Quarantine's Unexpected Gift: A Time to Remember

Well, baseball fans. It finally happened. Our boy had an actual-real-live-honest-to-goodness baseball game this past weekend. In the days leading up to it, I was almost too nervous to put it in writing on the calendar because of the possibility that it would vanish into thin (rainy and/or virus-filled) air again.

The last time I had watched a live baseball game was on March 11th. That night we returned home from my son's second high school scrimmage to find that due to the coronavirus pandemic, the NBA was shutting down and school had been canceled for the next two days (which quickly turned into the next three months). Since then we watched them fall like dominoes - the NCAA season, the College World Series, Little League, the MLB season, Summer College Leagues, and of course, our son's high school season. With each cancellation I felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest and crushed with a bat. 

(If you're new here, now might be the time to give you a heads up that I tend toward the dramatic.)

Anyway, two weeks ago we were finally supposed to play, but we got rained out. So due to that heartbreak, I was hesitant to count on us playing this past weekend. Fortunately, we did play. The sun shone and the games were on. We loaded up the truck with the bat bag, the packed coolers, and the chairs and set off to meet up with our old trusty companion known as "Standstill Traffic on I-95".

As we drove, I thought about these past few months when there was not a thing on the calendar for my youngest son - no practice, no hitting lesson, no catcher's clinic, no game. My two oldest boys normally attend college out of state. Both were supposed to be busy with internships this summer, including one who was to be working as a broadcaster in the Cape Cod Summer College Baseball League (cue the sad trombone music). They both came home from their campuses in March and all of their plans were canceled as well. So it was, that on just about every last one of those wide open nights, our family of five sat around the dinner table together. As I often have in the past few months, I thought about what a truly unexpected gift it was. 

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