Baseball, War and a Month of Memories

I’d rather watch grass grow than to go to a baseball game. I’m not a sports fan of any kind but I am a fan of cultural history and when the senior hall offered a lecture on the history of baseball during the Civil War I signed up. The bus picked us up Thursday evening for the event that took place at our state’s presidential library which is located in a city near-by. The speaker, a professor/author and well-known baseball historian is a member of The Chicago Civil War Round Table, an organization a Google search tells me is very large and active in its endeavor to preserve all things related to the War Between the States. It seems odd to me, at times, that we’ve romanticized a war to the extent we do with that war, but that’s a debate for another day. It’s enough to say the results of the Civil War merit that treatment on one side of the debate and on the other side, yearly reenactments of the deaths of so many men seems beyond morbid. The older I get the more of a pacifist I become so you won’t see me in the role of camp follower, doing what some women did during that war. The reenactments remind me that fighting is so deeply bred into humans that, I guess, romanticizing fake fighting is better than the real thing. Too bad we can’t get the rest of the world on board with that thought. Keep them so busy with reenacting past wars they don’t have time for new ones. 

Back to baseball: Dispelling the myth that baseball was invented during the Civil War by Abner Doubleday, a general in the Union Army, was the centerpiece of the lecture. The fact is scholars all agree, now, he had nothing to do with baseball---the game actually evolved from games played with balls during medieval times and no one person invented it. But the myth held on long enough for the National Baseball Hall of Fame to be built in Doubleday’s home town in 1937. An interesting and often funny lecture, I learned that the soldiers on both sides of the war spent more time playing baseball than in actual battles. It was also interesting that Lincoln had a ball diamond on the White House lawn. Who knew!

Speaking of Don---I wasn’t? Oops, that reference got lost in a rewrite. Anyway, April is a month filled with memory triggers for me. Don’s and my birthday fall in April as well as our anniversary and that of my mom and dad’s. My mother died in April and both my brother and brother-in-law share a birthday on the same day in April. And now I have a great-great nephew with an April birthday and soon they’ll be a great-great niece’s birth to celebrate in April. Last weekend I went to the first ever birthday party for little C.S. His mother made an assortment of homemade quiches and the best ever strawberries dipped in dark chocolate. Gifts and cake, too, came with the afternoon. It was good to build some new memories for April, happy memories filled with hope for such a young life. What a bright little boy. Already he’s learning how to point to letters on a wall chart. I may not live long enough for him to remember me, but I’ll bet one day he’ll read the words I wrote in the family genealogy books and learn about his connection to the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. His grandparents, both retired teachers, will see that he learns to love written words. And that pleases me.

I’m looking forward to summer and one of the first signs I get that its coming comes from my neighbor. They are so deep into medieval reenactments that they actually use handwoven clothe to hand stitch into costumes that are very specific to certain centuries of medieval life. Every summer weekend they’re off to reenactments, medieval fairs and jousting tournaments. I’d like to go to one. I heard the pig roasts are great. One day soon they’ll empty out the shed where they keep all their medieval gear---lances, shields, chain-mail, goal posts, a white tent with a pointed “roof” and colorful flags---no horse back there, but someday I expect to see one. Every knight with shining armor needs one. Can you believe it, they actually met at a jousting tournament. How’s that for a romantic way to meet. I can’t wait to ask them if the fairs include ball games. It’s nice to see a young couple so emerged in something fun that teaches at the same time. And maybe that’s the value of Civil War reenactments, too. Maybe it’s not so much about romanticizing war as it is about teaching history. ©

Note: The lithograph at the top is of a baseball game at the Civil War Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. A prisoner from the north recreated the scene when he got back home after the war.