Have you ever encountered places of magic, places where idiosyncrasies are recognized and repeated, where—in going there—you expect for things to happen, and they do?
I returned to one today—a place where my daughter plays volleyball. Last year, I met a friend I had not seen in years. His daughter, year younger, was playing there too. His face jumped out from the crowd as soon as I saw him.
Returning, I wondered if I’d see him again. I messaged him, seeing if he and his daughter happened to be there again, hoping for a chance to see again a friend of old. They weren’t. They were playing at another place.
“Oh well,” I figured. You can’t always expect for magic. It was still a great day, a great tournament. Watching my daughter’s team, I thought of my little league baseball team growing up. We were good, so is my daughter’s volleyball team, but what made it special and different was that it wasn’t just us kids that loved it—families and parents loved it too. Baseball, and our team, were our summers. Watching my wife and all the other parents, knowing how excited she gets to see her friends—as or more excited than my daughter to see hers—I see and feel that specialness that is one you remember and value for the rest of life.
I had as much fun watching my wife in the stands as I did my daughter on the court. They were both loving every moment as it lived.
Between games, my youngest son and I played catch in a field outside. A grandfather for a girl on our team came and watched and spoke with us as we threw. He’d umpired for 47 years, and told how he only quit because his gear was getting too tight (the same gear he caught with when he played) and to buy new gear, he’d “have to ump for another ten years!”
It was special—talking baseball. Our disapproval of the “automatic strike zone” that’s being instituted and how part of baseball is having catchers that frame and sell pitches for strikes on the edge of zones, and how the ABS box doesn’t show you where or how it crosses over the plate or what corner it did or didn’t touch on a breaking ball coming across the zone, and how teaching kids to swing by having a liberal zone you have to defend—and not just hope for a walk—makes them better ballplayers, and for a more fun game.
We threw a good amount—pitching, pop-ups, and just to be loose.
After, we went back inside. On the backside of the volleyball courts, there was a soccer field where games had played all day. Morning was boys, and in the afternoon, it changed to girls.
My son said he thought he could beat the girls that were playing then.
“You want to watch them for a while?” I asked.
“Sure.”
And so we did.
We watched from a balcony and level above the field, and as the game went on, my eyes wandered to the sidelines under. There were benches there for parents and spectators.
Magic—I recognized a face…and then another. I thought that I was wrong and followed down the line…a third.
“Come on!” I urged to my son and we took for the field, he not knowing why.
I nudged a shoulder, smiled and shook a hand, greeted, then did the same for next.
One of my best friends from high school and his parents there to watch their niece/granddaughter. My friend’s brother was a little further down—past where my eyes, in haste of hurry, stopped.
I hadn’t seen him in years! He was in my wedding, then life does what it does and everyone gets on in their own worlds and lives—but place, one of magic, brought us back together for a time; just as it had in year before.
Have you ever found a place like that? Have you ever lived the same, a place where magic exists and happens? You feel it, know it, and then it is?
