We were reveling in the life that was evident at the high school the other day as Springs’s cross-country runners, cheered on by schoolmates and parents and grandparents, followed one another across the finish line while the varsity boys team was waiting for Miller Place to arrive so it could claim the league championship in dramatic fashion, and as the football and field hockey teams were practicing on the turf.
Paul Hamilton, who made the observation — contrasting the ambient liveliness to the forlorn silence of East Hampton’s fields at this time last year — said also that he thought it was the last day of summer, but there was too much going on to reflect then upon the waning light.
Indeed, it has been heartening to go to games again, so I guess I’ll not change my answering machine, which has for years said that I’m either at one, going to one, or coming from one before it asks the caller to leave a message.
To our dismay, one of our grandchildren, a very athletic 11-year-old who lives in northwestern Ohio, and who had been wanting to get vaccinated, only to be told he couldn’t yet, last week contracted the virus, though he seems to have beaten it. I told Mary, who does not pass go on her way to immediately envisioning the worst possible outcome, that the odds were vastly in his favor. I’m happy to say that has proved true. He will be running and cradling his lacrosse stick soon. He may even be doing it as I write. Nothing can happen to him. It isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.
They like cross-country out there too. There were hundreds of middle school kids at an invitational meet we went to a few years ago at Heidelberg University in Tiffin. Kids running all over as schoolmates and parents and grandparents cheered. It’s the way it’s supposed to be.