A beautiful evening for baseball

Sunday was a beautiful evening for watching a baseball game.

Except that I wasn't really thinking about watching a baseball game, despite the fact that I had driven 25 minutes to reach the field, and toted along a fold-up chair, hats for my daughter Holly and me, salad and strawberries to contribute to a picnic, and a picnic blanket.

I was thinking about how I'd managed to vacuum only half the house. I was thinking about what time I'd need to get Holly to day camp the next morning and whether the schedule would enable me to reach my office on time. I was thinking about why the washing machine had mysteriously turned itself off in the middle of a rinse cycle, and when I could be home for a service visit if the washing machine didn't resuscitate itself in the morning. I was thinking about how many more games were left before Tim's summer league ended, and whether I'd submitted all the paperwork in order for him to start driver's ed next week. And I was thinking, as I always do during baseball games, about whether any of us in the stands or whether any of the players on the field were likely to get beaned by a fastball and sustain a brain-threatening injury.

And just as it looked like a win was within easy reach, the other team tied the game and it went into extra innings.

All of which almost made me overlook the fact that it was such a beautiful evening for a baseball game.

By 6:30, the edges of the field were bathed in shade. My parents had arrived earlier and claimed a wide swath of grass for our picnic. I'd taken time at home to hull the strawberries, and they were tender, sweet, and room temperature, just the way I like them best. Holly was excited about the start of camp. Tim was pitching with an air of assurance, whether merited or not.

It was the last weekend of June, and the whole summer still lay ahead....and yet as I watched the extra innings begin, in hopes of a prompt and easy tie-breaker, I realized the sense of limitless time was an illusion. The baseball season would indeed end, but more changes would follow. Holly would soon be old enough to make her own plans on a summer evening, plans which very likely would not include her brother's baseball games. By the time a new baseball season rolls around, Tim will be able to drive himself to the field. My parents won't be here to picnic with us forever either.

It's strange to have a sense of things ending just as the summer is beginning, but sitting there watching the game made me ever more aware of how much that game was like my life itself. So many details to keep track of -- details involving household maintenance, employment, health, finances -- but also so much to enjoy. And, too, so much to worry about: an errant pitch slamming into an eye or skull and changing everything; a bad decision about which side street to take on the way home.

Life is short, I reminded myself as the game entered yet another tied inning. Summer is short. The baseball season is short. Even the strawberry season is short. This abundance of blessings -- family, food, health, security -- all of this could, and in some ways inevitably will, pass.

There were still a couple of tied innings left for me to savor, and I stopped thinking about the malfunctioning washing machine and upcoming deadlines and paid attention to baseball. Tim's team lost, but that didn’t matter. We had a wonderful time. It turned out to be not only a beautiful evening but a perfect one.

Pausing

Our church service yesterday morning focused on the theme of taking time to pause and concentrate and absorb. We sang a hymn I hadn’t heard before about the need to behave like cows and sheep, standing in the fields watching and thinking. Our student minister read the well-known poem by Mary Oliver in which she describes spending a whole afternoon contemplating a grasshopper. And in the sermon, our minister described a classroom method biologist Louis Aggasiz practiced at Harvard in which students were required to stare at dead fish for days on end and describe it in detail, only to discover time after time how very little detail they were actually absorbing.

This was good for me to hear. I hadn’t been to church for several weeks because of other options on Sunday mornings. A couple of those weeks I’d been out of town, but other weeks I’d wanted to concentrate on other priorities: spending time with my sisters and their families when they were in town on a rare weekend visit in mid-October, going for a run with a friend another Sunday in early November and urging her to stay for a cup of coffee so that we could catch up a little bit.

So sometimes, going to church feels to me like the opposite of pausing and concentrating. Sometimes, I avoid going with the excuse that when Sunday morning comes, I just can’t rush around anymore. I rush every weekday morning to get the kids to the schoolbus on time; I hurry throughout the course of my work day; I hurry to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour; I hurry to get to bed early enough to try for seven hours of sleep. On Sunday mornings, sometimes I just need a break from hurrying – even if hurrying means something as theoretically contemplative as being at church. I need to pause at home and regroup.

But being back after several weeks away yesterday reminded me that in some ways, the only time I really can stop and concentrate is in church. I tell myself some weekends that I’ll have a leisurely, focused breakfast and maybe even read the paper, but more often than not, I eat while simultaneously unloading the dishwasher and making breakfast for the kids. I imagine going for a leisurely run instead of church, but instead I run with one eye on the clock, calculating what time I need to be done and showered in time to be on time to the next commitment.

I’m not good at pausing and concentrating, and during the holiday season this tendency for distraction only grows worse: instead of letting my mind absorb the present, I’m thinking about the next party, the next cooking project, the next holiday performance on our schedule.

So it was good to be in church yesterday morning to hear this message, and also to be able to enact it just a little bit. In church, there is nothing to do but sit and listen. I couldn’t unload a dishwasher or go for a walk even if I wanted to: it’s church. So that’s the one time of the week when I know I really will just sit still. And it was good to be reminded yesterday of what an important priority that is – at any time of year, but perhaps on the brink of the holiday season most of all.

Eating dinner while standing at the counter

Holly’s friend Caroline seemed to think it was odd that I apologized to her for standing at the kitchen counter to eat dinner last night. “I never knew it was bad manners to do that,” she said sweetly, and I appreciated her leniency although I realize it’s something of a can’t-miss to seek etiquette approval from seven-year-olds.

Still, I apologized, because eating while standing at the counter bothers me on principle. Both the girls were sitting quietly on bar stools and I knew I should do the same, if not go the extra measure and have all of us sitting at the table, but the temptation to be lax was too great. Rick and Tim were at one of their many evening baseball games, and Holly and her friend had each other for dinnertime conversation (which in this case was about mermaids, I believe).

When all four of us are home at dinnertime, we almost always sit down together to eat. It’s a tenet I’ve heard dozens of times throughout my eleven years of parenting: eating an organized dinner together is paramount to the success and durability of the family unit. Well, maybe it’s not quite that extreme, but the experts are nearly unanimous on the importance of a family dinner hour.

And I know dinnertime deserves no less respect when it involves half the family rather than all four, or two of us and a guest like last night. But it also always seems like such a convenient time to get other tasks done: unloading the dishwasher, in this case. Sure I could sit down with the girls, but then I’d still have the dishwasher to unload when the meal was over. Why not double up, multitask, and enjoy more time with them after dinner?

Well, because that’s not how it works, of course. Finishing one task such as the dishwasher never means you suddenly have free time; it means you can get on to the next task. Having put away the dishes while I ate, I didn’t then say to the girls, “Okay, now I have twenty free minutes! Fill me in on the mermaid discussion!” Instead, I went on to opening the mail.

Several years ago I attended a talk on the topic of mindful living. The speaker cautioned the audience not to do anything else while eating other than enjoy conversation if you have company or silence if you are alone. She said she didn’t even consider listening to music an appropriate option while eating because your focus should be exclusively on the companionship and the food.

I agree with her when companionship is an option, but I can’t imagine requiring myself to sit in silence without any other activity while eating just because I’m alone. I love my occasional habit of sitting down to the Sunday paper over a solitary breakfast after everyone else has moved on to other activities. During the work week when the kids are at school, I often use lunchtime to peruse websites and blogs of interest while I eat. Not doing anything else while eating alone seems kind of like a waste of time.

The truth is that I hardly ever do it, though: read the paper or sit in silence while eating. I multi-task, just like I was doing last night in front of the girls. And I apologized to them just as I apologize sometimes to myself and even to the food that I’ve carefully prepared when I don’t give it my full attention. Failing to focus on mealtime short-shrifts everyone. It’s a bad habit that I will try harder to overcome. I’ll try even knowing that from the viewpoint of Holly and her friends, if you can’t hold up your end of the mermaid discussion, you might as well go ahead and unload the dishwasher.

Letting the kids wander a little - while I sit and worry

Yesterday was a beautiful warm sunny May day. My 7-year-old invited her friend Samantha over to play. They asked me if they could go out to the barn. This is something fairly new for Holly. We live on the edge of my parents’ farm, and although she likes climbing rocks and playing in the pastures, Holly has generally showed little interest in the barnyard. But this was the second time this spring she and a friend had asked to play there.

I said yes with the usual caveats. “You have to be either in the barn or somewhere between there and the house; no wandering farther away. And you have to play together. No dividing up, even for something like hide-and-seek.” The girls agreed readily to these terms and headed out. I sat outside trying to read the newspaper, but because they were out of my eyesight, I worried.

I knew how silly that was. I knew this was exactly the kind of thing many parents love to see their kids do: play outside, take a friend by the hand and go do something a little bit adventuresome. My next door neighbor, Gail, introduced me to the book “Last Child in the Woods,” which essentially posits that it’s a big problem that we give our kids so little free rein anymore, both in terms of time – they are always scheduled for some activity or another – and in terms of physical independence. And recently I’ve discovered Lenore Skenazy’a popular Free Range Kids blog, devoted to this same idea. In fact, Skenazy is currently planning a fairly controversial event for next weekend called “Take Your Kids to the Park – And Leave Them There!”, intended to raise parents’ consciousness about being a little more lenient with our kids and allowing them to benefit from a little more physical freedom.

So as I sat there trying to read the paper, I reminded myself that it was a wonderful thing that Holly and Samantha were off exploring the barnyard. I knew they both had good judgment, just as my son Tim does. Neither of my kids is a daredevil: when I tell them to be cautious, or even if I don’t tell them to, I know they will. Both are diligent about following rules, and I’ve always trusted that if a friend does something my kids know to be wrong while playing at our house, my kids will tell me.

Still, I was uneasy with Samantha and Holly over in the barnyard, because I couldn’t see or hear them. The fears I have, based on the specifics of where we live and what they were doing, aren’t the typical worst-case scenarios. It’s extremely unlikely that there are child abductors, or anyone else for that matter, lurking in our pastures. The girls weren’t visible from the main road. And all the animals who have access to the barnyard are friendly, gentle and shy, so that wasn’t a concern either. Instead, I worry that one of them will wander into the woods, maybe even into a stream, which is why I insist they stay within eyesight of each other when they play and why I specifically disallow hide and seek. I also worry about stings. Twice, I’ve been in a situation with kids where we accidentally blundered into a hornets’ next, and it’s an awful situation to be in. While I trusted that if one of the girls had a minor accident like a fall, the other one would come get me, I couldn’t imagine how they’d manage if they stumbled onto a nest of hornets.

So I waited for a little bit, and then I wandered over just to check. A short distance from the barn, I could see them exploring the area together. They were fine. They were doing exactly what every mother should be lucky enough to see her seven-year-old doing on a beautiful spring day: enjoying the outdoors, discovering new elements of nature, exerting her independence to find ways to have fun. In this way, Skenazy’s idea about having kids spend some time at the park with other kids and without adult supervision makes a lot of sense. But still, I worry about emergencies: not abductions so much as bee stings.

After checking on the girls, though, I made myself stop worrying and just be happy that they were enjoying themselves. It can be hard to reach a state of mindfulness as a parent. You watch your child run off toward the woods and want to relish the Kodak moment but instead you’re worrying about hornets’ nests. Finding a balance is always the challenge: assure yourself they’re safe, and let them have fun. I know the girls had fun yesterday, and I believe they were safe. And I’m just really grateful that they got to play outside on such a magnificent spring day.

What I learned running in the rain today

Rain was falling when I woke up just before 6 this morning. At about 11, the clouds parted and the sun was shining, so I headed out for a run. And for the second time in five days, the weather changed dramatically about five minutes into my run. On Saturday it was a downpour; today it was steady rain and rapidly increasing wind gusts.

Though I had planned to do my usual weekday 2-miler, I turned back a little early and ended up running 1.5 miles, which is fine as far as my streak is concerned – the USRSA officially allows a minimum of a mile a day for maintaining a streak – but it was disappointing as far as wanting to build my mileage for the week.

As I ran home, I thought about how I usually say I’m fine with running in the rain, especially when temperatures are as mild as they are today. (Many times, I’ve paraphrased Amby Burfoot’s quote about how the only kind of weather not great for running is 34 degrees and raining, and I’ve run in 34-and-raining dozens of times over the past two years.) This was a steady but not soaking rain, and I realized what was bothering me wasn’t the water falling on me but the fear of what might happen.

That’ so often what slows us down, whether running or doing anything else: the fear of things getting worse. I didn’t mind the rain, and I didn’t mind the wind either, which was sending yellow leaves soaring through the air almost in formation. It was the fear that lightning would develop or that a tree would fall on me. Wind has never scared me until last year, when a summer weather patterns brought twisters to our region.

If I only knew that nothing worse than wind and rain would happen, I’d be fine with this weather, I kept thinking. But that’s always the real problem, isn’t it: not fear of what is happening but fear of what could happen?

And this transpires in other ways too, not just with fear. When I was in my twenties, I did so much writing and tried so hard to get published and it just never worked. I remember once thinking, “If I knew this was necessary practice, laying the groundwork for a future career, I’d be fine with all the rejections. What bothers me is worrying that it’s not going to get any better for me.” Of course, in retrospect, that’s exactly what it was: learning the ropes for a career that took a turn in the following decade, when I started getting plenty of work published, based on the lessons I absorbed during all those rejection years.

Now, as I try to pursue increasingly bigger projects, I often have the same thought: rejection is fine if it’s a steppingstone to learning something and consequently improving, but what if rejection is all I’ll see?

And so, the lesson seems to be to remember how much we hamper ourselves with anxiety about what’s ahead. Is this just a windy day to be out running, or is a twister about to touch down? I’m fine running in a steady rain, but am I about to be struck by lightning? Oh well, you can’t expect every piece of writing to get published the first time you send it out, but what if this rejection means it’s unpublishable?

Once again, the operative concept is mindful living. Just as it’s a mistake to spend too much of the present looking forward to good things yet to come – which I think we tend to do when we’re younger, looking forward to college, or graduation, or working, or being married – it’s just as big a mistake to spend too much of the present worrying about what might happen. I ran and got wet; I did not stumble into a tornado, and no trees fell on me. It was just a wet run in a steady rain. And next time I’ll try to enjoy it a little more.