COMMENTARY: Field of Dreams, Hoops, and Hopes

By WAYNE CREED

June 21, 2013

I spend most of my days driving across the Bay, going to work in Norfolk. Once back on the Shore, in Cape Charles, I tend to do what I really do best: nothing. Sometimes, once I park the car on Friday evening, I don’t get back into it until the next Monday morning.

It sounds boring, but there are many things that fill those empty moments. One of them is taking my beloved Labrador Retriever, Chloe, on walks through the old baseball field, to the fire road that winds through the woods back there. Full of scents and action, on a good day she might even jump a rabbit or a deer.

One Saturday in May I took her back to her haunt, and was surprised to find that the old ball field had been tilled, in preparation for planting summer cotton.

Chloe was unperturbed, nose to the ground like a good gun dog. I, on the other hand, was affected by the turned-up field. Looking past the tilled ground, to the old dugouts, a feeling of emptiness and loss began to spread over me.

Back from the walk, I sat on my porch, watching my son Joey and his friends, Max and Finn, playing baseball in the grassy knoll in front of my house on Monroe Street.

It was becoming overcast, and the slow feeling of dread began to mount. I remembered how, before the high cotton was planted, we used to have the Cape Charles Little League and a ball field, but the Town got rid of it.

We had soccer goals: now gone.

Then the basketball court, part of the old Cape Charles High School: gone.

When I heard the pop of the strike as it hit Max’s catcher mitt, I was jarred again. Why had the majority of people in this town been deaf to the plight of the kids of Cape Charles, and taken sides against them in favor of out-of-town developers? [Read more…]

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SATURDAY 6/22: Rain Barrel Workshop at New Roots

Another opportunity to make a rain barrel is coming Saturday, June 22, at the New Roots Youth Garden from 9 to 12. [Read more…]