Saturday morning, a pale sun and faint raindrops. A robin trilling and, farther into the forest, a thrush singing its wistful liquid tune. I have never heard a nightingale's song, but how could it be more beautiful than the song of the hermit thrush?

Yesterday at Paul's baseball game, I saw the eagle again, and then I saw two eagles, and then I saw the eagles' nest and heard the baby eagles squealing for dinner. Behind the backstop cows were grazing. Next to me sat one of my former music students, who had just graduated from high school. He bounced into the bushes looking for foul balls and shouted, "It's a Harmony kid!" when our boys came up to bat. A rising seventh-grader, about three feet tall, made the most beautiful bunt I have ever seen. My own son was parked on the bench for two-thirds of the game and did nothing spectacular whatsoever, but later he told me that this is the most fun he's ever had on a baseball team. All the players have black butts from sitting on whatever's stuck to that very dirty bench, and a team full of black butts is comic in the field.

I carried a biography of Robert Frost in my bag but didn't read it. Further down the line of parent lawn chairs, someone was talking about "bad ambulance incidents I have seen," which I avoided listening to. Later he changed his chat to "bad apples I have bought at the grocery store," which I also didn't listen to. I wished this field had a bathroom, and so did everyone else. Occasionally we reminisced about Farm League, as in "Remember when the little boys kept leaving the field one by one to visit the bushes and didn't realize that what they were doing was completely visible to everyone watching the game?"

One of the eagles went for a low soar over the field, and a tiny bird--maybe a robin or a red-winged blackbird--got tough and tried to chase it. The eagle was supercilious and ignored the pest. Dusk came on, and the parents got cold. One of them walked back to his car for a smoke and returned with the news that the Red Sox were beating the Orioles 8 to 1 in the first inning. This was cheering, but we were still cold. Eventually, to our great relief, our sons struck out in the ninth, and Paul and I drove home through a purple and orange sunset, where we were greeted by spaghetti carbonara, spinach salad, Portuguese white wine (for one of us), and a benches-clearing-brawl on Red Sox radio.

No cows behind the backstop at Fenway.