First Evers, Chapter 2

1.  Respect

I had heard about athletes being “in the zone.”  I particularly remember the Kansas City A’s hall of famer George Brett talking about those out-of-the-blue days when a baseball inexplicably looked as big as a melon.  Brett just couldn’t help but hit a home run and “go downtown.”  It never occurred to me that I could ever be in that zone.  This special grace could only envelop true athletes who had honed their skills with daily work outs, practices and swing coaches.

This was not me.  I was a slow moving first baseman whose offensive output was meager at best.  Feeble pop-ups landing in the mitt of an immobile center fielder were my specialty.  I had slowly drifted down in the batting order of our slow pitch softball team.

One nondescript humid summer evening it happened.  As I stepped into the batter’s box, I felt a cone of magical light shining down upon me.  Everything slowed down as the first pitch came in, the ball hung there as big as George Brett’s melon.  I stepped up and crushed it in a perfectly choreographed display of hand-eye-muscle mass coordination.  This was no bloop, dying quail or Texas leaguer but an absolute frozen rope to dead center, blazing far beyond the dazed fielder.  Not bad for the 7th batter.  I slowly jogged around the bases to the cheers of my stunned teammates.

Next time up, I nailed it again, this time over the left fielder’s head.  Another home run.  The third time I was up, I received the universal sign of respect for a hitter.  The pitcher recognized me, called time out, and turned around to her outfield.  With a waving motion she yelled, “It’s her again, everybody move back – way back!”

This of course is the flip side to the more typical gesture I have received when the pitcher waves the fielders in.  My opponents were helpless – once again I hit a rocket to left field.  There were no formal boundaries and so no official home run, but as I rounded third I could see the fielder was still chasing down the rolling ball.

I have never been in the zone again, never had that kind of flat-out in your face, public display of universally recognized respect.

Nor would I expect to.

2.  Duty

Growing up in the early 1960s our mother told us to clean our plates “because other children are starving.”   The location of these poor souls varied, sometimes Europe, or China, but my mother favored Armenia.  I didn’t know where Armenia was, or why children were starving.  Even at eight years old I couldn’t puzzle out why my clean dinner plate would benefit the Armenians.  But I was a dutiful child and didn’t probe.  I cleaned my plate, though the two Hershey kisses rewarded for a clean plate might have been motivation enough.

One summer I heard my mother talking about Daylight Savings Time.  Like cleaning my plate, I just wanted to do my duty no questions asked.  I went outside with a jar, let some daylight in, put the top on and stored it in my closet. Yes, I was a dutiful child – to the point of idiocy.

3.  Cleverness

My fifth grade English teacher, Mrs. Melton, divided our class into two teams for a vocabulary contest.  Each team challenged the other to define a word.  Most chose oversized words just entering our vocabulary, like obnoxious, democracy, institution.  When it was my turn, I proposed the word “the.”  The other team was flummoxed. So was Mrs. Melton.  Did the word “the” even deserve a definition?  It was innocuous, always there, nothing more than background filler.  An annoyed Mrs. Melton called me a clever child and told me to define the word.  I pointed out that “the” implied something more specific than “a.”

I have often thought that “clever” is the best compliment.  Dictionary synonyms include shrewd, original, inventive, nimble, handy, ingenious.  All note that “clever” is a type of intelligence.  For me, clever suggests a simple, elegant, and surprising solution to a complex problem, but I don’t limit it to humans.  Animals are clever, or more accurately evolution is clever.  Consider the bee, whose comb consists of an array of perfect hexagons.  Why hexagons?  Why not diamonds or squares? This question has puzzled great minds for some 2,000 years since the Roman scholar Marcus Varro proposed that hexagons were the most compact structure. His “Honeybee Conjecture” wasn’t mathematically proven until 1999.

Those clever bees knew it all along.  A hexagon minimizes the amount of wax they must produce.

My “the” might have been momentarily clever but I am humbled by the bee.

4.  Shame

In the affluent suburb of my childhood, there were many types of status – cars, clothing, jewelry – but as a child these were beyond my grasp.  The one I knew for sure was that you absolutely didn’t want to collect S&H green stamps to redeem for furniture.  My mother thought it was a fun game, but I knew my friends might think our family was just scraping by, that we couldn’t buy furniture on our own and had stooped to the ignominy of green stamps.

I was so ashamed.  Before friends came over, I frantically looked for stray stamps and swept them into a drawer.

My mother was oblivious to the implications.  She loved her S&H green stamp book, would tally up her growing stash, thumb through the redemption book and strategize what she could buy.

After several years of saving she finally got that porch table she had craved.  I thought I could relax, that her collecting might be done, but the next phase was worse and completely out of my control.  She would usher people into the porch and gush over her new table, describing just how many green stamps it cost and encourage others to start collecting the stamps.  Why not?  You could get free stuff!  I wanted to crawl into a hole.

5.  Pride

It took several years before the shame turned into pride, and to realize my mother was thumbing her nose at our pretentions community in creative and amusing ways, which went well beyond green stamps.  She would comply with the country club’s requirement to wear a pristine white tennis outfit but would show up in black socks from my father’s drawer. (She preferred to play tennis in her romper-style bathing suit.) She would carry a purse to social functions, as was the norm, but the only thing inside was a decades old emery board in the remote chance of a hang-nail emergency.  She just couldn’t think of anything else to put in the purse.  She wore plastic poppit beads instead of pearls.  One evening I watched as she got ready for a party.  She was wearing her “peek-a-boo” dress, a bright pink number with a small, demur diamond cut-out on her upper chest.

“Let’s see, what shall I wear for jewelry tonight,” she said as she rummaged through her motley collection.  “Oh my, how about this?”  S&H green stamps had gone out of business, but she still had a few in her dresser drawer.  “Perfect.”

She licked the stamp, fixed it right in the middle of the peek-a-boo hole and sailed out the door.

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