Yesterday my husband and I were walking the path around a neighborhood park, where softball games were going on, one Little League and one adult, in fancy fields with high backstops and well groomed diamonds. I remembered a time before they remodeled the park, where I was one of a group of moms informally assembled with our kids in an impromptu pick-up game that was all about helping the kids succeed. I was pitching, slowly, telegraphing clearly, willing the bat to connect with the ball, and it often did. This was a game I had never played well as a child, and the kids here were also not ball players. In that short time, sun setting in early summer evening, we all had a glow of success. Now that scruffy, climbable backstop is gone, and the kids are mostly grown, one of them married. And I only see the moms occasionally - years can go by between the times we casually run into each other. This poem arose from those thoughts and images:
We move within uncomprehended rules
of what will stay and what will fall away
What’s solid ground will shift and sink, we’ll stray
No way to hedge for what we’ll win or lose
The field we played on then is gone
So, too, are all the kids we played with
We couldn’t even hold the friends we stayed with
Our life arcs intersected and moved on
Back then it seemed that we invested time
and thought one day to reap time’s golden fruit
but many never pollinated - dried on vines
of fading memories, and many lost pursuits
turn out to matter less than we had thought -
What we have now worth more than what we sought.
April 27, 2011
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