This used to be my playground.

Yesterday as I drove through my hometown, I passed a construction site. I became nostalgic as I realized that it was formerly the site of one of the ball fields on which I spent my little league summers and, specifically, the one on which I experienced my finest moment in baseball.

I liked little league – the camaraderie, the lazy lulls peppered with bursts of pure thrill, even the occasional crunch of dirt between my teeth. I liked the common ground found there between my dad and I. I was pretty good at this sapling version of America’s pastime. Well, I was better earlier on. Okay… in retrospect, I’m fine with not having been a baseball star on those fields of my youth. As we all careened into upper grades and became “big kids”, I started to get better at track & field. I took fourth in the eighth grade pentathlon at the Oregon State Junior Olympics. I then moved on to soccer, arguably a more manly sport (but you’d have to be European to think so). Amidst a very enjoyable high school soccer career, I set a goalkeeping record that still stands almost 20 years later. But as an older junior higher, I was holding down a lower-to-middle rung on the leaguer ladder to the diamond. Among the boys of summer, I think it was a matter of priorities. Many of my teammates’ dreams were dependent on a direct trajectory from those fields of little league through those daunting high school and college diamonds, then right through minor and major league stadiums on their way to Cooperstown. At that age I wasn’t sure exactly what my dreams were much less where they would take me. I was pretty confident, however, that I wasn’t on my way to the Hall of Fame. But even so, I must have borrowed someone else’s dream one particular game day because something came true.

The pitchers were pretty sharp in our league. I must have maintained a batting average of .200 this particular season so when I came to bat I knew my team was probably just hoping for a walk or some miracle to merely keep us alive for the next hitter. The pitch came. I swung and I’ll never forget that teeth-rattling connection with the ball. No one was more shocked than me to see the ball fly at a low but strong rise to a place just left of center field, causing the fielders to run to the farthest point of the outfield. Two of my teammates crossed home before I safely touched third. Two “ribbies” (RBIs) and a solid triple! And for that moment, I was the center of the team. I can still hear the yells and feel the pats on the back. I climbed from my low-to-middlin’ rung that day to a much higher place. And although the following week I’d settle once again for that old familiar rung, for one day I WAS a baseball star. I wish every ball player on every field in every remote county at least one moment like that.

And as I slowly drove by the vacant lot occupied only by foundation markers, I remembered that lazy day bursting open with young joy, and for just a split second, I could have sworn I felt that old familiar crunch between my teeth.