April 10, 2023

The Easter Triduum arrived here chilly and gray, then turned stormy, but the solemnity of the Resurrection may rebuild spirits and break the back of winter. Then, from our waterlogged backyard I noticed the dark silhouette of another commercial aircraft passing high overhead. I wondered where it was going—if those aboard were heading to some mysterious place at the far end of the earth, some place I had never seen.

Everyone knows it: travel broadens horizons. Those who venture from their hometowns to see the world learn of the history, cultures, and values of other peoples. They marvel at the wonders of Europe and Asia, the majesty of London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Athens, Jerusalem. Some hope to see the pyramids, the Greek isles, the places where Christ walked and where St. Paul preached. Watching PBS specials and reading National Geographic isn’t the same.  

We have friends who have been to Estonia. I have a friend who traveled through central Africa for business. Calling the roll of places our kids have been: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, Guatemala, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, South Africa, Spain, The Netherlands.  Our oldest daughter, right now, is living in Colombia.

In 1980 I visited Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Mexico on two work trips. In the late 1980s we went to London and Paris, also for work. In 2004 we paid our own way for a 25th anniversary trip to Rome. A year later Sandy went back with her church choir. In 2010 I took my son fishing in Canada’s Northwest Territory. Sandy and I visited Prince Edward Island, setting of the girls’ story, “Ann of Green Gables,” in 2011, and Quebec in 2012.

In 2013 our passports were due to expire, we renewed them for the standard ten years. We tucked them in a drawer. Everyone, it seems, has one: all our children, my siblings, all our friends, our friends’ adult children. Passports can play a role in gripping drama. Movie secret agents and spies, like Jason Bourne, seem to have dozens. The conflict in the classic, “Casablanca,” has to do with “letters of transit” that enable Ilsa, Ingrid Bergman’s character, and her husband Lazlo to escape the city to fight again.

Watching those aircraft soar overhead, listening to others’ travel stories, the idea to go somewhere returned. We thought we should take a trip, see something of the world we haven’t seen.

We talked about it. A cruise to Alaska, maybe? You need a passport for the Canadian port calls. Okinawa, site of the last battle of World War II, is a powerful draw for me. I spent a year there as a Marine Corps lieutenant in the early 1970s, marking time to ship to Southeast Asia. I want to see the beaches of Normandy and feel the history of that immortal place. We should visit Ireland, our clan’s ancestral home. We’d like to see Oxford, home of one of England’s famed universities.

I fished the passports from a bottom drawer. The covers were shiny, as if brand-new. I thumbed through them. Every page blank. Not a single stamp. I let out my breath. The passports would expire in two months. Over those ten years, we never used them, not once. Never traveled overseas, nor even to Canada or Mexico.

Why not? We never dreamed the big dream: to visit Ireland when our daughter spent a year of college there, to walk the Camino de Santiago, the walk of St. James across Spain; to climb Machu Picchu, to ride a camel to the Great Pyramid, to gape at Victoria Falls in the heart of Africa. We never hiked England’s Lakes Region or stared at the horizon from China’s Great Wall. We never took a Caribbean cruise, or a cruise anywhere. Neither did we do anything else that required a passport. We had the passports. We didn’t have the imagination.

Over those ten years we visited our youngest daughter in Colorado, drove across Montana a couple of times. We saw Yellowstone and Glacier national parks and the Little Bighorn National Battlefield. We stopped at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. We drove to Philly and Pittsburgh a bunch of times to visit the kids. We flew to New Orleans to see our oldest girl. The big excitement was recent, 2018, our short-lived cross-country road trip that got us to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Never did we stray across the nation’s border.

Now it’s different. Time is short, memories and short-circuited dreams creep back. During my year on Oki I took a week’s leave on Taiwan. I tramped around the capital, Taipei, took a train to see the wondrous lakes in the island’s mountains region. On a weekend junket to a beach spot in northern Okinawa I paddled a canoe out into the bay that fed into the East China Sea. A quarter-mile from shore the canoe slipped into the outgoing tide. I couldn’t turn it around and had to swim back.

On our trip to London for the big Farnborough Air Show in 1988 (still the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent its newest fighter aircraft), we took a train out to the countryside and had lunch in a quaint pub. From the patio we watched local men play cricket in their gleaming white outfits. On the 2004 Rome trip, at the papal audience, we got close enough to Pope John Paul II to wave, he stared but didn’t wave back. I recall he was scheduled to meet Vladimir Putin that afternoon.

We printed the forms for renewing passports. I filled them out, making a couple of mistakes, meaning get a new form and start over. We got the photos and wrote the check. The State Department warns renewals are taking months. We had to send the expiring passports. I wondered: what will the passport renewal person think when he sees ours, which show we’ve been nowhere?

Our ingrained inertia may set back in. Some days, all the world’s famous places blur together. I once saw photos of picturesque Slovenia, tucked in just north of Italy, a tiny land of gorgeous lakes, mountains, and mysterious-looking castles. I wanted to go. Then I wanted to see the Norwegian fiords, the museums of Madrid, the jungles of Brazil. Then I didn’t. Instead we jumped in the van and hit the highways through America’s South.

But soon we’ll have passports. The doors of the world will open, we’ll pick up brochures, listen to the pitches from friends and family. We’ll buy tickets to fly to some exotic but affordable faraway place, and sign up for the cathedral and museum tours. Maybe. But then there’s the Maine seacoast, the Minnesota lakes. Never been to either.

April 3, 2023

In April 1968 I got on a train in Springfield, Mass., bound for home in Jersey for spring break. From the far end of the car I could hear someone’s portable transistor radio (remember those?) playing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence”: Hello darkness my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again. The lyrics drifted through the car. I had just turned 19. Guys my age were dying in Vietnam.

The words were right for that raw, ugly time. Seems they are for another time, our time: unspeakable tragedy in our home town, Nashville; then lowbrow comedy in the indictment of a washed-up vaudeville performer/ex-president.

That long-ago sense of darkness resonates. We try to move on. For us, last Tuesday was CT (computerized tomography) scan day at Greer Hospital. The workup requires a catheter through which a dye is pumped into the bloodstream to highlight the body’s organs for the scan lens. The phlebotomist stuck my left arm at the inner elbow.

“The vein has blown up. We can’t use it,” she said. “Can I look at the right one?”

 “Blown up?” I asked.

 “It’s if the vein won’t let the needle in. It happens sometimes,” she said. She grasped my right arm and inspected it. “This one looks great. Let me get a new needle.” I winced when I saw blood spattered on my arm. She inserted the new needle and attached the catheter. She motioned me into the CT chamber. The CT technician smiled. “Hi, I’m Keenan. Let’s get you ready for your scan.”

I asked her about the vein. Medical people who stick me usually compliment me on my veins.

“Sometimes the needle just won’t go in, if the vein is stiff for some reason. Sometimes the needle is too big for the vein and goes right through, allowing bleeding outside the vein. But it’s okay. You’ve got the catheter.”

This CT was intended to check my lungs and liver after four treatments with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda. The theory: Keytruda stimulates the patient’s immune system to fight certain types of cancer.

Someone explained it this way: Our bodies create cancer cells every day, our immune system routinely detects and destroys them. Some cancer cells disguise or camouflage themselves from the immune system and propagate undetected. Keytruda unmasks those cells so the immune system can attack them. The immune system, not the drug itself, fights the cancer. 

I bought the theory. After the four Keytruda infusions it was time for a look, via the CT. Keenan, the technician, positioned me flat on the platform, which passed through the CT scanner three times, a mechanical voice chirping, “Hold your breath … breathe.” on each pass. That was it. She uploaded the scan to a radiologist for his analysis.

The report arrived that afternoon on the patient portal. At the top: “The pleural-based nodule along the diaphragmatic pleural surface posteriorly on the left continues to enlarge. The low-density lesion/metastasis in segment 7 liver continues to enlarge. Multiple malignancies,” the report said. 

That’s cancer. It keeps coming. The big weapons, radiation and chemotherapy, have major downsides, they kill healthy fast-growing cells as well as cancer cells. Surgery is traumatic and may be impossible. Now there’s immunotherapy, which for many folks means Keytruda. You imagine this wonder drug coursing through your veins, gently massaging your bone marrow and lymph nodes, headquarters of the immune system, directing it to pulverize cancer cells.

On Thursday the oncologist was sunny, upbeat—a big part of his job, since all his patients are depressed. He tapped a few keys on a keyboard and brought up on a wall-mounted computer monitor a bizarre upside-down image of my body, the organs kludged together like chaotic boulders. In a corner of the screen he brought up the data from my last CT, in November. He pointed to a faint shadow on the older image and a darker one on Tuesday’s scan.

The darker shadow, the tumor on the liver, had grown to about three inches long from two inches at the last scan. It looked like a good-sized chunk of the liver.

“It shows up on the scan, but we need more information,” the doc said. “It could be a dead or neutral zone, where the immune response is now being optimized. You didn’t start Keytruda until mid-January. That gave the lesion two months to grow,” he said. “So we’ll have to wait for the next CT to get an accurate look. But your liver function is normal.”

The spots on the pleura (lining of the lung) were ghostly lines barely visible on the screen. The doc pointed to the report with his pen. “These are stable,” he had written. The numbers were nearly the same for both on the new scan and the older one. But they probably explain why I’m usually out of breath doing almost anything.

He asked about side effects, nausea, headaches, insomnia. No problems, I answered. “Here’s a plan,” he said. “You’re getting an infusion today, we’ll schedule two more, three weeks apart, then a quick CT. Keytruda is a big option, we don’t want to give up on it. The other is surgery.”

One of the eerie sidelights of my cancer: no pain. Without late-stage trauma or side effects, you don’t know what’s working or not working. Every three months the doctor walks you through incomprehensible black-and-white computer images. He slides his mouse expertly across the screen, over this gray shadow or that one, assuring you in techno-medical language that everything is under control or will be shortly. It’s what he does for me, for all his patients, what we hope he’ll do until this is over—and it will be over.

He has a plan for all his patients, some with tragic terminal cancers, which still outnumber the medical miracles. He’s a young man who works in a world of darkness. “Sure, there’s a risk of metastasis,” he said. “There’s always a risk. But we’ll deal with that. Sound good?” He grinned and held out his hand.

Sounded good. We shook. “See ya,” he said, waved, and headed to his next appointment.  I grabbed a bottle of water and headed for the infusion room. 

March 27, 2023

The wrecked bus and railroad car from the hit 1993 movie, “The Fugitive,” lie along the Tuckasegee River in Sylva, in Jackson County, North Carolina. The train-bus crash scene, the sequence of Dr. Richard Kimball (Harrison Ford) sneaking into the hospital, and the following scene of Kimball walking along railroad tracks into a tunnel were filmed near Sylva.

The bus and car are visible (you can’t actually approach them) just outside town near the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad track. The scene passes for a tourist attraction in these parts.

Lots of movies have been made, entirely or in part, in North Carolina, among them “Last of the Mohicans,” “Dirty Dancing,” and “Cold Mountain.” In nearly all of them the state’s mountains and forests really are the stars. Sylva is one of the outposts of this hard country along a scrubby state road, U.S. 23/74, on the underside of I-40. We came for the fourth time to the stretch of dark mountains that ring Sylva for the “Assault on Black Rock,” the 3,000-foot climb to the summit of Black Rock Knob.

Mountains change the country starting just east of Waynesville. The forest is denser and darker, the distances longer between the worn, ramshackle buildings, one-story houses, trailers, and small industrial businesses, the turns in the highway sharper. In March it’s still cold, a sharp, biting cold, often with snow or frigid rain.

Sylva, about 50 miles west of Asheville, is a busy little factory town. It has its two highway exits, its gas stations and fast-food joints, its Walmart Supercenter. But the locals have worked hard to give it some attractiveness for out-of-towners, cute restaurants, shops, and breweries, most crammed along a four-block stretch of Main Street. Still, when you drive into downtown on West Main you face Jackson Paper Manufacturing, which belches thick clouds of white smoke that on an overcast day hang in the air like an approaching thunderstorm. Not what tourists want to see.

Main intersects with Keener Street, which offers a view of the public library, a graceful, domed structure that once was the courthouse. That’s about it. Western North Carolina has a few such places. They start around Black Mountain, just east of Asheville and continue to Waynesville, which calls itself the “Gateway to the Smokies,” then stretch further west to Bryson City, the eastern access point for the national park.

I quit taking the “assault” too seriously last year, my second go-round. The field gathered was the usual mix of young greyhounds, middle-aged middle-of-the packers, and a few skinny-legged codgers wearing thick jackets. We milled around, stamping our feet in the cold until the starter yelled “Go!” The field strung out quickly, sailing up over the granite carpet. The trail dragged us up, simply up. My lungs heaved.

The course is a fire road that winds higher for three miles of rocks, then levels off for a quarter-mile. It then turns sharply north into a single-track trail through junglelike thickets for a third of mile over twisted limbs, vines, culverts, blowdowns, and roots as thick as logs. A couple of volunteers stood next to an ATV at the base of the single-track, stomping and flapping their arms, their faces wrapped in wool.

I staggered up, gasping as the 5,000-foot chill penetrated my three thermal layers. At the top the jungle becomes a grassy patch shaded by the massive rock of the summit. The trail snakes sharply and crosses the frozen mud to a rock cave just below the summit. The wind howled. Foot-long icicles hung from the rock mass. At the top I felt for just a moment the weak warmth of the pale sun. Then it was down, down, for the headlong descent.

An old friend came to these parts to write a book. She got her inspiration from the old Cherokee trails and the stories of the stalwart people who came to this rough country and fought Indian wars. These places, hemmed in by the sharp ridges, Sylva, Waynesville, Maggie Valley, Cherokee, Dillsboro, Clyde, Canton, never grew much, the jobs were and are mainly in Asheville or maybe Bryson City. West Carolina University is in Cullowhee, south of Sylva. A tourist mountain-fall foliage train runs through in season.

Beyond Bryson City U.S. 74 plunges further into near-empty country then passes through Murphy, near the Georgia state line. The road turns due west but intersects with 60 and 19, which eventually are swallowed by the vast Chattahoochee National Forest. You can tack past the Devil’s Spine to Blairsville, Ga., or further south to Ellijay. You may pass by Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.

This is Deep South backcountry, mountains, rivers, spectacular beauty, strange names, towns like islands in an ocean of wilderness. Ellijay, both cute and thick with forest, is just two hours from the maw of Atlanta’s northern suburbs.    

We may as well have a place to go as the months speed by, a place two or three hours from home, a kind of virgin place that still is new, a place not heavy with memories. Asheville is the beacon, the glitzy, exotic, offbeat little city in the hills with the lovely resort hotel built from rocks, the graceful cathedral, and in recent years the folks worried about climate change.

The Black Rock junket was a bit worse for me this year, and, if I show up next year will be worse still. More important things are at stake: the awakening to good but rare things, the sublime, bracing mountain chill, the overwhelming rockiness, the loneliness of deep woods, the dark, mystical remoteness that somehow offers a glimpse of eternity, and raises spirits, for me, for anyone.

PHOTOS: MARIANNE BEAMER

March 20, 2023

The Monastery of St. Clare is tucked away on a rural road near Traveler’s Rest, S.C., maybe 20 miles from Greenville. The route breaks away from a busy state road, a couple of westbound turns wind through rolling pastures and meadows, then thick woodland. The farms seem larger, then fewer, then disappear. Around a long turn the monastery sits on a high hill opposite a nature preserve.  A simple sign identifies it.

Here in Greenville County we have a church on nearly every corner. Two Baptist churches are within a mile of our street, fitted with giant steeples. Nearby is a massive “Praise Cathedral.” Other Christian churches, both mainline Protestant and fundamentalist, stand along every thoroughfare. The Catholics have about a half-dozen parishes. The Mormons are on the west side. Then too, we have non-Christians: an Islamic Center, a Jehovah’s Witness meeting place. Greenville has two synagogues.

W.J. Cash in The Mind of the South noted that “The South, men said and did not doubt, was peculiarly Christian; probably, indeed, it was the last great bulwark of Christianity.” From Southern pulpits, he wrote, “ran the dark suggestion that the God of the Yankee was not God at all but Antichrist loosed from the pit.” When he wrote that in 1941 he was alluding to Southern fury at Northern abolitionists. Now, generations after Reconstruction, the ages-old Southern preoccupation with the life of the spirit, whatever its political origins, enables all shades of faith in these parts.

St. Clare, born Chiara Offreduccio in 1194, grew up in a wealthy household in the Italian city of Assisi, where as a girl she often heard Francis of Assisi preach. When she turned 18 she resolved to follow Francis, rebelling against her father. She cut her hair and fled to a Benedictine convent. Her sister Catarina and other women joined her and dedicated themselves to a life of prayer and devotion to St. Francis. When her father died her mother also joined her group. They didn’t wear shoes or eat meat, and lived in contemplative silence.

In 1253 Pope Innocent IV declared the group would be called the Order of Poor Ladies. Clare died two days later at 59. In 1255 she was canonized St. Clare. In 1263 the order became the Order of St. Clare, devoted to Francis of Assisi’s mission of poverty, prayer, and service. The order has established some 900 monasteries in 70 countries, numbering about 17,000 women. The world is filled with places named for Clare, e.g., Santa Clara, Calif., and, with altered spelling the St. Clair River, St. Clair County, Michigan, among others.

Every monastery is independent, led by its own abbess. All follow the rule of St. Clare, based on the life and teaching of St. Francis. In the U.S. three other separate expressions of the order support monasteries: the Collettines, the Capuchin Poor Clares, and the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration.

We drove up the steep driveway. The grounds around the one-level building looked deserted. The front entrance was locked. We knocked and looked around. A woman finally opened and motioned us inside. “Here’s the chapel,” she whispered with a smile. “I’m Joanie. Stay as long as you like.” The chapel was gracefully designed to the oval lines of the building, austerely furnished, with a low table serving as an altar.

We talked a bit. Joanie said the nuns are cloistered, true to the order’s mission. Their lives are devoted to prayer. They conduct retreats at a retreat house on the grounds, provide spiritual counseling, and maintain a garden behind the main building.

The Traveler’s Rest site is one of 33 St. Clare monasteries in the U.S. The cornerstone shows the nuns came to the area in 1955, the monastery was completed in 2008. Mass is offered each weekday morning. The priests who come are those with the time to spare. The Saturday afternoon Mass, Joanie said, brings a crowd.

I attended St. Anselm College, run by the Benedictine monastic order. During freshman year, with a couple of classmates, I spent a weekend in the monastery. I slept in a tiny room and followed the monks’ schedule of prayer at 6:00 AM, silent reading and meditation, and Compline (evening prayer).  Meals were silent, the monks seated together at a long table, one read aloud from some spiritual volume.

At the time the country was enduring the bloodbath of Vietnam, the cataclysm of civil rights activism, deep alienation of young people, and vast political transformation. Yet through the weekend the tangible message of the monastic life was the undeniable nearness of God, not within the walls of the monastery but for all of human existence.   

Thomas Merton, born in 1915 and raised by an Anglican father and Quaker mother, a gifted scholar, linguist, and writer, seemed destined for fame and fortune in New York’s publishing world. In 1938 a Hindu monk urged him to read St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas a Kempis’s Imitations of Christ.

In 1941 Merton visited the monastery of the Cistercian Order in Gethsemani, Kentucky (also called Trappists) and breathed the strong silent air of contemplation. The trip transformed his life. In 1942 he joined the Order and in following years, until his death in 1968, wrote 50 books on spirituality, pacificism, and social justice. His memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, has been translated into 15 languages. The original hardcover sold 600,000 copies. Merton taught untold millions the gift of his vocation, the sublime beauty and power of faith.

We walked the St. Clare grounds for a short while. We saw no one, but knew the nuns were about the place, engaged in their assigned tasks for the benefit of their community and for those who wander by.

I returned for the morning Mass a few days later. The 15 or 20 nuns, in their tan robes secured by rough cord, sang beautifully. Afterward they smiled quietly then disappeared. A few other pilgrims showed up. We felt in the quiet dynamism of that place of peace and contemplation the presence of God, the vocation of this small group of women, which brings spiritual gifts for visitors, and for mankind.

March 13, 2023

It was around 6:00 P.M., the sunlight was fading. The batter crouched, awaiting the pitch. It was outside. He swung at the second one, which was high and again outside. The third was in the dirt. He swung at the next one and connected with the dull clunk! of a metal bat on ball. It bounced sharply past the pitcher and through the infield. A runner on first advanced to second then to third as the center fielder chased the ball to the fence.

Fourteen nine- and ten-year-old boys showed up for practice. They didn’t have uniforms, those would come next month when the season started. This was their second practice together. Drills started in the infield, the coach tapping ground balls. Three boys took turns at each base, a couple at shortstop and between first and second, and one caught throws back to the coach.

This was Country Club Road park, a complex of kids’ baseball and soccer fields off Country Club Road on the fringes of the city. With some effort, the kids’ parents had found the place for the first practice. They sat on the uncomfortable metal bleachers along the third-base line, hunched forward, arms folded against the early evening chill.

The boys started practice horsing around, the coach got them focused. Most fielded the grounders cleanly, more or less, some were muffed or rolled to the outfield. The boy at third who caught the ball threw to the fielder at second, who pivoted and threw to first. Some of the throws were sharp, most were high, looping tosses that didn’t quite get there. These were nine-year-olds, after all, this was their introduction to baseball.

The coach was alone. I guessed he had an assistant who didn’t show up or was alternating with the coach at the twice-weekly practices. Maybe the guy leading the practice was the assistant. He called the players’ names as he knocked the balls toward them and, pointing with the bat, motioned them around their positions.

The kids all had gloves, cleats, batter’s helmets, and metal bats. I recalled faintly that kids in my hometown Little League decades ago wore sneakers, the league provided the helmets and the bats, which were wood. Now the boys are expected to be fully equipped. I wondered what ten-year-olds’ baseball cleats cost. Part of the investment, I guessed. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed on TV that many major league ballplayers are wearing ordinary running shoes.

The sunlight lasted after 6:00, highlighting the deep green of the outfield and the forest beyond the chain-link fence that enclosed the field. The boys playing outfield shaded their eyes with their hands, although several wore caps. The shadows slowly extended out from the infield. Around 6:30 someone switched on the field lights. The boys paid attention. They caught more ground balls, their throws were more accurate. The coach waved his bat like a baton, a conductor in front of his orchestra, moving them to one position, then another.

The parents in the bleachers, mostly moms, watched their sons engaged in the boys’ baseball ritual, chatting a bit about kids and sports. Kids and sports, I’m guessing, now is almost a compound noun. What kids aren’t in something? Soccer—in the fall more than a thousand boys and girls from ages four to 14 play on teams at our local YMCA. The basketball league, in season, has games every weekday evening and all day Saturday. Then football, gymnastics, swimming, softball, tennis. Then the newcomers, hockey, taekwondo, judo, golf. Kids’ sports cost money, the sign-up fees and the gear, the gloves, bats, rackets, shoes, helmets, the hockey sticks, helmets, pads. I’m leaving some things out.

One mother talked about kids’ football in her home town in Alabama. The coaches, she said, made the boys run until some of them threw up. “It’s awful,” she said. “and some of those kids are massive. At least here they play flag football.”

So it’s not all fun and games. I recall some of the fall soccer games, when a few parents shrieked at their kids and at the refs. Some of them, standing on the sidelines as their kids run around the field or sit on the bench, are replaying their own imaginary stardom.

But then the kids are having fun, most of them. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the boys (maybe the percentage is higher than that) we were watching won’t become major league ballplayers. “He’s not going to be the next Sammy Sosa [or other big-league star]. If he’s just an accountant, I’ll be happy,” the mom from Alabama said.

But then there’s the dream. Of these kids running around, throwing, catching, swinging at pitches over their heads or bouncing in front of the plate, some will return to play next year, their skills a bit more advanced. Then maybe the middle-school team. Then high school, where they face the prospect of not making the team, for some, their first real disappointment in life. Do they give up and get back to their schoolwork—or do they practice harder? They’ll hear the stories of high-school players who got to the minor leagues then were called up to the majors and became stars.

Still, as we shifted our positions on those hard-as-rock bleachers, feeling the evening weather close in, the parents relaxed in the moment. Except for the voices of the kids and the whack of the bats against balls, the place was mainly silent, peaceful, almost. Most of the pitches by the boy taking his turn on the mound went over the catcher’s head or through his legs to the backstop, as the batters swung wildly.

A few parents checked their watches. It was after seven, a school night. Some of these boys probably still had homework, most had not yet had dinner, then would need a bath before bed. They were elementary-schoolers, after all. But for that 90 minutes at that ballfield on the far outskirts of town, the world retreated a bit. For the kids, the tests and homework, the bells starting class, the lines in the lunchroom, were replaced by fun outdoors in late-day sunshine.

For the parents, too, practice was a few moments of light-hearted pleasure that suspended the daily parenting drill, the chores, the commuting, the bills, the job—the rest of life. It was, or it seemed, in this corner of this southeastern state, a bit of the “Boys of Summer” when, in their memories, on a warm, sun-drenched afternoon at some big ballpark, the shirt-sleeved crowd roared as their star homered, driving in runs, circling the bases. It’s baseball