Daybreak

An excerpt from a story I'm working on, one about a twelve year old boy.

Some days are more remarkable than others. 

The sun rises and you go about breathing and learning, taking small steps, doing all the human things, and then the sun sets and you rest, readying yourself for what tomorrow will bring, or planning for what you will bring tomorrow.  Most days are like this; essential, but unremarkable when set against the vast backdrop of so many similar days, a long cadence of soft drum beats, a mirror of the heart.  Yet once in a while the drum beats loudly and you remember for the rest of your life.

A soft day in late spring slowly unfolds, a day still in the grip of the dawn's chill, but with a sun that presages the heat of summer.  I am just a boy.  Twelve years and four days old to be exact, and although I sometimes cannot recall details from that era, my birthday and the Saturday after are etched into me with total clarity.  My birthday was the one when Ralph Drivdall lined a home run through my mother's kitchen window, right in the midst of my birthday party, and right into the middle of my birthday cake.  It was a good shot.  Ralph was always bigger and stronger than the rest of us, and the crack of wood against ball echoed loudly off the slab sided barns.  Why we had oriented the playing field toward the house, instead of away from it, I'll never understand, but as soon as the ball was hit everyone knew that the house was in peril.  None of us could do calculus yet, but we all had an athlete's intuitive understanding of the inevitability of ballistics.  The ball did not disappoint.  The window between Ralph and the cake didn't alter the path of the ball very much, but it did contribute bits of itself to the mission.  The cake looked like something from a Grimm's Fairy Tale; a beautifully decorated butterscotch and spice concoction, my favorite, with a baseball incongruously sitting in the middle of a sugary lunarian crater, all surrounded by a picket fence of broken glass shards.  We were worried that my mother would make us eat it anyway.  I have a film of this in my head, and I suppose at this distant remove that I should remember what happened on its own merits, but mostly I remember that birthday because it was so close to what happened the following Saturday.