Girls’ grade school sports in the pre Title 9 days of the late 1960s were a decidedly low key affair, and presumably were included in the curriculum on the basis of the “sound mind,
sound body” principle. There was no such thing as traveling teams, no parental involvement and no aspirations for college scholarships, simply a bunch of kids playing field hockey in the fall, skating in the winter (just skating around for the pure exercise of it) and softball in the spring. However, beneath this benign surface there boiled all sorts of jockeying for identity and social stature.
I think that our class grouped itself into several cliques: the boy crazy girls, the horse crazy
girls, the sporty girls, the brainy girls and everybody else. Of these only the sporty girls could be self defined. The boy crazy girls were defined by the fact that boys pursued them, the horse crazy girls were defined by the fact that they had a horse, and the brainy girls were defined by the honor roll that was read and posted each quarter. Perhaps this is why divvying up teams was such a high stakes affair.
These cliques were pretty much mutually exclusive. I don’t think that any of the boy crazy girls would be considered brainy, in part because academic achievement was not a big turn on for the boys. And the horse crazy girls, well they were just in their own world as they galloped across the field whinnying. Although I occasionally flirted with being brainy, my identity was pretty much based on sports,. Therefore it was a big honor when the sports
teacher selected me, along with my friend Kit Spaulding, to be captain of the softball team one afternoon. There in a row in front of us stood all our classmates squinting in the afternoon sun, wearing baggy green cotton shorts, and cute white button down shirts with Peter Pan collars, this being in an era before t-shirts were ever considered appropriate outerwear for girls. Some of my classmates were hopefully punching their fists into their mitts, some staring directly at me, some looking down and rubbing their shoes into the
dirt.
At this instant, I felt the weight of responsibility that had been thrust upon me. Kit and I quickly made our selections, moving through the athletic, marginally capable, and then the
totally inept. With horror, I realized that when there were only two left it would be my turn to make my selection. I felt like I was taking out a dull needle and stitching the scarlet letters “LOP” onto a fragile adolescent psyche – “Last One Picked,”
the eternal stigma of schoolyard shame.
And there it was. Ty Winterbotham and Gale Runnells stood before me. Ty was relatively new to our school, and her almost translucent skin and thin frizzy hair made her an unfortunate target of casual adolescent cruelty. But the odd thing about Ty was
that she was totally oblivious to our scorn, thought that the “kick me” sign pasted to her skirt was a laugh riot, and tolerated other meannesses with amazing good humor. She was the type of person who would not realize that being sent to play right field without a mitt
was a form of damage control, rather than an affirmation of her fielding abilities. Ty would not understand the horror of being the last one picked. I did not know Gale Runnells particularly well, other than I seem to recall her nickname was Punnells. She was tall, clunky, totally unathletic and always seemed to have an unhappy look on her face. I had no idea what to do. Kit stood quietly next to me. Although the last one picked would be on her team, her hands would be clean and blameless. On an impulse, and perhaps in atonement for past sins, I picked Ty, who gratefully skipped over to my team, while Punnells trudged over to Kit’s team.
I have no recollection of the sad little game we probably played, but as we were filing back to the locker room to take our showers, Punnells came up to me and said, “I didn’t appreciate that you didn’t pick me. I know that I am not good at softball, but my mother told me that there was an accident when I was born and my right arm is weak and that is why I cannot throw well.” I was stunned. In the tight gossipy world we lived in, I felt sure that I would have known that Punnells had a birth mishap. For example, it was common knowledge who was adopted, whose parents were getting divorced and I had even overheard at the grocery store about a mother’s affair with the golf pro. I felt that I had been put into an impossible situation and it was utterly unfair to spring a disability on me
after the fact. Even the meanest person would not make a disabled person the last one picked.
I struggled with my guilt for years, until I ran into Punnells at some black tie event, where she had emerged as a stunning, slim, glamorous beauty, a real boy crazy girl at last. I began to think that Punnells was brilliant and had skillfully invented her “damaged at birth” story to inflict maximum revenge. Mission accomplished.
The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters, like stop, post, spot, etc.) The number of asterisks indicate the number of letters and one of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following words, giving you a big hint. Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.
The day * ***** up as captain, I thought it would be fun,
Until I realized it meant that I had to cruelly single out someone.
I would designate the last one picked, and certainly it couldn’t be ******,
That I would stigmatize, humiliate and likely destroy someone’s precious pride.
******, Ty and Gale stood before me, the last two left and I had to name a name,
I don’t know why, but I picked Ty and poor Gale was never quite the same.
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Answers: I ended, denied, indeed
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