Cold Case In Ellyson

Someone asked me, why does a fiction writer blog so often about baseball…the answer is elementary…I write what I know and what I see. Yesterday it was baseball, tomorrow it will be football and basketball with tennis sprinkled in between. It’s in my personality – to talk about what moves me, good or bad, and oftentimes what moves me is what I see in competition, mine or my children’s.

My oldest’s hiatus from baseball has taken an intermission. He was asked by another team whom he does not know to play for one more week in an upcoming tournament. After weeks of no ball, he found himself last night scrimmaging with them against an older team. What struck me is how small my son looked. He’s bigger than I am, as big as most of his friends, yet he was downright puny among these man-children. And he played like a child, like a boy I didn’t recognize. Nerves, mental vacation, rusty – I don’t know what it was, but it surely wasn’t pretty… As a rule, I never let my kids quit something once they start. But after the game, I asked him if he wanted to go forward with these people he doesn’t know, recognizing that he had to be embarrassed by his own performance…and he said he wanted to play. It’s what I secretly hoped to hear but wasn’t sure he was big enough to say.