Point of View: Their Wits About Them

We must stay calm, O’en and I, though this is a particularly trying season to pursue the middle way, neither sniffing nor yearning overmuch.

“Tranquilo, tranquilo,” as I hear the men’s soccer team’s coaches urge pretty much constantly. “Calm, calm.” But how can you when you’ve been bumped from behind while waiting for the light to turn, cut off, jumped ahead of at a four-way stop, and such — all flagrant fouls, as it were, but nobody’s blowing a whistle and giving you a free kick. It’s a triumph of sorts simply to return home with your wits about you.

“If you can keep your wits while all about you are losing theirs. . . .”

It has, as I say, been difficult, but our littlest Little Leaguers have been instructive in this regard. They, wonderful to tell, have been keeping their wits about them, and have, as of this writing on Monday afternoon, been winning. No matter what happens tonight at the district championship game in Riverhead, they will have brought joy to this summer. 

Henry Meyer, whom I remember catching in Little League, just as his son, Hudson, sometimes does now, wrote in an email this morning that East Hampton’s 9-10-year-old traveling all-star kids have been wonderful, and that the parents too have been wonderful, letting the coaches — who I would add are also wonderful, Tim Garneau and Greg Brown as well as Henry — coach and the kids play. Refreshing words in these times of overbearing parents used to getting their way.

I would add that a team with a Meyer on it and with an Alversa on it augurs well for the revival of baseball here, for Hudson and Kai’s fathers not long ago were teammates on the East End Tigers, the foremost amateur baseball team on the Island. 

But I’ll not stop with them, for all should be mentioned: Andrew Brown, Tyler Hansen, Carter Dickinson, Leandro Abreu, Victoreddy Diaz, Hudson Beckmann, Bruno Sessler, Livs Kuplins, Justin Prince, Michael Newmark, Liam Cashin, and Luke Rossano.

“The most important thing,” Henry Meyer said in signing off, “is that the boys are working hard and learning how to play the game at a high level with high expectations.” He added that they have also been having “lots of fun.” 

Thanks to them the summer has not been a nightmare from which I have been trying to awake.