Opening Day

E.B. White ~ 1931

Olden Opener, Roger Angell, The New Yorker

The ballpark in this treasured spring-baseball photograph is a stretch of meadow or rough lawn in Bedford, New York, an upper-Westchester exurb where my mother and stepfather found a modest spring-and-summer rental in the first years of their marriage. Judging by the post-blossoming young apple tree just down the third-base line, this opening day fell on a mid-spring Sunday in, let’s say, 1931. Since the photo is undated, I base its time on the size of the pitcher, who is me, at ten and a half. The batter is my mother, Katharine White, and the tweedy, cautious catcher is my seventy-nine-year-old grandfather, Charles Spencer Sergeant, a retired executive of the Boston Elevated Railroad. Not a great athlete, perhaps, but a man with a strong conceptual awareness of foul tips.

I can’t take my eyes off my mother. Her uniform, which appears a tad formal, is a well-cut suit skirt and a silk blouse, both in keeping with Sunday-outing styles of that time. Despite a certain wariness in her gaze and upper body, her stance is excellent—her weight mostly over the slightly flexed back leg, her front foot stepping boldly forward in preparation for the swing, which will initially take the bat up and back, then swiftly down into the reversing pivot and full-body turn that precede and accompany her Speaker-esque, closed-stance cut at the ball.

My pitching form is O.K., too. Yes, I look more like a center fielder trying to cut down a speeding baserunner at third base or home, but give me a break, guys. By the looks of me, I go about eighty-two pounds here, and the angle of my arm shows an instinctive understanding of the physics of the fling. Only the greatest athletes seem to have this somewhere within them, an elegant je ne sais quoi that marks the Mathewsons and Mayses of each era and warms the hearts of even the idlest, most distant onlooker.

The photographer, who is my stepfather, E. B. White, has snapped the softball in first flight, only a blurry yard or two out of my grasp, and this good fortune, taken with the tilt of my follow-through, allows us to supply the invisible arc of the sphere, a combined heater and changeup that will parallel the lower profile of the apple tree and, descending, cross the plate hem-high: a pitch taken by my mom for a called—called by me—strike one.

Way to go, kid.