Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

It’s been a rubbish couple of days, forming what I hope is the nadir of my week off work (but still in Q, so the baseline is pretty low to start with). I’ve tried my usual chirrup-y modes—working in the garden, trying a new game, binge-watching a good show—and none of it has been able to dent my foul, black mood.

But . . .

I’m not going to bother y’all with that. Chances are, you’re dealing with something similar or, more likely, something more difficult than what I’m going through, so instead, I’m going to step into my WayBack machine and attempt to capture a day when something went really poorly and yet I felt great.

The ground was dry and hard beyond the playground’s blacktop, dotted with clumps of tow-head grass and the occasional dark green splotch of burr-tail clover. It looked very much like the hills around the schoolyard: deeply shaded copses of live oak standing sentry over a sea of grass blasted blond by California’s unwavering springtime sun. 

Though a school-day, this was not recess. The girls went one way with Miss Cornell and our teacher, Miss Otaviano, marched all us boys out past the four-square boxes and tetherball poles right out onto the hard-pan of the field where she turned us over to a short, stocky man with a wide smile and a gleam in his eye that, to me, said he was definitely not to be trusted. He greeted us with avuncular enthusiasm, his balding pate shining in the forenoon, and informed us that we were going to have a chance to play a game. Then he stepped back and, in a manner which any student of Torquemada would recognize as the first step of inquisitorial torture (i.e., “Show the Instruments”), he gestured expansively toward an array of equipment our playfield had never seen.

We all knew what baseball was. We were in third grade, after all, and we’d seen some things. But we’d never seen the equipment (aside from a ball and glove) up close. The bases shone white in the sunshine and were big, almost too big to carry. There was a special mitt for the catcher, and a mask. And there was a collection of bats, long and short, wooden and metal, some with rubbery grips and others as bare as nature made them, all lying there waiting to be selected, chosen, put to good use.

I was immediately on guard.

As a quite skinny boy of bookish nature whose deep myopic vision, at that point, had not been discovered (despite my incessant creeping toward the television screen like an asteroid caught in a star’s gravity well, and despite literally having my nose in a book in order to read it), I was not great at team athletics. I was quite good at four-square, able to rank up in record time, but that was an individual effort using a large ball in a small court. Baseball–or, for that matter, softball, which is what our friendly gentleman intended to teach us–was the kind of team-building activity that began (for me) with the humiliation of being picked next to last, as I at least had two good legs while Scott, with a brace on his polio-impeded right leg, was always the final selection.

I searched Miss Otaviano’s face (once I’d sidled close enough to make out her features) for an inkling of mercy, but her smile and cheery attitude told me all I needed to know: there was no escape.

Most of us boys knew the basics of the game—hit the ball and run the bases—though few of us had ever taken part beyond having a catch with Dad out on the back lawn. I watched with some satisfaction, then, as the more physically adept boys struggled with pitching, catching, and especially with hitting the ball. I spent most of my time in deep centerfield, stationed as far out as Brook (our captain) could place me without actually putting me in the marsh that was the far border of our playfield. He knew the ball would never come to me out there or, if it did, it’d be a home run anyway, so my well-established ineptitude would not cost the team anything. 

And he was correct. The one time the ball did make it out my way (a grounder that spun and bounced past every able body we had, including me) I was eventually able to zero in on the moving white object and hare it down within a minute. Or two. By the time I put hand to leathery cover, I could tell by the cessation of excited shouts that all runners were safe at home.

When the moment I dreaded finally came and I stood at the plate, blinking, squinting, trying to resolve the fuzzy blur of limbs into Danny Petersen as he prepared to pitch the ball, I could feel the cold sweat of fear trickle down the nape of my neck. The blur of limbs gyrated, and a white orb arced toward me. I swung the bat, hit nothing but air, and winced at the little-boy giggles that inevitably followed. Only two more swings, and it’d be over, I knew. No point putting a whole lot of effort into this. 

And yet, I couldn’t just not try. “Keep your eye on the ball,” our perspiring coach told me. If I’d been a few years older, I’d have rolled my eyes. What ball? Danny windmilled his arms and again, the white blob soared toward me. I watched. I calculated. I swung, and the jolt in my hands told me I’d hit it.

“Run!” said the coach, said Brook, said everyone, and I did. Even though my vision was extraordinarily poor, I could run. I’d been “called out” to the churchyard a couple of times, but the bullies who wanted to beat me down for sport never reckoned on my jack-rabbit speed.

I ran.

“No!” came the shout. “Toward first base!” 

First base. First base. Where the hell was first base?

I hadn’t stopped running, but I veered toward the loudest of the voices. “No! That way!” they told me, which considering that they were all just blurry shapes, wasn’t particularly helpful. I swerved and turned, looking for the large white bag of first base, but by this time enough of my fellows had run over it that it was no longer white. The white bag I had headed for was (I was later informed) actually second base, and it was only when I passed a hysterical Danny Petersen that I knew I was going the wrong way. I corrected, saw a gaggle of boys to my right, and headed toward them.

I was thrown out just before I got there, of course, and the day went down in my school’s history as The Day That Kid Got Lost on the Way to First Base.

My friends will tell you: I’ve told this story a few times, and always with that title as its main action. But for myself, though, I’ve never remembered it that way.

For me, what stood out wasn’t that I got lost on the way to first base. It’s that I hit the ball.

Me and my 20/700 vision. Me and my eyes that didn’t know there were leaves on trees until I got glasses. 

Me. I hit that damned ball. I saw it arcing toward me, followed it as it dropped toward the plate, and I swung low and upward, and hit it hard enough and far enough that even though I ran all the way to the pitcher’s mound before hanging a right, they still had to work to throw me out at first.

That’s what I remember about that day.

Onward.

k