Ghost Runners

I wrote something years ago that has stuck with me. It was describing a place we used to play baseball as kids. Being short enough players to field two teams, we utilized ghost runners for the team at bat. For those unfamiliar with this practice, say six kids decide to play. That would be three per team in a game that fields nine players normally. When the team at bat got hits, any kid who was still on base when his turn to hit came up again would declare a ghost runner would be taking his place. Thus, the game progressed and ghost runners could score or be forced out. They could never be tagged out, of course. But it was a way to be able to continue the game.

What I wrote years ago included this part:

one day
we left the ghost runners stranded
standing on their bases,
waiting, a setting sun
shining on their faces
and there they remain
among houses sprung
up from the weeds

Here's what stuck with me about this.

I don't recall there ever being a collective agreement to not play there any more. We didn't change fields. We weren't forced to stop playing there.

We just stopped.

In the normal evolution of life, people moved away and kids grew up and this is obviously the root of it all.

1 Corinthians 13:11 says "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (NKJV)

Neighborhoods change. Friendships change. People change. With age comes new responsibilities, new challenges, different circumstances in different locations, some far from the old homestead.

I can think of many things I used to do with friends that we just stopped doing. Not by agreement or decision, but we all just moved on to something else.

I still like to think those ghost runners remain at their bases waiting for us to return and continue playing. It's a fool's dream, of course, because that field is now cluttered with houses.

But they're still there. I know it.

And they are patient.