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non sequitors

Lake Wyola race in the heat yesterday. Breathing air that hardly deserved the name of the element. One was drier bathing in the lake. Today, I ache. I have that loping walk of fed-up muscles yelling up the nervous system for potassium and rest.

Lightning splintered trees around Amherst and Hadley. We heard it like cannon concussions Sunday evening. It puncutated a stunning sky of deep cumulus dimensions from black of storm to rose-pink of sunset all in the same quadrant of heaven. The kids were impressed and surprised. Today I saw some of the aftermath. One huge oak on Amity Street shattered in its mid-trunk - splinters the size of arms and legs scattered across the street and the leafy crown laying intact across a yard in defiance of upright logic.

Baseball - who could tolerate professional sports if you know the eager sweat and dirt of kids playing ball? Here is my bit of atonement for being completely non competitively athletic as a child, or maybe it's paying my grandfather's dues for never playing enough and always working.

Coaching seven and eight-year olds has a magic to it. By the time they reach nine and ten they are either serious and engaged in the pressure cooker of Little League competition and tryouts or they are doing something else. This is the first and only chance the majority of them will have to get aquainted with the game or even organized sports in general. It's a sad state of affairs because what happens after this age seems to turns off a lot of kids from good healthy exercise engaged in just for fun. I know my oldest is about to hit the wall of Little League. You can already see the sports parents playing the push game - eyeing out the kids with the talent they want on their kid's team for the League come next season. Playing to win. It's a bit Darwinian. It also takes the fun out of it.

The new seven-year-olds arrive perplexed and anxious, looking for familiar faces from school. The eight-year-olds show off like they know all this already. The parents have just as great a range of personality and ability levels as the kids. There is always one father or mother who spends the entire practice time over in the shade behind the bleachers on their cell phone, emerging at the end to say "great game" whether they happend to have seen even five minutes of it or not. There is always another parent crew who keep one eye on the action and another on the social millieau. These are the most helpful folks who can be relied upon to organize snack and juice, cheer at relatively appropriate times and otherwise stay out of the way and let their kids learn something. There is always at least one dad (inevitably a dad) who tries to help out with coaching but who is clearly trying to struggle through his own athletic "failure" from childhood. It's almost a cliche, but he will be there, loud, pushy - like a cliche. There is always one mom who is very sensitive to whether and how her daughter gets to play. For some reason, the lesbian families don't go out for baseball here. Perhaps they know about the Little League defense perimeter that generally keeps girls and all those "wussy" boys out. Wanting a better experience for their kids, they promote softball? I should like to know. They were such a great presence at soccer at this level. Women do approach sports with a different dynamic.

Here they are, fifteen or so kids, ready as they'll every be to take a rather complex set of physical demands and skill, social and cultural signifiers and parental as well as peer pressures that make up baseball and build a life-long impression of it all. Most have never played any organized sport before. A few don't even know which hand their glove goes on. What a wonderful opportunity to help them gain mastery of their own physicality, feel good about what they can do, learn to work as a team with others, give them a set of social skills and language they can use for the rest of their lives! We'll never have this chance again. These two years are really it. They're old enough and developmentally advanced enough to take it on, young enough to be receptive and eager to "get it".

Facing them are the volunteer "coaches". I rasied my hand last year because no one else would. It was among the toughest of unpaid jobs. I came to love it and hate it. I tried to let someone else take the bullet this year, but he seemed so like a rabbit caught in headlights, that I am "assisting". Last year I was the rabbit caught in headlights.