a.         Stories about youth baseball almost always end the same way. A big game and a catastrophic failure. Scars that last into adulthood. My story does not.

b.         Summertime is when young boys feel they live on the verge of every possibility. I was twelve and in love with the girl next door. She had sandy blonde hair. Blue eyes. Thin hips. A pair of leather pants that mystified me. I would walk by her house where her blue jeans hung on the line and think about walking up to her door. But I never did.

a.         None of us knew how to play. We were the city rec team of a small town. Three or four actual games a season—the rest won and lost by forfeit. We never had a big game. There was no trophy to capture our dreams.

b.         Old black cottonwoods lined each side of my house. Their seeds would burst from their pods and float down in white silky tufts, like snow in June. I would shimmy out my window onto the roof to watch cottonwoods shed at dusk. And when it was night, I would crawl into bed and hope to dream of her.

c.         We practiced every weekday morning. The field was two blocks away, in the corner of the park, next to the small creek where sometimes I’d find crawfish. We’d walk through the outfield and leave footprints in the morning dew.

d.         I was a third baseman. Speedy on the basepaths. A good bunter. Iffy with the glove if the ball traveled fast or low. Money on popups. A terrible hitter who never once got a solid hit in a game.

c.         Practice was sparsely attended—just three or four players on a bad day. We played catch and shagged balls. The aluminum bats clinked like dinner bells as we hit soft ground balls at each other.

d.         I never got to pitch that summer.