PRETEND BASEBALL

This past Saturday, I picked up my grandchildren for some “Nana time” with them. Well, I picked up the two older ones, ages 3 and 4 – the baby, at not quite ten months old yet, is a bit young to go play in the park and have lunch at McDonald’s, and Nana is not quite up to handling all three kids at once on her own! But I digress.

The park we went to is a small park near my home, and it has swings and picnic tables and a jungle-gym type structure with slides and climbing places and a tunnel to crawl through. This particular park also has a small baseball field.

First, we did the swings, where I discovered that if you can get both kids in adjacent swings, it is actually possible to stand between the two and simultaneously accommodate all requests to “push me higher, Nana!” That was fun, but I was grateful that about the time my arms started getting tired, the kids were ready to move on to something else.

The jungle gym was fascinating. Kids really love climbing and sliding and climbing again and crawling through a worm-like tunnel with cutouts in the sides for peering out. While I sat on a bench and watched with glee, they climbed and slid and crawled, periodically peeking out the holes with big grins on their little faces, until I would cry out, “Oh, no, you’re stuck in the worm … let them go, you mean worm!” which never failed to evoke uninhibited giggling followed by a hasty exit and a victorious stance to show that the victim had indeed escaped the mean worm, bringing delighted applause from Nana!

But I think my favorite part of our sojourn to the park was the baseball game we played. You see, we didn’t bring any equipment with us, unless you count sippy cups filled with cool apple juice as equipment. We had no baseball, no gloves, no bat. Indeed, the field itself wasn’t much of a baseball field, with no home plate, no bases, and no clearly defined diamond shape. But there was a backstop and a crude welded iron bench up on a platform immediately behind the backstop.

So we took turns. First Nevaeh climbed up onto the bench and sat with a look of joyful anticipation on her face unrivaled by any Yankees fan at a playoff game. Jayden then took his place at bat, hoisting his pretend bat high over his shoulder with a smile so radiant it could have powered every light bulb in town if it could have been somehow harnessed and connected to an electric grid.

Nana was the pitcher. I stared down the batter, furrowing my brow in my best fake-serious fashion. Then I slowly raised my imaginary glove to my waist, did my best imitation of a windup, and BAM, released the pretend baseball to glide with expert precision across the non-existent plate. Jayden swung hard and SLAM, hit a homer, way out and over the invisible fence around left field! Nevaeh leapt to her feet and hollered as pitcher-turned-Coach-Nana screamed, “Run, run, run,” to a very excited three-year-old. (As there weren’t any bases and no real demarcation lines, Coach Nana also had to point to the runner to indicate to him which way to run.) From roughly where third base should have been, the runner decided to take a shortcut to the bench to give his sister a turn, but that was just fine, since everybody knows that shortcuts are perfectly permissible in pretend baseball.

Next up, Princess Nevaeh. This one would be tougher. She actually managed a look of feigned consternation onto her beautiful little face as she raised her pretend bat to rest just above her delicate shoulder. Again I raised my glove and ball, did my best windup, and zoomed it right over the plate. But alas, the pitcher was foiled again as SLAM, Nevaeh hit a homer just as impressive as her little brother’s, this one gliding easily over the imaginary fence about fifty feet behind center field.

“Run, run, you can do it,” shouted Coach Nana. “That way, yeah, that’s it. Oh, my gosh, you did it! You made a home run!” The pride gleaming in those precious eyes had to have been visible from space.

I found out that day that pretend baseball is my favorite sport, eclipsing even Dallas Cowboys football. Of course, there are the obvious advantages – Nana never misses a throw or a catch and never has to run for the ball. But there’s more than that, so much more.

You see, pretend baseball exercises your muscles, but it also exercises less tangible things, like your imagination. In pretend baseball you have to “see” with your mind’s eye, and swing a bat that exists only in your thoughts to hit a ball that’s invisible to all but your soul. Every pitch is perfect and every swing connects, and every hit goes over the fence that we made up together.

But pretend baseball does more than provide a workout for muscles and imaginations. It raises little spirits to a lovely and unprecedented level. It gives a tiny person who’s still learning to use and coordinate her or his body the opportunity to feel big and strong and powerful and in control and successful! They get to “try on” what it feels like to be a champ, and they get a taste of glory. And last, but not least, Nana gets to be a participant in, and an exuberant witness to, the growth of little hearts and spirits. And no exercise on earth is better than that!

CLOUDEEBLUE

Okay, first things first – I will answer the inevitable question about the origin of the name “CLOUDEEBLUE.” Several years ago, shortly after getting my first computer, I had to come up with a name to use for my email address. My real name was “already in use,” so I started thinking about things that I like, things that mean something to me or say something about how I feel. As my mind drifted, I imagined myself lying in a lovely green field on the side of some unnamed hill somewhere, gazing up into the sky, feeling that all was right with the world. I watched as soft, marshmallowy clouds drifted by in a sky of dazzling blue, and I was filled with a sense of peace and wonder. “That’s it!” I thought. So I typed in “cloudyblue” as my choice for an email name, and, alas, it was “already in use” just like my actual name! Not to be dissuaded, however, I thought maybe I could get the name if I varied the spelling a bit.

Now, let me stop here and say that, as a wordsmith and a worshipper of language, one of my pet peeves is cutesy misspellings of common words, like “Krab Fest” or “Lazy Daze Sale” (although that last one could arguably be a well-placed double entendre). So the thought of doing precisely that with my own email name was something I wasn’t quite sure about. But I really loved the feeling of warmth and serenity that accompanied my imagined foray into that hillside scene, so I hesitantly typed in “CLOUDEEBLUE” and, lo and behold, that name was available!

I pushed the button to accept, and from that moment on, I have been using the moniker as my email name. Every time I’m in a store and see those blue pajamas with clouds floating on them, I smile. (I never got any of them, though, and I’m not sure why – maybe that’s a good thing for my next Christmas wish list!) And once, I even found a mouse pad with that scene on it, and I was near delirious!

So when it came time to pick a name for a blog, I naturally gravitated to CLOUDEEBLUE. The picture at the top of this page is not EXACTLY like the puffy-cloud-adorned blue sky from my meditation that first day, but it is a photo I took myself, from one of my favorite locations on earth – a beautiful, chalet-style cabin on the side of a mountain in Oregon – and it very much gave me the same wondrous “cloudeeblue” feeling.

As to what this blog will be, that’s something I’ve been contemplating for awhile now. I decided that I will write about the things that matter most in life – at least in my life – and always with the goal of following that “cloudeeblue” sense of deep-down inner calm and joy. You see, “cloudeeblue” isn’t an exuberant, loud joy; rather, it’s a quiet, all-too-easy-to-miss feeling, but a very important feeling, nonetheless. It’s important to find the sacred in the ordinary; the magic in the mundane; the “cloudeeblue” in the normal. It’s there. It’s always there. Sometimes you just have to look for it, and sometimes you have to look real hard. But it’s so worth it when you do. Let’s look together and celebrate what we find!