A little boy and dirt
An homage to baseball and a life well-grounded
My little buddy spent a lot of time at the ballpark this spring.
It was his first year playing T-Ball, where the unwritten, unchained rules consist of running the basepaths in the wrong direction and every player on the team chasing after the same ball.
The main requirement is to look adorable in their caps and uniforms, holding their tiny baseball gloves.
Bennett, the youngest of our four grandchildren, never broke that rule. Not once.
In his league (age 4-5), they don’t keep score, and everybody gets a participation trophy at the end of the season. Life is good.
Bennett spent most of his time at the ballpark attending the Little League games of his older brother and softball games of his big sisters. Sometimes, the schedule had us there three or four nights a week. The last stretch of the school year was filled with long stretches of cold suppers and late bedtimes.
He never sat still long enough to watch most of the games. He was usually running full throttle around the bleachers. He took frequent time-outs to ask for money for the concession stand. Like most 4-year-old boys, he ran on pure sugar.
As grandparents, our heads were always on a swivel, trying to keep up with where he was and who he was with.
We knew we could usually find him in one place, though.
In the dirt.
He was in his element when he was digging in it. Bennett moved around so much dirt that he could have been on the ground crew.
Even when the games were over, he wasn’t finished. He would be out there rolling around on the infield, making mounds of red dirt the color of his hair.
When his family apiled in the car on weekends when his big brother’s travel ball team was playing in tournaments in places like Winder and Jackson, my wife and I would usually look at each other and say we sure hoped they had good dirt wherever they were going.
The little guy is going to grow up and have a darn good garden one day.
During a recent tournament game, he hurried over to me and announced he had planted a tree. I walked over to see what was going on and, sure enough, there it was, like a beanstalk. He and several other children had found a cut bamboo branch and stuck it in the ground over by the other ballfield. The ground was hard, so they found a convenient hole in a small hole next to the sprinkler system.
A few innings later, I looked over to see that four or five kids were standing around the “tree,’’ holding hands. It was cute. I didn’t know if they were saying a prayer or having a dedication. I asked Bennett about it later, and he said they were guarding it. They didn’t want anyone to steal it.
Little boys are dirt magnets.
I have always loved the story baseball hall-of-famer Harmon Killebrew told about growing up.
“My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard,’’ Killebrew said. “Mother would come out and say, ‘You're tearing up the grass.’ Dad would reply.' “We're not raising grass. We're raising boys.’ ’’
