Books And Baseball

I love a good library book sale. I realize that I say that the same way some people might speak of steak. Feel free to replace the word “book” with “steak” for the rest of this paragraph if it helps you better understand. I love that there never seems to be enough room for all the orphaned books lined haphazardly in cardboard boxes on top of and under rows of card tables. Then there is this careful dance between neighbors and strangers leaning over one another to take a book, or excusing oneself to crawl below the table to leaf through a box of books that caught their eye.

At this particular book sale, on a hot and sticky morning in August, I am making out like a bandit. The brown paper shopping bag that I’m carrying is stuffed with a bunch of novels for myself, an old issue of Craft magazine that I haven’t read, some classic books of my childhood, Corduroy, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny for Matthew, and a dessert cookbook that has something to do with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. As I am shoving in a John Feinstein book that I think Bob will enjoy, my bag starts to tear giving me the cue that it is time for me to go, otherwise I could very well spend the day there.

When I arrive at home it starts to rain hard even though the sun is still shinning. Bob approves of my book choices for him and starts to flip through the beginning pages of the Feinstein one. Matthew snuggles up next to me with a Thomas the Tank Engine book that I knew he would have picked out himself. On the inside of the front cover there is a handwritten note, “Dear Ryan, Merry Xmas 2004! Your cousins…” Yet another reason I love library books sales, for the little surprises of owning a book secondhand.

Aside from being bookworms our family has other pastimes, namely sports. We took Matthew to his first professional baseball game, Worcester Tornadoes vs. the Brocton Rox, in the evening. Matthew held our hands in the parking lot but once he heard the crowd cheer, we arrived at the first inning, he let go to clap his hands too. When we sat down in our seats, he looked at the field and said, “Baseball cards?”

I would need to remember the cuteness of that moment to center me when he later drove his matchbox fire tuck through a melted puddle of ice cream on the ground and then licked it.

“So who won the game?” A co-worker asks a couple days later after I mention, well, shamelessly brag that that Matthew stayed through all nine innings of the game.

“Umm…” I can’t remember.

What I can remember is that it was the night that Matthew learned the baseball chant, “Charge!” I also remember that it started to lightly rain in the ninth inning but the fireworks show scheduled for after the game still went off without a hitch. That night Bob, Matthew, and I sat in the rain on a warm summer night watching fireworks in the distance.

I would have to say that we won the game.