Читать книгу Here and There - Bill Conlogue - Страница 8

... our season: Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day.

As far as we knew them, we followed the formal rules of softball, but in a casual way, given our amateur status and the topography of the field, which was a side hill cut by a stony driveway, two ditches, a barbed wire fence, the house, and three barns. Each game surprised us with lessons in chance, improvisation, and judgment.

Sure of snagging a grounder, you could get a rude awakening when the ball popped up and smacked your chin. Catching a fly meant accounting for the ball’s trajectory and the height of its arc, but also the slope of the ground and the location of holes, pipes, and posts. Aunts and uncles, cousins and kids watched from the porch along third-base line, ribbing batters and pitchers, laughing at infield errors, and applauding spectacular plays, which often enough meant someone snaring a fly ball against the gas tanks in left field, stopping a pinball up the driveway, or beelining a strike from barn to home.

All the littlest kids batted at least once, each hitting a home run, of course, though it required repeated directions and dramatically dropped balls to get them around the bases. For the rest of us, making it home meant remembering that reaching second, uphill and from grass to gravel, required an instinctive understanding of different types of ground; that balls knocked into the pasture sometimes disappeared into wet spots, which required both teams to double as a search team; and that behind home plate stood a stone wall.

So that the cows could be milked, the first innings ended just before five; some of us tossed aside mitts and bats to pick up shovels and pails. Others ate, drank, talked.

The rest of the game ended in twilight, the ball a moth...