Ah, the crack of the bat, the noise of the crowd, the smell of the…pressed Cuban sandwiches? That’s how we do it, here in Tampa Bay.

Yesterday my family and I went to a Tampa Bay Rays game—I’m the baseball fan in the family, so a summer isn’t complete for me without a game or two over at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. We like going to day games during the week—the crowds are usually smaller and we don’t get home at midnight.  (We’re fuddy-duddies, I admit.)

We had a great crowd today, more than 27,000. Lots of kids from local camps and childcare centers banging thunder sticks and hoping to catch a foul ball.

My favorite part:

The Tropicana Field roof—and the air conditioning contained therein.

Rays lefthander David Price getting ready to pitch.

Sorry, I didn’t get a photo of the Cuban sandwich before we ate it...

Oh, and best of all, the Rays beat Cleveland 6-0. And since Rays pitching struck out 10, we all get coupons for free pizza from Papa John’s!

Rays baseball—an awesome summer tradition. What are you favorite summer traditions?

I just bought a new battery for my laptop, and for some reason I decided to read the single-page instruction manual it came with. I learned:

Never throw the battery pack into fire, as that could cause the battery pack to explode.

Never short-circuit the main battery pack by either accidentally or intentionally bringing the terminals in contact with another metal object. This could cause personal injury or a fire, and could also damage the battery pack.

Never hammer a nail into the battery pack.

Never hit a hammer on the battery pack.

You know someone, somewhere has done each one of these things. Possibly my son.

What I want to know is…why?

Why would you want to throw a laptop battery into a fire? Hit it with a hammer or pound a nail into it? The only reason I can think of is to find out what happens. Personally, I can’t imagine anything good coming from those actions, but that’s just me. I’m pretty cautious about experimentation.

But thankfully, not everyone is like me. We need people who are curious and test boundaries, or we’d never have inventions like the laptop and its battery-that-shouldn’t-be-hammered. People who step outside their comfort zones to try experiments the average person wouldn’t dream of have made the world an immeasurably better place, often at great cost to themselves. I’m grateful for the men and women who want to find out what happens. (All I ask is that they pause for a moment to ask themselves what could go wrong, and how they’re going to cope if it does.)

Once again, I guess people can be divided into two categories: Those who put their laptop batteries in their computers and those who come at them with a hammer. Which one are you?

Jewel-toned fruits.

Fireworks.

Flip flops.

Baseball.

Fresh herbs.

Ice cream.

Cotton-ball clouds in cobalt skies…

July is really and truly summer. There’s no school (both June and August contain a few days of school where we live). Summer weather patterns set in and we get thunderstorms nearly every afternoon. I love to hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, watch the skies darken, hear the pounding rain. Then sun again. Sometimes we get “sunshowers”—rain and sunshine at the same time.

In July, we slow down. After all, it’s too hot and humid to do much of anything but sit. Grab a cool glass of something to drink, put your feet up and chill—usually with a good book. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Think I’ll do that this weekend…

Every month, every season has its own pleasures. Though I like to complain about the heat and humidity, just this once I’m going to shut up and appreciate what July has to offer.

What are your favorite July pleasures?

There are thousands upon thousands of poems about love, many of them using predictable words, predictable rhymes. Ho-hum. But here the Illinois poet Lisel Mueller talks about love in a totally fresh and new way, in terms of table salt. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

Love Like Salt

It lies in our hands in crystals

too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet

without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine

we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies

in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table

talking of holidays and the sea.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1996) by permission of the author. Poem copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.