Monday it was hot here on the East Coast.  I do not know the official temperature here in Philly, but it felt like it was summer: somewhere between late June and early July when the temps get up in the low 90’s with regularity.  It was also a baseball night for my older son.  Yes, little league has started and it will dominate our lives for the next couple of months–particularly since the younger also started T-ball this year.  The game went well, my son’s team won and he even got on base a few times.  For those of you that don’t know, it is a pretty big deal that I am not jumping up and down about that.  In fact, I (and even he) now kind of expect that type of output.  It was not always that way.  Not even close.  His first year of machine pitch, he hit the ball twice in the second game.  And that was it.  For the season.  Not even another foul ball for goodness sakes.  No sound of a metal bat barely grazing the baseball.  Nada.  Three swings, three misses EVERY SINGLE TIME.  It was beyond painful for me, but he was having fun, or so he said.

At the end of that first season we had a little chat.  It may very well be that my kid never becomes a superstar, but as long as he is having fun…..

OK, that is a bunch of crap.  I tried to go the whole father of the year route there, but I just couldn’t do it.  The truth?  There was no way I was going to suffer through another season like that.  Nope, one of us would die before that happened.  When I became a parent, I swore I would never be one of ‘those parents’ that push their kids non-stop into sports (or music, jarts, whatever) and create complete monsters out of both kid and parent.  Well, it was clear that I was going to have to start walking somewhat closer to that line or he was going to have to pick another sport or activity.  After the season, we started working on a few aspects of his hitting, going to batting cages once in a while, that kind of thing.  Nothing ridiculous or over the top, but certainly more than we had done before.  I told him that “part of playing a sport was also trying to get better.”  Something like that at least.  Heck, it almost sounds noble when I write it….

The following season was better.  Much better.  He started hitting the ball with increasing regularity and it was great to see the smile on his face when we would make it to first (I am sure my wife would say the same thing about my reaction, but let’s not go overboard here, OK?).  He never hit the ball out of the infield, or even in the air, but at least he was hitting it.

We did some more work before this season and he has started off rather impressively, I must say.  He has hit the ball out of the infield a couple of times and almost had a ‘little league home-run’ (that’s when the ball goes through about six pairs of legs and the kid just keeps running around the bases and they all call it a ‘homer’ even though there were five to twelve errors on the play).

As a result, going into the game Monday, I was not nearly as apprehensive as I had been before any game the previous two seasons.  Add that I had to race home from work and then over to the field in order to just barely make it before the game started.  Before I headed to the field, however, I had the forethought to grab a bottle of rosé and make sure it found its way into the fridge.  As I mentioned, it was a hot day and I knew I would want something chilly when we got home after the game.

The game was close, but I never really thought we were going to lose, so I let my mind wander a bit while I was coaching at first base.  A couple of times I was not even paying attention to the game and it almost cost my son’s team dearly.  What was dominating my thoughts?  Well, unless this is your first time reading this blog, you no doubt have the answer–I was already pulling the cork on that bottle in the fridge.  Not in an alcoholic, pathetic way, but rather a hoping-that-it-would-be-cold-enough-by-the-time-we-get-home kind of way.

It was not a fancy, expensive, nor a impressive wine.  Nope.  It was perhaps the least expensive wine in the whole ‘cellar’.  I got it for $5 from a website called LastBottle, perhaps my favorite flash site.  And it was a rosé–a wine that says to me “Summer” (my favorite season).  It was a wine that should have been consumed perhaps three years prior, but I could not have cared any less.  It was hot out and I wanted something uncomplicated and cold.

It was both.  And I was happy.  Appropriately, it was called Paradis(e).