Play Balls

The family that filed into the row in front of us at the baseball game tonight was large in number and size. All of them spread over their seats like so many pillows except one teenage boy. He was rail thin with a big curly mop of blond hair.

He was on his phone most of the time, even when there was a home run or an amazing catch. When his parents talked to him, his eyelids fluttered in a powerful signal of disdain I remember but haven’t seen in a long time, my own kids now very much grown.

I watched this going on because I often watch families interacting when I’m at the ball game and because it was nearly impossible to watch the action on the field because of the family’s impressive size.

The boy sitting in front of us was intriguing for the disgust for his parents that radiated from him like heat from a wood stove. I had to lean back to get out of its draw. In an act of hard habit like a long-time smoker roughly tamping down a new pack of cigarettes, the boy snapped off the protective cover of his phone and peeled off a strip of black electrical tape. Then he took an angry bite out of the tape and placed what was left back inside the phone cover. There was another strip of tape there as well, not just the one. He had come prepared.

He chewed the tape for a good while, though I didn’t time it, I’m not that strange. Then he finally relaxed enough to take two pieces of red licorice from a bag his mother held out to him. He spit out the tape and took angry bites one after the other until all the licorice was gone. He held his phone in both hands, and I waited for him to snap the cover off again for another pull of electrical tape.

This was when I realized the wisdom of moving to a row of empty seats in the next section over where we would have an unobstructed view of the game, which our team won 7-3.

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Photo by Mike Bowman on Unsplash