Baseball

I am building up to a moment. A moment of seeming randomness that happened my sophomore year in high school. But I have to stop along the way and talk about baseball. Countless books, articles, documentaries, movies and interviews have highlighted baseball as a truly American pass time. Baseball doesn't hold it's place in the American imagination that it once did. One of the results of globalization has been the rise of soccer and the slow sad fading of the glory of baseball. Still, my boyhood was shaped by the sport.

I was a shy kid--a smart kid. I played violin and GI Joes. But when I was 9 my parents forced me to play baseball. They just signed me up and said it would be good for me to be around other boys. I was resistant to the idea initially. Soon I discovered that I had a talent for ball and that talent made me popular with the other boys. For 9 years, from Little League to high school ball, summers meant being outside on warm evenings: parents cheering, team mates chattering; the smell of hot dogs and bubble gum, mounds of spit covered sunflower seed shells.

Baseball, really was how I learned to be a social creature. It wasn't just my brother, parents, and myself, but my teammates, school, and community.