far side of the field, I headed across the damp grass toward the diffused glow of the field lights. In the dark and fog there were no other points of navigation, just the grass underfoot and a milky radiance in the distance, the lights themselves indiscernible. I could hear the football practice; cheering and coaching, the play, and some laughter. I thought at that moment that this could be heaven. What else would I want amidst an untethered darkness but to know I traveled toward a loved one waiting inside the light, and waiting with them was play and counseled endeavor.
The little league baseball games near my house aren’t quite as ethereal as that autumn night, but they come close. Innocent fun with small dramas of no consequence. The most recent game I attended was composed of players in third and forth grade; eight and nine year-old boys, who were small enough to be pulled over backwards by the weight of their bat if they weren’t paying attention as they flailed away in the on deck circle. These boys were small and so was their strike zone -if you applied big league guidelines, but they don’t. To avoid making it a game of walking everyone around the bases the strike zone gets big enough to make you think Lacrosse: if you could reach it, it’s a strike. This recent game had a succession of progressively smaller players come to bat. The first was small but the following was smaller, and the following was smaller still. It looked as if their coach had composed his team as a Russian doll set; each player capable of fitting inside the next.
The innocent fun of these summer evening baseball games may not be heaven, but it’s close enough to set your folding chair.
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