Field of Dreams and Nightmares

I was not an athletic child. I grew up in the 60s when clumsy children like me suffered greatly on the playgrounds. Choosing teams was the order of the day and there was no greater humiliation than being chosen last. Unfortunately, it was often my fate to be the last one chosen. On one particularly shameful day, neither team wanted me and argued over who would have to take me on and what handicap would be applied to the losing team. If I was lucky, my best friend Corinne would be chosen as one of the captains and would pick me early, out of a confusing mixture of love and pity.

My first experience with an organized softball team came at the age of twenty-five. The company I worked for started up a women’s softball team and I gathered up all my courage to join. After all, I was the manager of some of the players so they could not mock me—to my face anyway. My then-boyfriend took me to his parent’s garage where he rifled through a surprisingly large and dusty pile of sports paraphernalia to find a glove for me. We proceeded from the garage out to the back yard to hone my skills.

The day was warm and dry and my throat felt the same. He stood a distance away and threw the ball to me in what he considered a gentle lob meant to boost my confidence. What I saw was a dirty round missile being fired at my head intending to undo three years of expensive and painful orthodontics. I instinctively threw my hands up over my face while simultaneously closing my eyes so I would not have to see the blood and teeth spurting from my mouth. The ball sailed past my head landing harmlessly in the dirt behind me.

My boyfriend regarded me like I was an alien life form and asked with incredulity, “Why’d you close your eyes? You can’t catch it if you can’t see it!” Apparently having decided that this closed-eye-thing was a major factor affecting my athletic performance, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend proceeded to fire ball after ball at me while shouting, “Don’t close your eyes!” After about fifteen minutes of this, my heart was racing and my hands were sweating, when an upstairs window opened. My boyfriend’s brother stuck his head out of the window to inquire, “Who’s going to pay for the plastic surgery?”

Fast forward a dozen or so years and it’s no wonder that, when my own daughter announced her desire to sign up for softball, my reaction was less than exuberant. I actually felt a tightness in my chest and a large lump in my throat as I assured her that I would sign her up on Saturday. My husband was thrilled with the idea. He spouted on about the value of teamwork and the pride of sharing in your team’s victories. He did mention possible defeats but only as they related to one’s triumphant battle back from the brink. It’s not hard to tell that he was always one of the first picked on his playground.