Summer

Summer's cry came to me Thursday across a summer field on the day of the summer solstice, and if it wasn't a herald of trumpets it was as ceremonial a flourish. It came from a baseball diamond a hundred or so yards away, tiny figures in white T-shirts swinging bats and running bases and doing gloriously imperfect baseball things.

This is how it sounded:

Hey, battah ...

Hey, battah ...

Hey, battah-battah-battah-battah ...

Summer's cry, right there. Summer's voice, high and keening, like the yip-yip of the old Rebel yell without its menace and its grim promise of blood and death.

I couldn't resist this. No one who was an American boy with memories of American boy summers could.

So of course I wandered over to the rough diamond with its high chain-link backstop, and there it was again: Bunch of kids playing outside on a steamy morning that whispered we ain't seen nothin' yet, just wait 'til this afternoon.

Wildcat baseball, baby. Took me right back.

Took me right back, lord, 60 years now, when I was knee-high to a fruit fly and a sort of reverse five-tool player: I couldn't hit, couldn't hit with power, couldn't run the bases and couldn't field. It's why I was generally deployed in deepest left field, because hardly anyone in Wildcat could pull the ball and thus my dogged search for four-leaf clovers went largely undisturbed.

And now here I am tailgating 70, and you know what?

Not a damn thing has changed.

Those iconic shirts with the blue Wildcat on the front are exactly the same. The red-and-blue caps are exactly the same except the logo on the crown is bigger these days. The chatter is the same, the thick heat is the same, the kid on the pitcher's mound is the same.

Watch now as he winds up, uncoils, flings the baseball toward home.

Watch as it sails over the batter's head by a good foot-and-a-half and slaps the chain-link.

Yessir. Same pitcher, same pitch, same merry cha-ching against the backstop.

And how wonderful is that?

How wonderful is it that, on this summer solstice morning, time can so completely stop and turn back on itself? 

I move a little closer, into a welcome piece of shade, and here are the parent and grandparents, sitting in their folding chairs same as ever. 

"That's my grandson out there," one says, pointing to the kid at the plate.

We watch as a pitch sails high, and another sails high, and a third comes down just enough to get a strike call from the Wildcat coach standing out there behind the pitcher.

"Yes, the strike zone is very generous," the batter's granddad observes with a grin.

I laugh. Yep, I remember. I remember standing at the plate and swinging at pitches a mile over my head. I remember bailing out of the batter's box if a pitch came within a nautical mile of me. I remember that proud day when I kept the bat on my shoulder and drew a walk.

Out on the mound, the pitcher winds up again, his arm comes forward, the baseball flies toward the plate.

And then the most amazing thing happens.

The grandson swings.

Bat strikes ball with a resounding crack.

It's a sizzling ground ball that smokes between second and third for a base hit.

Everyone cheers and claps, and the next batter trudges to the plate, and I turn to go. As I do, I see one of the players sitting in a lawn chair next to his mom and his granddad, and I smile and point at his shirt.

"I used to have a shirt exactly like that when I was your age," I tell him.

Summer.