Opening Day

Opening day is a clean slate. It's green trying to push the droll winter the hell out of the way. It's grass-cutting season. It's little league practice until dinner time.

Opening day is a looking forward and in-the-moment day. Twenty-five years ago it would have been a day closer to swimming off the Oxford Ferry Dock time (generally late April, early May).

Though I'm more of a football fan than baseball, opening day of baseball season is one of my favorite sports days. Period. And though I'm more of an Orioles fan than a Nationals fan, I'm jazzed to be heading to the Nats' season opener this afternoon.

I can't recall how many Orioles' opening days I've been to. With a father who is a CPA, it hasn't been many. Which is why, in part, I'll feel like a kid when we take a crew from work and head across the street to Nationals Stadium. The other part of giddy will be the $8 beer in my hand and subsequent $8 smile on my face...

Baseball moments--both playing and spectating--are woven through my almost 39 years. Learning to play catch in the backyard with my dad; hitting a bottom of the last inning game-winning double over Jeff Wilson's head in right field so the Oxford Little League beat Cordova; being at Mike Mussina's first Oriole start at Memorial Stadium; being at the game when Eddie Murray, again an Oriole, hit his 500th home run; ...opening day for the Nationals 2011 season.

Opening day is renewal. It's change of seasons. It's backyard cookouts. It's Chuck Thompson and Brooks Robinson doing play-by-play. It's leaving work early with friends and co-workers and taking in America's game.

Paying attention

Noticing the unnoticed. Or maybe it's making you notice those things you see all the time but don't pay attention to.

Maybe it's the way they yolk things together that had no business hanging out, but by seeing them grabbing drinks in a booth you wonder how you never put them together.

Illuminating the universal through the particular--those shared details that light the cartoon lightbulb over your head.

Seamus Heaney says, "Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable." I love that line. But I'm not sure it says what I mean.

My mind inhabits the city more frequently (or vice-versa). The daily commute, the NPR interview with the author who says the city is the answer--the spark for creativity, for innovation, it is people and community at their best.

It isn't. I don't buy it, nor would anyone who has watched a sunrise with a fishing pole in the river, or climbed trees for no reason, or smiled walking the woods on hearing a woodpecker go to town.

There are things the city lacks. But Gay Talese's New York intrigues.

Plus it's baseball season. Which has always brought with it trips to the city. And time in the stands. But not passively. More than a spectator.

Being a part. Paying attention.