THE FIELDS
I was playing croquet
Outside the other day,
With the senior league,
Everyone wearing white,
Limbs lithe, wrinkled but alive,
Fending fatigue,
The weight of sultry Sarasota air,
With the sun now falling, much easier to bear.
Next to us, a baseball field,
Sixth graders whooping,
Parents onlooking
In folding chairs under rainbow umbrellas,
As one team had a shutout cooking.
The happy hullabaloo disrupted our play,
One gets prickly as one grows grey.
Then a foul ball skipped over my way,
So I picked it up
To walk it back
To the home plate ump.
Mallet in hand
I ambled along,
Closing in on home base
As the ump screamed at my face,
You’re up! and just like that
The mallet I held was a baseball bat.
I spun around, not seventy but twelve,
The onlookers stood and cheered and yelled.
I took my position at the plate,
No idea what was what.
The pitch came fast,
I swung too late,
The parents roared.
When the next pitch came
I had somehow drawn
Ball field memories
To sunset
From a distant dawn.
A loud, crisp crack and the ball
Sailed five feet over
The shortstop’s head,
Bouncing toward the center field wall.
I tossed my bat and started to run,
But it was my croquet mallet
That landed in the dirt,
Radiating red in the setting sun.
What are you doing, old man?
I spun around and stuttered like a clown,
But it was real and for an instant
I had stared my old age down.
The umpire’s hand lay soft on my shoulder
As he led me back to the croquet lawn,
No one made a single sound,
But I was two feet off the ground,
Carol and Bob shuffled over to me,
You must have felt pretty dumb …
I reached into my pocket,
Out came three pieces of Bazooka bubble gum.
(Image – Wikimedia Commons)
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