Tuesday, September 11, 2012

A meditation on youth

... and Strat-O-Matic baseball.  Here's an excerpt:
And somewhere along the line, what seems to slip away is time—the time to have time for losing yourself in such things as baseball seasons played out with dice rolls. The world intrudes, the boy grows, and the games prove less enthralling. Still, the lessons of Strat-O-Matic were real and vital, in their day. A realization of the interplay of order and randomness, for instance. A grasp of the sheer reality of the past, the truth that others lived before us. The civilizing of boys by appealing to their impulses to forget themselves in the mathematics of the world and the inner secrets of a game like baseball.

Read it all if you know anyone who was once an adolescent boy.  Even if he didn't get his Strat-O-Matic game until 1985.