Out of sight ...

I passed a baseball diamond this morning, on my lengthy walk. I was hardly alone.

No, sir. The sun was third-week-of-March warm, the breezes were soft, and so we all emerged, blinking, from our isolation. There were parents with strollers and couples and kids on bikes with oversized helmets wobbling atop their heads like bowling balls on pencils. There were schoolgirls playing hooky from e-learning, presumably.

At one point, a pint-sized boy wearing a coonskin cap pedaled madly past me, as if I had been transported to 1955 and it was polio we still feared, and not some baroque strain of virus.

But back to the ball diamond.

It was deserted on this morning, and fringed with overgrowth, and garnished with standing water here and there. And it nagged at me. It whispered that there was something I was forgetting, something important, something that had eluded me here in the grim new world of COVID-19.

Then I got home and opened one of my sports websites, and there it was.

Today would have been Opening Day in Major League Baseball, in a different reality. And I had completely forgotten about it.

Forgot about the Cubs and the Yankees and the Dodgers and my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates. Forgot about Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium and Chavez Ravine. Forgot about the Astros, those cheatin' no-goodniks, and the Washington Nationals, your World Series champions, and that one Opening Day in Wrigley Field when it was 45 degrees and a wind like flung razor blades was howling straight in off Lake Michigan, which was crashing ashore along Lakeshore Drive in monstrous breakers.

Strange how much goes out of your mind, when it's out of your sight for even a short while. Two weeks or less since everything in sports went dark, and already I don't even think about it anymore.

I don't think about this being Opening Day. Don't think about this being Sweet Sixteen weekend in the NCAA Tournament. Don't think about this being the weekend of the state finals in boys basketball in Indiana, a grand a totem as there is in this basketball state.

Two weeks since it all went dark, not even, and already I've forgotten that NASCAR would have been in Texas this week, in that other world. I've forgotten that LeBron would have been back home in Cleveland with the Lakers today. I've forgotten that our hometown hockey team, the Fort Wayne Komets, would be in the stretch run to the playoffs right now.

It's like the shift of a moon's orbit, all of this. We've been blown loose from our trajectory into a new one, where Opening Day and the Sweet Sixteen have become binging on Netflix and hanging with the fam and going for long walks when the sun turns third-week-of-March warm.

Kids on bikes, that's our NCAA bracket now, with Coonskin Cap as the overall No. 1 seed. Two young boys heaving a globe-sized basketball at a rim, that's LeBron in Cleveland. And Opening Day?

A deserted baseball diamond.

Fringed with overgrowth. Garnished with standing water. Evoking something barely, if at all, remembered.