Three-year old Jaxson Alcantar was enjoying himself at a minor-league baseball game. When a player swung the bat and hit a ball hard somewhere, Jaxson would smile broadly and turn to me and yell, "That's me, right?" I don't know what he was thinking, but after spending an afternoon with Jaxson, the son of my daughter's long-time friend, I learned that I never knew what he was thinking.
Jaxson was enjoying himself right up until that moment of change came, that moment when things went differently. It came in the fifth inning. The broad smiles that had been Jackson's constant companion first froze, then went away.
The inflatable man ate a kid.
Right there in front of everyone. Right there in front of his parents and his friends, and most importantly for Jaxson's purposes, right there in front of Jaxson. The inflatable man showed no previous predilection toward munching on kids. He had been helping cheers begin. He had been summoning and eliciting laughter and general loudness. Then the kid got close and the inflatable man up and ate the kid.
Right there in front of Jaxson.
It was, to every one of the 2,341 in attendance, a laugh riot. The kid started out as fodder for the joke, and slowly but absolutely without question or doubt he was ingested by the inflatable man. Slurped. Crunched possibly.
Right there in front of Jaxson.
Jaxson had some as a package deal with our daughter and her kids, our grands. It was my birthday, and I had wanted to do something together, children of my favorite woman and their children. It wasn't the whole brood, but it was as many as we could bring together. So, Shanna and her children -- two of them -- and Carrie and her daughter all popped for tickets and we stepped back in time.
See, the girls (and Jason, our son) used to go to games together. Loved to do it. Loved to talk baseball with their dad, or at least I think they did. Loved to eat overpriced food. Loved the ritual.
Loved being together.
Yesterday, it was a step up onto the time machine. In another place, in still another time, baseball honored Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Bobby Cox. Maddux and Glavine were pitchers who were among the best of their generations, so much so they won more than 300 games. Cox was manager of the Atlanta Braves who benefited from such wonderful pitching. They were our past, the kids, Mary and I.
And the thing I noticed more than anything else yesterday was by the time it was dark, by the time we were quite ready for bed, as us old folks were tired and more than ready for sleepy time, it was time to put it all away and let it go.
There's a song by Butch Walker (yeah, I never heard of him either, till one day driving down the road public radio did an interview with him and I wound up buying an EP of his work) whose words say this in a song called Let it go where it's supposed to,
"Well my father had this moment back before fast food and strip malls ruled his town. Oh, keep the land or sell it, 20 acres, he had always turned it down. But as the tractors all moved in and I watched as he pretended not to show it from the inside looking out. He said let it go where it's supposed to. Let your life hang out the window to dry. And if the catches the wind, and you ever see it again, then I guess it was probably time. Now that I'm a man myself and my father's bones are turnin' to dust. I got a boy to raise through hell and just pray he turns out half the man he was. When you're grown and you think you've seen it all, nothing will prepare the fall. Just take these words before I'm gone."
Jackson was eating peanuts, drinking a lemonade when the world crumbled. The inflatable man ate the kid, and from then pin, Jackson's ability to trust anyone was sort of eaten as well.
At the end of the game, kids were allowed to run the bases. We talked Jaxson into doing this, totally against his wishes, for he was convinced it was all a trick to give the inflatable man time to gather all the kids together for one great and grand munch a bunch. Kids appeared seemingly from no where to be told to go, and when those great and grand words were shouted, there they went. One by one they entered the field and they RAN.
Except for Jaxson. Jaxson decided this ploy would not work on him, and he turned and ran into the crowd. A three-year-old swimming against the tide of jubilant, crazed youngsters.
Our youngest daughter rescued him, even ran with him to help him to understand that the inflatable man was not waiting at the end of the sprint to have a late evening snack, even deserting her own five-year-old daughter who was smacked to the ground by a kid with the audacity to run the bases wearing a cast on his arm. She, like all Turners everywhere (even if her last name is Burst) rose from the ashes and sprinted around the bases from the point of the illegal, though admittedly cunning, smacking to the ground with a cast ploy.
It was the end of a glorious day.
For everyone except the deliriously fearful Jackson.
My point is this: Swimming against the tide, especially against the tide of the future, is difficult at best. Most of the time, you'll be eaten like a late-afternoon snack. Jaxsson's world crumbled because he wasn't ready for change. He wanted, needed, normality, and for his world, normality was cheering because in his mind "he" had gotten a hit, or made a defensive play or whatever. He cheered normality. Normality did not, would not, ever include kids being eaten by a runaway and apparently voraciously hungered inflatable man. In fact, in his world there are no inflatable men. They are REAL.
Yesterday was great. I was given the great, great opportunity to see down the corridors of time and smile longingly.
But yesterday is without question gone. Done. Kaput. We have got to figure a way to leave the past in the past.
As another memory, a much more recent memory, of movies and icy circumstances and a granddaughter whose favorite movie is now and forever more will be (till the next one comes along), Let it go, let it go.
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