When you glance at the color-printed copy of Fisher Cats’ schedule you’ve pinned to the bulletin board—you’re a middle-aged Gen X’er and still have a corkboard in your basement with calendars and a picture of your friend Bill who passed from cancer—you’ll notice that the team is playing a rare summer matinee on a Wednesday in July.
Don’t think about all of the things you’re supposed to be doing that day. Don’t think about the new novel you’ve been half-heartedly trying to write, or the book of poems being released next month, or the freelance work you’ve already agreed to cover. Don’t think about mowing the lawn, or going to the gym, or answering emails, or writing lesson plans for the next school year.
Think about baseball, Old Buck.
With only an hour until the first pitch at noon, and the ballpark a 10-minute jaunt from your front door, you’ll decide to forego a shower. You’ll throw on a slightly-soiled T-shirt from your laundry pile, some deodorant then splash your shirt with Old Spice aftershave, redolent of middle-age. You’ll grab your Red Sox hat and your car keys and stop at the door.
You’ll ask your wife if she’d like to join you for the game, but you already know her answer. She doesn’t know a baseball from a gallstone and would much rather spend her afternoon watching “The Real Housewives of New York City” than minor league baseball.
You’ll ask your daughter, home from college, but she’ll already have plans with friends that don’t include her puffy, gray-haired, middle-aged dad wearing a Red Sox hat and dirty T-shirt. Don’t take it personally.
So dart from the front door, hop in your car and play hooky from your life for this one day. It’s been years since you’ve done something so spontaneous, so succulently selfish and deliciously alone.
When you arrive at the ballpark, you’ll buy a ticket and enter the park and realize the reason for the early start: It’s a game scheduled to accommodate the regional summer camps, and the stadium will be swamped with the summer camp kids.
Don’t let this faze you. Be grateful for the sunny weather. Be grateful for the cold beer and the steamed hot dog that you’re having for lunch, which you’ll purchase at the concession stand before first pitch. Grab your scorecard and a pen and settle into your box seat.
When the camp kids start their first “Let’s go Fisher Cats” chant, be grateful that your own kids are now adults and no longer summer camp kids. Celebrate the small victory. Text your wife and tell her that you love her.
As you sit, alone, a dozen rows behind home plate, you’ll drink in the sensory details of the game—the crack of solid wooden contact as The Fisher Cats’ clean-up hitter ropes a line-drive over the left field fence for a two-run dinger; the high-pitched prepubescent cheers exploding from the summer camp kids as they throw up their arms and spill soda on the blue plastic seats; the sip of cold beer traveling down your gullet from the Coors Light can sweating in the dense humidity; and the single teard drop of ketchup that dripped from your hotdog onto your clean white T-shirt.
As you sit alone behind home plate, you’ll remember a Wordsworth poem, a poem that you wrote a 10-page essay about as undergraduate, decades ago, a poem that spoke to you of the importance of memory and the way we summon these senses of pleasure, in solitude, as we age.
But don’t be pretentious, Old Buck. Besides, Wordsworth was a weirdo with his sister. Realize that at 20 years old, you didn’t know shit. Realize that at 48 years old, you still don’t know anything, but at least you recognize it.
The summer camp kids will file out of the stadium when the game goes into extra frames. Take in the quiet for a moment. Don’t think about Wordsworth, you dink. You’ll wonder, with the new MLB rules, how you’re going mark the automatic runner placed at second base in the extra innings on your scorecard. Improvise.
Embrace the fact that you’re one of six people in the stadium who still scores the games. Love yourself for being the last of the baseball purists. Embrace your role as an anachronism.
When the game ends—even though the Fisher Cats will lose in 11 innings—take a moment to appreciate the things you have: your health, your wife, your kids, your jobs, your home and your relatively-stable life. Your solitude.
While leaving the ballpark, you’ll stop in the souvenir store and buy a Fisher Cats’ baseball hat to mark this day, when you were happy, unbridled and unbidden.
Never forget it, Old Buck.