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.

Playing cards

My 11-year-old and I played cards for over an hour last night before bedtime.

This is unusual. I am not someone who ordinarily plays cards. I am, in fact, someone who will go out of her way to avoid playing cards. For a long time, I've seen it as the ultimate show of pointlessness. When the world still contains more books than any of us will ever be able to read in even the longest of human lifetimes, why spend time staring at cards?

But Holly's cousins taught her a new card game during a sleepover earlier this month, and she was eager to teach it to me. Because I think it's good for kids to have the role-reversal experience of teaching something to their parents, and because it's good for me to make myself learn something new, and mostly just because school starts in a week and I wanted to make the summer evening draw out a little longer, I agreed to play cards with Holly.

And it was so much more fun than I expected. For one thing, it reminded me of my grandparents' lakeside summer house during my childhood, where after dinner, everyone of all generations played cards. I can still remember the desk drawer in which my grandmother kept pads of paper and golfers’ pencils for keeping score of our gin rummy games.

But it also reminded me of why it really is worthwhile to play cards once in a while. Yes, even when there are issues of the New Yorker not yet finished and classic Russian novels not yet begun.

Because playing cards is perhaps the best way to just stop and focus, make the moment last. When you're playing cards, you get caught up in the numbers and the strategy, the luck and twists of fate and intellectual gymnastics involved in trying to win the game. During the hour we played cards, I wasn't thinking about writing assignments or current events or household tasks that needed to be done, the way I do when I'm taking a walk or cooking or driving or doing almost anything else that feels fairly mindless. There was nothing on my mind at all but the game.

And that, I realized as Holly and I dealt and discarded and exchanged and shuffled, is the best reason to play cards. Paradoxically, it is mindless -- just as I'd always feared -- but also commands full attention. For that hour, I was thinking about nothing except the activity to which Holly and I had devoted ourselves.

It's a simple enough notion, and yet it's something that I as a parent do far too seldom. So often, I'm half paying attention to my kids and half thinking about doing something else, or else I’m not just thinking about it but actually doing something else at the same time. Multi-tasking, multi-thinking, multi-focusing.

Not yesterday evening, though. Yesterday evening, we just played cards. It was all-encompassing for that one hour. And in that singular respect, it was just as valuable as any hour I've spent doing anything else this summer.