Sometimes you come across someone who has carved out a unique slice of life with which to nourish themselves, even to feast upon. I met such a person in Cooperstown, New York, someone who spent their days in a way I’d never conceived of, outside of any box I was aware of up to that point.

First a word about Cooperstown, because the setting is essential to this story. Cooperstown is a picturesque, historic, one-stoplight village in the countryside of central New York State, between the Catskills and the Adirondacks. The Baseball Hall of Fame is located there, smack dab in the middle of the village, on Main Street, in a vintage red-brick building.

The Hall of Fame calls itself “surely the best known sports shrine in the world.” Baseball pilgrims from all over come to visit the Hall, stroll down Main Street to shop in its baseball souvenir and memorabilia stores, and eat at one of its disproportionately large number of restaurants.

I had driven to Cooperstown with three of my friends. I told them to go on into the Hall while I checked out the shops for an old-time baseball cap to my liking. After buying my hat, I decided to sit on a bench for a few minutes and soak in some sunshine before I joined my friends. It was a beautiful day, filled with warmth and light, the kind of day that a friend of mine calls “the second best day of the year”. If you take the bait and ask him what the best day of the year was, he says, “We haven’t had it yet.”

Cooperstown may have only one stoplight, but it has plenty of benches for folks to take themselves off their feet. I couldn’t see any unoccupied benches in my vicinity, but I saw one with a man sitting at one end, so I sat at the other end. After I settled in, the guy said something to me. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he said it in the way people say things when they want to open the door to a conversation.

Very soon we were talking about baseball and our mutual affection for, and separate histories with, the game. It seemed like a natural topic, considering where we were. Then we moved on to telling each other the broad outlines of our lives.

Tony, which turned out to be his name, had lived most of his life in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, I can’t recall which. Being a ”baseballphile,” he visited the Hall of Fame a number of times with his wife. When retirement time came, the two of them asked themselves what they wanted to do now that they could go anywhere and do anything within their means. They decided that their retirement dream was to move to Cooperstown, so they sold their home and bought one in the Cooperstown area. I got the sense that while being near the Hall of Fame dwarfed any other reason for Tony to move there, the charm of the village and its surrounding countryside figured in heavily with his wife.

His wife turned out to be one of those people for whom the transition from working full time to having no job at all proved to be jarring, so she got herself a part-time job at the Hall of Fame box office.

On the other hand, Tony flowed right into a routine that fit him like a glove. Right up there with his passion for baseball was his passion for meeting people. He devoured conversation and connection the way some people devour books, or nature, or electronic devices, or their own thoughts. The way Tony decided to combine his love of baseball with his love of connecting with people was to do what he’d done with me – sit on a bench, leaving room for others to sit there also, and when they did so, chat them up. He spent hours every day doing just that, and when you talked with him, you had the sense that your dialogue didn’t have to tread water on the surface of things.

Tony’s voice when he told me about this centerpiece activity of his days was buoyant and proud. He was not an old man killing time, but rather someone enlivened by living his dream. For him, sitting on a bench was not a way of watching the world go by, it was a way of marching grandly in the parade.

When Tony was telling me about his days and ways, I could hear that Cooperstown was not only a perfect place for him to meet fellow disciples of baseball from all over the world, but also a place where he could breathe in deeply that intangible something in the air wherever and whenever people come together in a way that excites them.

After we talked awhile, I realized I’d better catch up with my buddies in the Hall. Tony and I said our goodbyes in the way people who have connected do. I’ll call that “as friends.”

I met up with my other friends in the Hall, and after we’d finished venerating its contents, we exited to find a restaurant that worked for us.

Then I saw Tony sitting on a different bench than the one I’d shared with him, but he didn’t see me. He was too immersed in an animated conversation with a young couple with whom he shared the bench. There he was in all his magnificence, being where he loved to be, doing what he loved to do, hitting a home run with his day, the “Babe Ruth of the benches,” as it were.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.

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