They canceled softball practice today — it was too rainy. And it was my fault, a little: not that it was rainy, but that practice got canceled. Until this morning, I had entered myself in as a “maybe.” Then I woke up. I saw that it wasn’t raining. I felt my knees, my ankles, the fuzziness in my brain. I opened the app and moved myself to a “no.” Then it started raining, and half the team moved their status to “no.”
Almost as soon as I got the email saying it was canceled, I realized that I actually really wanted to go to softball practice today.
I finished the grading that wasn’t supposed to be mine but that I ended up doing anyway. I put on a thick hoodie and my grey Jays hat that I always wear out in the rain. I had to go buy a softball first, because I must have put all of mine somewhere weird when we moved last summer. The softballs that I can no longer find were bought in February 2020, along with a new glove, because I had decided then, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that my life was looking up. I still have the glove, and with it and the new plastic-wrapped softball I took the bus five stops to the big field beside the community center. There was someone in a raincoat with a dog far away on the grass. In the puddle-soaked middle of the dirt softball diamond, there was just me.
If we end up getting to play actual softball games, I am going to be pitching. It turns out that adults in recreational softball, like the kids I played with in recreational softball fifteen years ago, don’t really want to pitch. I never understood this as a kid. I still don’t understand it. The two best positions, the battery, were always the ones no one wanted. If I could still catch, I would. But I can only stand for about ten minutes at a time these days before the pain starts really burning. Which is fine — I’m used to it. The kind of pain that would probably result from crouching behind the plate for an hour and a half, I think, would likely be hard to get used to.
There was a big puddle that seemed to be approximately where the rubber would be, and an even bigger puddle that seemed to resemble home plate. I stood sort of to the side of the big puddle, trying to imagine a catcher looming behind the bigger puddle, a batter leaning over it. I tried to remember what it was like when I was ten and actually practiced this stuff. Pause, backswing, stride, release. Sometimes I released the ball too far back — that was always my bad release point, my most common source of wild pitches — and it spun out onto the ground. I did that a bunch of times. When I finally got it right, the ball sailed back to the fence, slamming against it before rolling straight back toward me and into the home plate puddle, where it came to a soggy stop.
It was only in fetching the ball out of the puddle that I could see there really was a plate there, a bit of rubbery white under the layers of dirt and mud and water. The puddle had a bunch of worms in it. I think they might have been dead. I don’t think the softball diamond dirt is a good living environment for them. But maybe some of them are alive, I thought. The dog and the person were long gone. Maybe there’s something alive here with me.
I kept doing that, over and over. A breath, a pitch, and then the little walk to get the ball back from wherever it ended up. Most of the time it didn’t make it to the puddle. My hands turned red, then blue, but they do that anyway. It’s been a month now and my knee doesn’t seem to be getting better. Maybe I’m making it worse by not stopping, but I don’t think I can stop. I don’t know what stopping would look like.
I don’t think I would have been able to play softball back in 2020. I wasn’t myself then — I couldn’t be; I didn’t know who that was, couldn’t find them anywhere. Now, only just now, I’m myself again, and I can play softball — now that I have fatigue and swollen joints, a degenerating spine, the same blood pressure at 24 that my dad had after three heart attacks and a lifetime of smoking and drinking. I always wanted to be in the center of everything, the battery. I want the one perfect action, the trying again and again and again to dig it out from wherever it’s buried in the complex of nerves and muscles and memory and confusion. I thought I saw, in the flecked grey, one of the worms move.
After about an hour, though I wanted to keep going, I made myself stop. I trudged back down to the bus stop. It felt so long this time, even though it was only a few blocks. There is so much calculation to my movements these days: how much is contained in a block, how much would be risked by walking a few more or lost in walking a few less. When I got home, shivering, I fell asleep. I’ll have to call the doctor again tomorrow.