The girl at the plate this morning is no bigger than a minute, and she's fanning the breeze pretty good with that Fred Flintstone club of hers. She's wearing a purple-and-white batting helmet, which perches on her head like a hollowed-out bowling ball. Behind her, beyond the backstop, the moms sit in their collapsible camp chairs, watching with one eye and keeping the other trained on rambunctious siblings.
Out on the mound (or rather several feet in front of it), Coach lifts the baseball and lobs it overhand.
Swing and a miss.
He lobs it again.
Swing and a miss.
He lobs it two, three, four more times, and finally the girl gets the tiniest piece of it and the ball squirts toward second, where the second baseman and the shortstop have a brief territorial dispute before one picks it up and throws it.
Too late. Safe!
And here we are on a perfect June morning, golden sun in a blue-as-blue sky, lace doily clouds riding all tattery and frail on the cool breeze. And the kids and moms and siblings huddled around and on the beige dirt of a baseball diamond -- the kids all wearing that familiar white T-shirt with the navy collar and the snarling blue wildcat on the front, and the equally familiar red-and-blue cap.
I don't know what normal is anymore, not after four years living under a mad king and a year-plus living in the United States of Pandemica. But this looks and feels and sounds as close to it as we've come in awhile.
It's Wildcat League baseball in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the last glorious days of spring, and it looks and feels and sounds no different than it did 10 or 20 or even 57 years ago, when yours truly was wearing that shirt and cap. It's a lifeline from that day to this, a firm morsel of continuity in a time that feels all unstitched half the time.
It's the return of summer after a year when summer, like everything else, was weird and half-assed and profoundly solitary.
"You know, I played Wildcat myself way back when," I say now to the one of the moms.
"And look at you now, you survived," she laughs.
"Worst baseball player ever," I say, and she laughs again.
And now we both look out towards the diamond, where Wildcat-y stuff is happening. The kid at the plate has hit the round ball square and sent a sharp grounder between second and third, which handcuffs first the third baseman and then the shortstop. The batter goes tearing off around the bases, looking to stretch a single into ... well, something.
One problem, though: The baserunner in front of him has stopped on second.
The coach waves him on. He starts toward third, then stops, then starts again. Meanwhile, the tearing-around-the-bases batter has caught up with him.
They arrive at third side-by-side. Then the batter passes him -- think Helio Castroneves passing Alex Palou on lap 199 of the Indianapolis 500 -- and sets sail for home, followed belatedly by the baserunner who'd been ahead of him.
In Wildcat, this means only one thing: Two runs. Scored out of order, but what the hey.
"I love Wildcat," I say to Mom in her camp chair, after all this has happened.
This time we both laugh.
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