A Little League game schedule is a fickle thing. It toys with your adult life in so many ways.

Do you stay for every game? Even if your son isn’t going to play? What if you miss that one great hit? If your son plays all the time, does it matter if you miss that play at second? After all, he’ll make many more before the season is out.

Yes, you stay.

I have perched for hours upon small, rickety benches, swatting away the black flies, while my sons came to bat – or not. I have wrapped myself in an old blanket and shivered while my sons roamed the infield, unaware of the dropping mercury on a cold spring evening. I have chatted for hours with compatible parents, sharing the trials and tribulations of parenthood and politics.

A perfect moment, that one time when my life was momentarily a circle and not a line, came on a rainy afternoon, on a pine-wooded Little League ball field on the outskirts of some Maine village whose name I can no longer remember. About eight other parents and I had ferried our boys to this field in order that they might once again test their newfound courage. These boys were about 11 years old, an age when the muscles, the sinews and the hearts all begin to grow. Baseball is the perfect sport to try them out.

Just after we arrived, the threatening skies finally let loose upon us and the rain came down. We all jumped under the nearest protective covering, the boys to the dugout and the parents to their cars or a nearby tree. I found myself huddling alone under a large pine just behind the concrete-block dugout.

After a moment, I began to hear, coming through the rain, an incredible sound. It was the boys in the dugout. They were singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” These little warriors were singing with the joy of children who have something to look forward to. They did not mind the wait because they knew that the joy of living is the wait. It is the rain shower on a warm ball field just before a game starts. It is the circle of loving parents surrounding their every endeavor. It really is just that perfect. As they sang, I breathed. I inhaled the pine scent and the perfection of that moment. I listened to those boys enjoying the wait, this part of their journey.

Just as they finished, for some reason I still cannot explain, I poked my head around the corner of that cold concrete dugout only to find that at that exact same moment, my son had done the same. As I looked around that corner, looking to see if I could witness the beauty of those boys, I found myself looking directly into the eyes of my own little boy. Life had come into a circle, for just a minute. He looked back at me and smiled. I cannot remember who won that day but I know for sure that we played the game.

Laurie Wood is a resident of North Yarmouth.


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