Inutility
SOFTBALL
Summer in
I trotted down empty streets to go home, carrying tablets and pencil box and other desk detritus—fat pencils, Crayola stubs, Pink Pearl erasers, a newfangled ballpoint pen. Home to change into jeans and tee shirt, to inhabit days void of deadlines, assignments or other devices of teaching and learning. I rushed to my toy box, dragged out bats, balls, gloves, cap guns, boxes of toy soldiers, equipment for three months’ reprieve from nine months’ penal servitude.
From that early June morning, summer was a delicious repetition of one honey-colored day, a primitive version of heaven: No houris but Elysian fields, fountains and meadows of bliss—city parks and hikes in the countryside, meanders down uncharted streets and alleys, exploring my small town. Aimless drifting on currents of lassitude into backwaters of reverie. I was ready for any opportunity but not anxious to create agendas and purposes, directions for my time. Memorial Day had passed, the 500-mile Indy race carefully absorbed from the radio, and the next ritual event was July 4, way in the future (however, it would be good to find a source of illegal fireworks, especially evil cherry bombs, zebra crackers and torpedoes which could surgically remove a finger or an eye).
Early summer, I discovered who was home, who could play when and where. The Catholic school ran longer than public schools, so I waited for kids down the block to be freed. Some families traveled early or had cabins at upstate lakes, and the kids might be AWOL. I trotted to
I soon knew the state of summer’s sports talents. We could begin an unlimited season of pick-up ball. Optimum times were mid-morning and early evening. We could get in a couple of hours’ play at either time, with enough players for two respectable teams. It was a nameless, unmanaged show-up-and-play league: no adult supervisors or coaches, no umpires, no spectators. We brought what was needful—a good ball, a bat, a mitt. Between us, we were equipped. We policed the diamond, cleaning up debris, pacing and marking out bases and pitcher’s “mound.” It was in the upper park, a meadow between the playground apparatus (slides, a push-powered merry-go-round, an iron stand of swings) and picnic shelters. The perfect area for a diamond, with big elm, oak and willow trees around it for mid-day shade.
Thereafter, we followed an unspoken schedule—show up morning or evening and join a game. Everybody got a crack, we chose field positions and batting order on the spot and operated as a team on syndico-anarchist principles, “From each according to his abilities to each according to his need.” I usually played right field, owing to tortoise reflexes and uncertain manual dexterity—meaning, I couldn’t catch an infield hit and reliably forward it for a play. I batted in the middle of the order for the same reasons. If I got a piece of the bloopy ball, it usually went somewhere desirable, but I usually swung a nanosecond early or late. As skinny as I was, the centripetal momentum of the fat-ended bat threatened to yank me across home plate and dump me on the top of my head.
I was a mediocre softball artiste, and if today’s neofascist programs of kids’ sports oversight had existed, I would have been SOL. I wasn’t up for Little League or Babe Ruth League or Wiffle Ball or Universal (everybody gets a base hit!) TeeBall or anything assembled by adults as good-for-you supervised play. I rarely saw an adult once summer started—kids lived in anarchic mobs in parks and vacant lots or on streets, no supervision, no directives, no custom-silk-screened tee shirts, no healthy goals and objectives. We sought and found Chaos which we, like Jaweh at the Beginning, shaped into a new universe of perfect delight.
I loved softball not because I excelled at it or mastered it but because it was a medium of social cooperation, fusing a dozen kids of about the same age, size and talent quotient into a super-entity, a gestalt organism. This, I think, is a major (rarely described) effect of team sports and one of the drives which turns some people into dedicated athletes and fans, while others either don’t need this social fix or find it other ways. I needed it every summer as an antidote and antitoxin for the past nine months’ incarceration inside a classroom of sullen, silenced and unwilling inmates sentenced to do hard time together.
In summers we created our own society, molded it and even disbanded it. We had no stake to lose, no emotional investment to guard, no adult censors to oversee and admonish us for success or failure, no evaluation beyond a vague running score in our heads. Softball, rather than textbooks, homilies and civics classes, taught me about democracy and a natural meritocracy, taught “how to play together,” as playground manuals said. We were free in a way life rarely grants—free of consequences and expectations and judgment. You hit the ball or not, you got on base or not, you scored or not, while the other side caught a fly or not, tagged you out or not, struck you out or not. Chance, probability and the laws of Newtonian physics ruled this stick-figure cosmos, and the only unit of time that mattered was the moment. It was pure, untrammeled existentialism.
This descriptive-analytical stuff was not then imaginable to me. What was liberating was that no one cared what I did, where I was or who was with me. All the minor reports, confessions and admissions extorted by teachers and family during the school year were suspended for the duration. I was expected not to maim or kill myself (or others), to avoid criminal behavior, to appear home for meals or other (rare) appointments—otherwise, my universe was bounded only by familiar geography and the reach of my imagination.
Which, sadly, wasn’t very large. I was a simple servo-mechanism with a two-speed switch marked FULL ACTIVE and FULL PASSIVE. When I wasn’t playing softball, I reverted to bookworm behavior. I hiked nearly every day a mile downtown to Morrison-Reeves Library and gathered a stout armload of books, which I devoured in the heat of the day, as the stereotyped Mediterranean peasant enjoys siestas. I crumpled on our shady porch in a slough of pillows on the glider, enveloped in other worlds as timeless and boundless as the softball universe.
I read every book by John R. Tunis, which made sense, because they were inspirational, heroic baseball stories about small-town kids who broke into the Big Show. But I also read any other series at hand—Robert Heinlein’s wonderful space-kid stories (Space Cadet, Have Spacesuit Will Travel), Walter R. Brooks’s whimsical Freddy the Pig detective series, several sets of war stories by authors I can’t recall, some stunningly good, Richard Halliburton’s astounding books of uplifting adventures (The Royal Road to Romance, etc.), any book or books by or about the superman of paleontology, Roy Chapman Andrews. I even ingested healthy, vitamin-packed classics—Literature that Was Good for Me—without knowing it: great Jules Verne stories of Captain Nemo (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s luminous tales—Treasure Island, Kidnapped, David Balfour. Some golden singletons sent me looking for any sequelae—Nordhoff and Hall’s superb Falcons of France, about high adventures in WW I with the Lafayette Escadrille, led me directly to their magnificent Bounty trilogy.
I read with feckless abandon, with the same zeal that I took to softball. I didn’t try to “do it right” or “find a purpose” or “follow a reading list” or other uplifting horsesh*t. I read because I loved it, I assumed it was good for me in subtle and mysterious ways, that the more I read the more I knew, felt and discovered about my world and about worlds I could never visit. My series fixation was a demonstration of loyalty—I figured that anyone who worked hard enough and wrote well enough to thrill and please me once deserved my affection and continued patronage. I never wanted to get to the end of
But reading was a secondary world, while softball filled my primary world. Each game was different, every one a chance to win, to discover my own abilities, to finally understand how to hit a fat pitch, to catch every floating fly ball. Just as each day in summer was different, a discrete world of infinite promise.
I never got much better at softball. I never thought of trying out for an organized team—that was a whole other universe of regimented aspirations and order. I despised student athletes who pranced around in junior-sized uniforms like half-scale models of adult sports figures. (I loathed the Boy Scouts for the same reason, though I coveted their gear. Nobody was going to dress me up like a junior soldier-boy perfectly equipped to fight the Spanish-American War.) I hated the thick-headed, brutish gym coaches and imagined how really awful and phony they must be when coaching the official school teams, shouting at kids for mistakes and crowing at their own achievements in victory. I desperately did not want adults to supervise me in wholesome, well-supervised and highly educational extracurricular activities. It was bad enough that school stole nine months from every year and tried to haunt the other three by pernicious memory seeds of future schooling planted like time bombs within me. Softball and the town library were passports to a free world, a world of chance, imagination, endless possibility.
I did watch adult softball games—our town had a large, flourishing league of factories’ and merchants’ teams, and 10 or 20 games were played under lights every weeknight in
I was mesmerized by the despised umpires, who wore for-real black suits, wire masks and chest protectors and kept track of the pitches on hand-held counters. They also bawled incomprehensible judgments on every pitch. The team in the field twittered a morale-boosting chatter—hum babe, hum boy, he’s got nothin’, easy out, hum babe—and everything matched the Platonic softball models inside my head. Fat moths and anxious bats zipped through the big spotlight beams, nighthawks dipped overhead, the crowds roared and jeered, a peanut vendor snaked by the bleachers jiving,“Peanuts! Gitchyer peanuts here, roody-doody double-jointed
Every mid-summer came a visit from The King and His Court, the Houdini of softball, a slight, unimposing man with three nondescript helpers—catcher plus two infielders. He faced local nines in exhibition games. The King’s pitch was supersonic and evasive. He spun his arm and body faster than any softball pitcher I had ever seen, and the ball roared in at shoetop level, rising in a series of sine-wave bumps through the strike zone in an unidentifiable blur. It was like watching a shooting—the slam of ball into catcher’s mitt reached us before the ball left the King’s scoop-like hand! It was a trick, an optical illusion, magic against the rules, the laws of physics and probability and all collective human experience.
We cheered and cheered, for even if the King majestically (noblesse oblige!) granted a hit, the ball feebly blooped in a girlie arc to a bored fielder. When the King and Co. batted, they also used legerdemain, getting impossible short hits and booming homers that sailed like galleons over the distant fence of corrugated iron. They were winners foreordained by logic and justice. They were just too good to imagine in defeat. It was good that my universe contained one King and His Court.
This game capped the softball season, as Carnival presages Lent. It was soon August, dog days, stifling heat and sauna-like humidity. Kids went to camp or to summer cottages, on a death-march of relative-visiting, and our improvisational softball league withered. Nearly time for sandlot football, for Labor Day and the funereal school bell (“It tolls for thee!”), for another year’s hard labor in classrooms. But my leathery sunburn, the calluses on my hands, scabs on knees and ankles, the fat bruise on one thigh (a fast-ball kiss) were mementoes that betokened the death of the year.
And next summer: it was waiting in a memory now the future, the to-be green of new leaves and sprouting grass, tang of neatsfoot oil saturating a fielder’s glove, the tacky feel of an adhesive-taped Louisville Slugger handle, both slick and gritty. Soon I would meet it all again! ###
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