Paying attention to the changing of seasons, the march of time

If you’re a baseball fan, they say the best four words each spring are ‘Pitchers and catchers report’ to spring training. Each spring, when professional baseball players show up for spring training, it’s a sign we’ve survived another winter, that the best of our climate is yet to come and there is hope for better days ahead.

OK, perhaps that’s a bit over-romanticized. Spring training is one of those items on the bucket list, along with visiting Augusta National, Pebble Beach National Golf Links, visiting Pearl Harbor and the beaches at Normandy. The problem is, other than Florida and California, visiting those places requires extended airline travel. Oh, well.

Last week, the local equivalent of pitchers and catchers reporting finally arrived. The return of activities on the high school sports calendar. There’s a tennis match this week. Swimmers will lunge forward into the water. Crosscountry runners will check their stopwatches just before the starting gun is fired. On the gridiron, the Trojans will open the season in Bloomington at Thomas Jefferson High School deep in prestigious west Bloomington.

We spent much of the past couple years dealing with budget adjustment stuff. A sporting event is a nice break from the realities of people losing their jobs, children losing time with p-e teachers and some parents realizing the bus ride their children used to enjoy isn’t there anymore.

There’s an energy, an excitement, walking up to an outdoor high school sports venue with the lights piercing the dark nighttime sky. Sure, the early-season games are played in late-summer and mild, fall temperatures. It’s easy to enjoy a football game, even if you didn’t play football, when all that’s required to be comfortable are bluejeans, a hoodie, perhaps a windbreaker and a soda.

New Prague is lucky. You have solid teams here. Those teams are built on a bedrock of tradition – the hard work that produced championship teams in years gone by. Hard work has made luck easier to come by. The community, much of it anyway, relishes its local teams. The Trojans are an easy brand to root for. You have, for the most part, good kids here. Sure, they’re not all angels. They could do well without social media, but that’s not realistic. After all, there’s a police officer in the building for a reason besides being prepared for the unthinkable.

Those good kids come from parents who care about their community, their schools. It’s good to see parents give a damn about what happens in their childrens’ schools. It’s great to see the auditorium filled when there’s a choir or band concert. It shows people care about what their children and grandchildren are doing. There would be cause for concern if parents didn’t show up for concerts, for ball games or, worse yet, for parent-teacher conferences.

In the near future, parents will have the opportunity to meet their childrens’ teachers. To some, it might be an inconvenience, an event requiring rescheduling of events. Take the time to be there. Make the effort. Show your children you know school matters. Sure, technology has made it easier than ever before to communicate with teachers thanks to communication portals. If teachers follow through, parents should know almost immediately how their youngster is doing in school. There should be no surprise over late homework or a test where the child might not have been prepared.

Parents – your children are going to grow up and, eventually, live lives of their own. They will get to a point where you as their mom and dad are no longer the center, or near-center, of their world. Take advantage of this time, before they don’t care whether or not you attend or care about their events.

The other day, playing golf in Montgomery, the walk up the hill on the parfive to the parking lot was a reminder of our son running cross-country. He did very well his senior year at the old Redbird Invitational. He didn’t have the easiest road to success but the hard work paid off. Cheering for him was fun. Time waits for no one. Now, he’s all grown up and doing well for himself. He and his wife have two beautiful daughters.

Next year, hopefully, we’ll take the day off and make the drive to be there when the first of two daughters starts kindergarten.

It will be time well spent.