What is of consequence? That is, what is important? I picked up a baseball today. It has red seams. The seams are raised to provide a better grip for the pitcher. My hand covers the ball. It is small and hard with a smooth white leather surface. Its core is a sphere of black rubber wound tight with string. I know this well, the details are everyday to me. Baseball is of the greatest consequence in my life. Baseballs and memories they and I created still emit the sounds of laughter, the gritting of teeth, the rapture of looking to the sky to see a ball you hit turn tiny and disappear into the wall of weeds that hedge the back of left, right, and center field. Where we played had opened meadows and endless blue sky filled with meadowlarks, butterflies, and thousands of smaller creatures. At sundown the crickets would fill the air with their sound. Bats barely visible streaked the sky black with their flight to hunt mosquitoes.
In those days—the late fifties—our opponents were generally our neighbors and friends. They came from The Foresberg Addition, or from the modest homes beyond the hills of rich black dirt where new homes were soon to be built.
Baseball and its cousins, softball and slow pitch softball, led me many places. When I began to learn to throw and catch and field and hit I was six years old, not yet in first grade. My Dad taught me. He is now 86 and suffers from dementia. But then he would sidearm a toss and I would return it until there formed a soothing rhythm, one movement flowing smoothly into the next like a steady heartbeat.
This ball is a Wilson. My first glove might have been a Wilson too. It was a caramel colored brown. My second glove I used at thirteen. I left it in the restroom of the Mobil Station on a stop on the way back home from a game in Sturgis, South Dakota. My first lesson in focus and mindfulness. That had been my best glove. It appeared in a photograph of The Minot Daily News, titled, “Young player, Terry Kurtz fields a fly ball.” I don’t know what became of that news clipping. It used to be in Mom’s old photograph album. She has stage-four cancer now. I am her eldest.
Just yesterday Sandy, the fastest pitcher in our fast pitch league, showed up among my other Rapid City friends on Facebook. Forty-five years since, the past and present certainly do collide. During a tournament in 1972 in Pierre, South Dakota I was benched. The only explanation given for that was that I didn’t have lunch with the team. I had not ever been benched in fifteen years of playing. I was benched for the rest of the year. It was a painful time when I questioned myself and what had I done wrong to deserve this. That was the last year I played with that team.
Nearly two years later I got a phone call from Kathy, the Scotties team captain. She explained why I was benched, and she apologized. The captain had been angry at a love interest. The bitterness between those players led her to bench me as a way to get back at her apparently lost love. The intended victim of this revenge had been the second string first baseman. The captain benched me in order to snub the second string first baseman by not filling her into my starting spot at the same base. The captain was not a drinker. She did have convoluted logic. In this I experienced how the moral chaos of one individual can hurt another, how bewildering a lie can be, and how destructive to an innocent person. Baseball, not a utopia, was no exception.
That ended baseball for me. For the next four decades I kept to watching my cousin Tommy and my brother Brad hit their homeruns. Brad’s team made the Junior League World’s Series. And I followed the Minnesota Twins of The Major League.
Those years that followed were at times extremely difficult; my mental illness rose up again. I had to quit the job of my dreams. As my marriage continued to unravel I entered a dark suicidal depression. I was hospitalized after one of my attempts at suicide. My network of friends and family and former colleagues failed to stop the decline.
Years after my mental health improved I began to slow down. Arthritis, a gain in weight, and general inactivity severely affected my overall health and fitness. I was on the pathway to cane and walker and wheelchair. Pain in my knee was telling me I would never run again.
A couple years ago I joined this story group. I found the nurturing group of fellow sages, men and women of Denver’s GLBT community. You guys. Then Gail Klock joined us for a trial run. We liked her from the get-go. And she liked us. And softball showed up again like a guardian angel. Gail read her story, how from childhood she was an athlete and later a highly successful professional coach. She invited me to practice slow pitch softball with The Colorado Peaches. After a few missed opportunities I made a leap of faith and joined them along with our Jessie to practice. I discovered I could indeed manage to run. Practices brought frustration and later joy as my body remembered how to throw and to slug the ball. I learned to hit off a tee. The team graciously declared Jessie and me to be honorary Peaches.
When I asked to accompany the team to a tournament in Utah, the team arranged for me to go. Gail had me coach third base. We won a bronze medal. For me the team joined me at the heart. Now as my hand holds this baseball, past and present converge, and what I feel is love.
Denver, Colorado © 17 October 2016
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