The Riddle of Summer

Arthur sat on the wrought-iron bench, watching seven-year-old Toby adjust his baseball cap. The field where his grandson now stood had once been a cow pasture, though the swimming pool remained—a shimmering oval where Arthur had first laid eyes on Martha in 1952, she in her modest two-piece, he awkward and nineteen and desperately trying not to stare.

That same summer, his father had posed the sphinx riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? Arthur hadn't understood then, not really. Now, at seventy-eight, his cane made him part of the answer.

"Grandpa! Watch!" Toby called, then tore toward first base, running with that boundless confidence of children who haven't yet learned their bodies will fail them. The memory hit Arthur: his own father's hands—thick-knuckled from carpentry, gentle when they'd worked together—closing around his shoulder to teach him how to stand at the plate.

In the attic, wrapped in tissue, sat the teddy bear his father had rescued from their burning farmhouse when Arthur was four. The bear's left ear was singed, its glass eye loose, but Arthur had never been able to part with it. Some objects, like some lessons, you bear across decades whether you intend to or not.

Martha had been gone three years now. The pool where they'd shared their first kiss still held water, though the diving board had been removed for liability. Sphinx-like, time riddled him with questions that had no answers—why he'd outlived her, whether he'd been a good father, what legacy he'd actually leave.

Toby struck out, but his grin didn't waver as he trotted back to the dugout. The boy had something Arthur had spent a lifetime learning: the wisdom to fail without being defeated.

"You were watching, Grandpa?"

"Every inning."

"Want to know something funny? Coach says I run like a bear."

Arthur laughed, a sound that surprised him with its warmth. "That's the best thing I've heard all summer. Your great-grandfather would've liked that—he said the same thing about me when I was your age."

The sun dipped behind the oak trees, and for the first time since Martha's death, Arthur felt something like peace. The sphinx had been right all along: we begin with four, stand with two, end with three. And somewhere in the middle, if we're lucky, we learn to cherish the running. The baseball would wait until next weekend. The riddle, somehow, had become the answer itself.