Pastimes

I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us. ~Walt Whitman

When I look at the word 'pastime', it has an echo to me. It is a word that makes me remember time and place that has never existed for me, hazy days of youth that millions experienced, but not me really. Still, as one who embraces the past as much as the present (or as much of the present I can stomach and hope the future is not as revolting :) I see myself where I ought to be in those memories. Perhaps I have watched 'Field of Dreams' too many times, maybe I have gone to far too many batting practices on a lazy summer day just to hear the crack of the bat, and almost making the game itself a denouement.

In our ever insanely fast paced lives, it is nice to be able to slow down and breathe a little of life in, see it for what it should be. I certainly do not mind a fast pace of course, but the thrill of wasting a summer or spring evening listening to the sounds of the game, enjoying the camaraderie of strangers I always knew, for the ballpark makes all equals, and perhaps equally young in it eyes. While I do not have a Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, nor even a Polo Grounds, the game is still played more or less the same way, we all sing during the seventh inning stretch, and sometimes, we all reach into that collective memory, live in the world of the pastime, and for a few moments forget the frenzy and pace of our modern lives.

Of course, one never really thinks of these things while at the ballpark, but I suspect that is the point. And baseball does not necessarily have to be your pastime, but whatever the endeavour, I hope it brings you the same thrill I get every time I walk into the ballpark with the hop in my step as if I were eternally ten.

C.