In the Mood of Youth

The National High School Baseball Championship, held each spring and summer, gives me a mysterious power.

Though the players are separated from me by more than a parent-and-child’s span of years, while I watch the games on TV I get so heated it’s as if comrades my own age were sweating and fighting for dear life, and forgetting my own age, I get carried away, glued to the screen.

High school baseball, in any era, carries me back to my days of youth.

This very phenomenon fits the saying “aging does not mean the decline of the body, but the decline of the spirit.”

When the game ends, the muscle pain from yesterday’s hard preparation work, and my hand aching with tendinitis, begin to throb, and I come to my senses—it didn’t used to be like this.

I, too, am still immature in my state of mind, and I reflect that I want to slough off the shock of aging quickly.