The boy of summer

Idon’t much like baseball.

But, “Sure, we can go hit some balls.”

Because I have an 8-yearold son. I don’t even have my own baseball glove, so I take my wife’s.

She has an 8-year-old son, too, but he’s slightly different than mine — more of a mommy’s boy, a little clingy and cuddly.

She’s been throwing and catching with him since he was a baby, and bought a small, cheap glove to throw the baseball with a bigger him while I’m too busy mowing and weeding our backyard. Sometimes throwing the baseball feels like work to her, but she knows I’m always jealous.

Our backyard is too small for him now.

So I drive my son to the field behind the school — a rough, hard diamond of tan sandy dirt and a very deep green outfield, strewn as if with stars by tiny white flowers of clover. The field is framed on three sides by a high silver chain-link fence. The third-base line is lined with giant oak trees, as green and thick and stiff as stalks of farmers’ market broccoli.

I carry to the mound a plastic grocery bag of 15 balls, but I take out only four — three brown relics we found and one of a dozen we bought with the bat on July 4 weekend for more than I thought baseballs cost. My son steps up to the plate. “Bat off your shoulder! Feet square! Knees bent!”

The sound of the aluminum bat hitting the ball is a like a note of good music. He hits the first four solidly and I turn to go pick them up in the outfield. The carpet of clover is thick and soft. “Feet square!” Dink! A swing and a miss. Dink! Dink!

My son hits more than he misses.

He’s trying to hit a fly ball into the grass instead of the dirt. I’m trying for him to, too. “Bend your knees!”

This whole thing seems slightly pointless — me throwing balls at him, him hitting them back at me and past me, and me walking out and trying to find them like Easter eggs in the grass.

But there is a nice rhythm to it. Four balls. Retrieve. Four balls.

Besides me yelling at him, and him saying “Crap!” when he misses or laughing when he hits, we don’t talk. And he’s not listening. Or so I think. But then, I look up from my pitcher’s stance, and he’s standing there, bat, feet and knees ready — perfect.

Feeling the pressure a closer must feel in the World Series, I wind up and throw. DINK! The sound of the connecting is a great one.

We switch, and I hit balls to him on the edge of the outfield, worried every time one of them is going to hit him in the face, and still yelling.

“Great catch!”

“Keep your body in front of it!” [But crap, don’t let it hit you!]

He bare-hands a lot of balls that bounce or fall out of his still-notbroken-in glove.

“You have to squeeze it,” I repeat. “You have to squeeze it hard and hold on!”

I don’t know baseball, but I know a few things.

I knew it would be quiet at the field at this time on a summer Saturday, when most of our neighbors are eating dinner, but I didn’t know it would be this quiet. My son and I have the field all to ourselves. It feels like we have the whole summer.

One ... two ... three balls make it to the very edge of the grit, but not the green. Thick clouds roll overhead. One big dark one glowers and spits at us.. The breeze is strong and cool. But the rain holds off. Bits of the sky turn back to blue.

If I could just flick a switch and stop it — the clouds from moving, the grass from growing — I’d ...

My son and I switch places.

He readies his bat, squares up, bends down and looks at me with a determined smile. He wants to hit that ball over my head and into the outfield. I’m fairly sure he will taunt me when he does.

Like any good pitcher, I think, “Bring it.”

One ... two ... three balls make it to the very edge of the grit, but not the green.

“Four more!” he yells back at me. “Four more!” I don’t much like baseball. But if anyone has an old glove I can borrow, or even buy, let me know.

Because August is just about here, and my 8-year-old son is turning 9, and he’s pretty good at baseball.

So, sure, we can go hit some balls.