Happy Aloha Friday. 🌺
But first, the shoutout: this one’s for the 317 — Indianapolis, Indiana.
In 1989, Trumbull Little League stunned the world. A team of Connecticut kids beat Chinese Taipei — a program that had taken the previous three championships — and etched their names into Little League World Series history. I was eight, watching from a few towns over, and even then I knew it was bigger than baseball.
A few years later I stood in my own batter’s box. Not a prodigy, not a star — a kid hoping to belong. I tried out for an all-star team against a pitching machine that did not care about my nerves.
Twenty pitches. Twenty misses.
And then, finally, contact. A shallow hit. Maybe two or three in the whole session. I knew walking off that I wasn’t making the team, and I was right. But I keep the twenty-first swing, and I have never once thought about the twenty that came before it as failures. They were the price of the twenty-first.
Nietzsche died this week in 1900, and he’s the reason I finally understood what I was watching all those Augusts. He laid out three stages of the spirit: the camel, who carries what he’s handed. The lion, who refuses it. And the child, who plays.
The child is last. Not the thing you start as and lose — the thing you spend the whole climb trying to get back to, and most people never do.
Which reorders everything. The kids in South Williamsport aren’t at the beginning of the story. They’re at the end of it. They are doing, casually and in cleats, the hardest thing on the list.
Ray Bradbury, born this week in 1920, spent a whole novel — Dandelion Wine — trying to bottle one Illinois summer he was twelve years old for, and the rest of his life insisting he’d never left it. I don’t think he was being nostalgic. I think he was doing the climb.
There’s a word for the kind of summer he was after — halcyon. Calm, golden, the good one. But the word has a catch built into it: it only ever applies backwards. Nobody in Williamsport in 1989 knew they were inside a halcyon summer. Nobody standing at a pitching machine missing his twentieth pitch in a row knew it either. You don’t get to award the label from inside. You only get to show up.
And here’s the part I only notice as an adult. It isn’t the ferocity — though it’s there, worn on the sleeve, the kind of wanting adulthood slowly teaches you to keep indoors. It’s what happens right after. A kid strikes out to end a season he waited his whole short life for. He cries. Then he lines up and shakes twelve hands. That grace is unmatched anywhere in sport and it is performed, every August, entirely by twelve-year-olds.
The final is Sunday. Another summer in the books.
I write one of these every August. Last year’s was about Fairfield’s run — and the same twenty-pitch tryout, which I have evidently not finished thinking about.
This week’s sign-off: This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) — Talking Heads. Byrne said he was trying to write a love song that wasn’t corny. He got there by never once saying the word — just “home, is where I want to be,” over and over, until you believe him.
There’s something you’ve been putting off because you’d be bad at it in front of people. Twenty pitches, twenty misses, then contact. Go be bad at something this weekend, before we put another summer in the books.
Mahalo Nui. 🌺
— Matthew
