The Raging Elitist

Summer tried to sneak up on us this year. Baseball games, summer league meets, and evening walks worked their way in around the edges of our routine and occupied the space in our lives allotted for pleasant distractions. It all seemed so easy and whimsical until I looked at the calendar and suddenly realized – the boys only have one more week of school.

Baseball is Cartter and Scotty’s latest obsession. They play catch and pitch to each other every morning before school, every evening before bed, and for hours at a time on the weekends. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed them getting a little less terrible, catching each other’s throws with more regularity, but they still manage to command only a beginner’s understanding of the game.

A boy a few houses up the street had his ninth birthday party at the old ballfield on Speights Street in the Old Village, and there Cartter and Scotty shamelessly trotted out their ignorance for all to see. Cartter manned first base (like I did as a boy, he likes that the infielders all have to throw him the ball at that position) while Scotty posted up at third. Cartter stood with his foot on the bag at all times rather than play off the line where he might stand in the way of a grounder. In between opposing hitters’ at bats, he would launch balls across the diamond, turning Scotty around and sending him scurrying into the grass in pursuit. Scooping the ball up, Scotty would then return the favor. On balls hit to the outfield, they would stand next to each other, each with a foot on home plate and a glove in the air while Cartter yelled “Pass!” Once, when Cartter somehow found himself all the way over at the third base bag, he confidently asserted that a baserunner was out, never mind that there was no force play, and Cartter hadn’t applied a tag.

Danyelle and I watched all this unfold from the back of the minivan. We took advantage of the party and had a night out to dinner for the first time in months, opting for a visit to Nico just off Shem Creek. We showed up twenty minutes before the party’s end, and I backed the van into the grass so we could open the hatch and sit above the rear bumper watching the game. There, we watched Cartter swing and miss six times before Jonah from next door finally said, “Okay, you’re out Cartter.” Then Scotty stood in the box.

Bending at the knees, shifting his weight from one side to the other and wiggling his bat slightly, he struck a very determined stance. After standing his ground and ignoring a larger boy (James from down the street) who tried to force him out of the way and take his place, Scotty poked one to the left side of the infield, took second on a throwing error, and then raced all the way around third and scored on another throwing error. Meanwhile, Danyelle and I laughed our asses off in the van. I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Scotty, who’s a good little eight-year-old swimmer, might not be better off in a sport where he gets to use his wheels.

More interested in playing than in watching or learning the actual rules of baseball, Cartter and Scotty brought their gloves and a ball with them when we took them to a Riverdogs game. I drove down from swim practice at the aquatic center on Friday night and met them and their mother there. Sitting in the left field bleachers, I was able to talk with Betsey while the boys spent a good deal of the game on the other side of the stadium, playing catch on the hill in right. Only a few times were we interrupted by a child wanting a little attention, and on each occasion that child was Cartter.

In those moments Cartter was keen to beef up his superficial knowledge of the game, asking me several times what OPS meant before retreating into a glazed trance when I attempted to explain. Faced with an apparently complex concept, he sought a means to bury the confusion it aroused. Turning to the videoboard in center field where the hitters’ stats are displayed, he asked “Is .692 a good OPS?” before finally striking at the heart of the matter: “What’s a good OPS?” he asked. Because never mind about the inputs. This number with all its variability and precision is obviously a tool to be wielded in judgment and ranking. Just tell me how to use it.

The Friday night game marked the first time we ever stayed until the end and watched fireworks, and being up late might have been the highlight of the evening for the boys, who cared not a whit that the home team lost 3-1. “This is my record for staying up,” said Cartter (he ended up in bed at 10:30). “Tomorrow, I’m going to set my record for sleeping in.” Sadly, that prediction proved inaccurate.

For all their apparent lack of attention, the boys are slowly picking up the game’s many nuances. Their understanding shows up in brief flashes. I interrupted one of their games in the front yard and grabbed a bat so Cartter could pitch to me. After a couple takes and a couple swings and misses, a little voice standing off to the side remarked, “Two and two.”

I was surprised and unsure I’d heard correctly. “What was that?” I asked.

Scotty looked me in the face, smirking. “Two and two.” With the pressure on, I foul tipped one pitch and turned on the next one, pounding it into the ground to the pull side.

Watching a Braves game on TV, Cartter remarked, “I feel like the hardest thing about hitting would be all the different pitchers, and trying to adjust to them.” Quite right.

Mother’s Day

Scotty, a big-time holiday enthusiast, looked forward to the arrival of Mother’s Day as he does every special day on the calendar. “Tomorrow’s Mother’s Day!” he said the day prior. On my suggestion, he kept his gift hidden in the minivan until it was time to present it.

The gift was made at school, and part of it was an acronym, with the letters M-O-T-H-E-R written in all caps down the left-hand side of a piece of paper. For “M” Scotty wrote “My Mom is the best Mom.” For “O” he wrote “Other Moms aren’t as good as my Mom.”

Summer League

The neighborhood summer league team’s dependence on me continues. The Head Coach is one of the most incompetent people I’ve come across, and that opinion is not particular to me. At the team’s time trials, where I ran the timing system as always, a woman on the board, the one responsible for bringing in the nitwit of a coach and paying her as if she were a full-time year-round employee, asked me if she were messing things up by having logged in to time by mistake. “Yes,” I told her before adding, “Just kidding. You’re not messing anything up . . . Not any more than usual.”

The boys, who are now the shining stars of the team, Cartter especially, almost didn’t go to the first dual meet this year. I had to be in North Charleston to coach the Sharks and had planned to have them there at practice with me, but Cartter and Scotty did not think that was a wonderful idea, protesting with mild shock and indignation when they found out about it.

At the meet, which was away at Oyster Point, Scotty missed his first individual event, the 25 free, due to the remarkable ineptitude of the staff. After that debacle the boys went on to win all of their events by a wide margin, with the exception of Scotty’s medley relay, in which he was inexplicably placed on the B team.

The Salmons

Caught up in year-round and summer league swimming, I almost forgot about the boys’ big year-end concert at the Music Farm downtown. The night before, Cartter mentioned it at bedtime: “I’m nervous,” he said.

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and when he enlightened me, I said, “Oh. That.”

“What if we mess up again?” he wanted to know, citing their last performance, back when the band was known as “The Sardines,” during which they apparently made some gaffe that I couldn’t remember. Now, the boys have renamed the band “The Salmons,” because to their minds, they’ve leveled up.

“Nobody cares if you guys mess up,” I told Cartter.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because you guys are a little kid band.”

He laughed at this bit of frankness, and sure enough, botched his solo on “Come Together” the next day, confusing it with the lines at the end of the song and freezing up on stage. As predicted, nobody cared.

Cartter and Scotty’s band was probably the least offensive I had to endure during the two hours we spent at the Music Farm, a venue I hadn’t visited in upwards of twenty years. Cousin Maddux was playing bass with the older groups, and the misplaced bravado from the frontmen, the pretentious long hair and rocker attire, and the screeching sound of offbeat, out of tune Led Zeppelin songs blaring deafeningly through stage speakers were worse than nails on a chalkboard because of the anxiety, disgust, and pity they aroused in addition to the reflexive cringing. One lead-singer was particularly repulsive. A sixteen-or-seventeen-year-old girl with greasy black hair, a prominent FUPA, and a double chin that gave the appearance of a five-o-clock shadow, her cool-kid act and brutal off-key wailing left me thinking to myself, “This kid is gonna have a rough life.”

Who Wears Short Shorts

The beginnings of the mosquitoes have arrived, as Danyelle is quick to point out standing on the edge of the park in her shorts.

Golf is Hard

The boys have taken a couple golf lessons with a pro over at Patriot’s, and they’ve made some significant progress. Cartter is putting a real swing on the ball and pounding the driver up to 150 yards.

“What if Cartter played in the Masters?” Scotty asked his mother at the range.

“What if you played?” she answered.

Scotty, who is developing a golf swing of his own and who believes that his brother is naturally better than him at everything, thought about it, and said, “I’d like that.”

“Is that your dream?” Danyelled asked.

“Yes,” he said.

For his part, Cartter apparently has at least some appreciation for the difficulty inherent to the game. “What’s the worst thing you have to do tomorrow?” he asked me at bedtime. For whatever reason, this is lately one of Cartter’s preferred questions. After I declined to answer several reiterations of it, he said “What was the hardest thing you had to do today?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s the hardest thing YOU had to do today?”

“Play golf,” he said.

Mick, or An Evening Stroll

After the last day of school, Field Day, the fourth-grade class had a party at a student’s house. The party was part of the extra ceremony surrounding the end of the year, because at Porter-Gaud, fifth grade marks the start of Middle School, which means after fourth, students are “Lower School graduates.” Danyelle took the boys (even though Scotty technically wasn’t invited, as a few rude fourth-grade girls let him know) and reported that they spent most of the evening with Cam and Jack.

Jack, a shy boy who clings to Cartter at recess and social events alike, was the topic of conversation during an evening stroll the next night, the first evening walk of the summer season for our family of four. With a thin layer of gray clouds lining the sky above the pines and live oaks, mosquitos biting around Danyelle’s ankles, and Sammy limping along behind us, Cartter announced that Jack is a distant relative of Ernest Shackleton.

“That makes sense to me,” I said upon hearing the news. “Jack is one of the most courageous leaders in the course of human history.”

Cartter, who did not fail to appreciate the sarcasm in my remark, was compelled to share that Jack “cowards” in his seat during class to avoid being called on and run the risk of answering a teacher’s question incorrectly. Meanwhile, all Scotty wanted to know was “Who’s Miss Shackleton?”

From the time it took to traverse the little wooded section of the park between the tennis courts and the playground, he must have asked six times, determined as he was not to remain in the frustrating and potentially embarrassing position of not knowing who this apparently very famous and important person was. As Scotty quickened his step to walk alongside us, repeating himself every ten or so seconds, Danyelle and I did our level best to talk right on over him for as long as possible, trying to give the appearance of ignoring him while simultaneously keeping one eye on him and his wee plight, delighted by hearing him repeatedly refer to the great Antarctic explorer as “Miss Shackleton.”

“Ask it again,” I said under my breath to Danyelle, who, as we approached the playground, finally burst out laughing when Scotty obliged my muted request. His mother’s laughter was a touch deflating for the boy, but after a fleeting moment of confusion, Scotty bounced back almost immediately. The news that Shackleton wasn’t a woman prompted another question, which he delivered looking up at my face in full earnestness: “Oh . . .” he said, “so it was Mick Shackleton?”