With just enough time between dropping one son off at play rehearsal and making it to the other’s baseball game, I swung into the grocery store for inspiration. Spring means four nights a week of baseball games, plus two on Saturdays; two nights of play rehearsals; two rec league basketball games; and piano lessons. So what little time we have around the dinner table is, um, interesting, at best.

I whizzed through the aisles at breakneck speed and at the checkout, bumped into a fellow baseball mom casually sipping on a latte at Starbucks.

“You know the game starts in 10 minutes?” I hurried to put my bags in the cart.

“Yep, see you there,” she waved from her seat and took another long swig.

I marveled at her relaxed state, reminding myself she only has one kid who plays Little League, and that my own peaceful cups of late afternoon luxury would have to wait until next season. Or the next. Hurrying from the store, I rushed onto the highway and down the 15 minutes to the field. If I timed it right, the game would be over just as play rehearsal was ending, and my family would all be home at roughly the same time for a change.

That would happen of course, if I actually knew where I was going.

Five minutes after the game was scheduled to start, I pulled into a very empty parking lot with the realization that I was most definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time (a feeling I am not completely unaccustomed to, I confess). I tried my son’s cell phone, but of course it went unanswered, ringing into the empty bowels of his bat bag. I wracked my brain for elusive cell phone numbers of other parents or coaches, but not one of their numbers was stored in my phone. My frustration only intensified as I tried to reach my husband at the office, knowing he, too, was leaving any moment to drive to an empty ballfield.

I alternated between blaming the coach for not telling me about the change of plans, and chastising myself for not keeping better control of my own schedule. When the going gets busy, the busy get going … or something like that. And I am in the season of the year — nay, of my life — that requires me to be on the go. Which in turn, requires me to be on my toes. I steer myself back onto the highway, trying not to think of the $4-per-gallon gas I just wasted driving 30 miles out of my way, and promise to do better in the future.

But as Eckhart Tolle and Oprah would say, there is no past, there is no future; now is all we have. And right now I find myself in need of a bathroom and a baseball field, preferably in that order.

With sudden insight, I decided neither the coach nor I was to blame. (Neither was my son, for that matter, though he later owned up that he knew about the change and assumed I did, too.) It was a mistake, a slight lack of communication and, though I would miss the first inning or so of my son’s baseball game, I consequently grabbed a few peaceful moments in the car to look out the window at the blossoming spring, the shoots of green grass making themselves known under the mountain landscape.

I took advantage of the quiet to ponder what I would have for dinner the following evening (such forethought!) and even collected a few ideas for writing projects.

And so it was that I found myself for the next 20 minutes searching the baseball fields that my son’s team traditionally plays on, and taking in the beauty of a spring evening. I finally hit upon the familiar Yankees jerseys from afar — at a field, it turns out, just a baseball’s throw away from the grocery store where I’d seen my fellow team mom sipping contentedly on her latte.

As I hustled up to the stands she smiled and asked, “What took you so long?”

It doesn’t matter, I thought to myself, I’m here now.

Charla Belinski’s column appears every other week in the Glenwood Springs Post Independent.