One Last Summer

It’s just an ordinary baseball… right?

But for me, this old baseball takes me back to the summer of 1976… my last summer playing Little League baseball.

When I pick it up, I can hear my parents cheering from the stands, taste my favorite grape-flavored snow cone, see the bright yellow lightbulbs flickering on the scoreboard in center field, and feel the excitement every time another run went up for my team—the Cardinals. If we won, Coach Garrett would take the whole team to Dairy Queen for ice cream cones.

But more than anything, I can still hear my dad’s voice from behind the fence telling me to “keep your eye on the ball.”

If you look closely at the baseball in this photo, I’d have to say I listened. Something pretty amazing for a 12-year-old going on 30!

But that wasn’t quite the end of baseball for me that summer.

The Paris News: Paris National League All-Stars, 1976. That’s me on the far right of the second row—the last summer I played Little League baseball.

I was selected for the Paris National League All-Star team and ended up pitching. We went on to win the Northeast Texas baseball championship, beating the American League All-Stars 14–12.

Somewhere along the way, this newspaper photograph from August 1976 survived. There I am with the rest of the team, sitting on the far right of the second row.

Looking at it now, what strikes me isn’t really the championship. It’s seeing the people who were part of that summer again—the teammates, the coaches, and a 12-year-old version of myself who had no idea that nearly fifty years later, an old baseball and a faded newspaper clipping could bring the whole thing rushing back.

Funny how an ordinary object has a way of reminding us that some memories never really leave us. They just need something to bring them back.

What about you? Maybe there’s an old ball, glove, photograph—or something completely unexpected—that can still take you back to summers when you were a kid. What does it bring back for you?