The idea of innocence lost, embodied in a Whiffle ball story

Occasionally you find one of those depressing stories that illustrate some of the unfortunate realities of modern life. This is one of them:

GREENWICH, Conn.

Vincent Provenzano, 16 years old, experienced his Kevin Costner moment one Sunday afternoon in May after a thrilling day of Wiffle ball in a friend’s backyard. He came home, gazed at a field of weeds, brush and poison ivy in an empty lot off Riverside Lane, turned to his friend Justin Currytto, 17, and proclaimed: “If we build it, they will come.”

After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it — a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes.

But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.

When you read the whole story, you can easily see both sides – the property owners who are understandably upset at the encroachment on their very expensive land (this being Greenwich, CT), the town government needing to ensure local laws are respected, and also the feeling by the kids and others that something is just wrong when the mere idea of putting together a ball field to play with the neighbors and <gasp> not sit in front of a Wii all day is stymied by the morass that is our legal system.

In the end, the legal argument will likely win out over the nostalgic, the logical over the emotional. But it does at least make you shake your head and think maybe there is some kernel of truth to the old saw that it “was different back then.” Sigh.