The Conversation

I was walking into a store this morning when I passed a presumably attractive young woman as she was getting out of her car. I say presumably because although a quick glance was cast in her direction, I most certainly did not check her out*, because I am a married man who does not subscribe to that sort of lecherous behavior**.

*Also, because I had switched out my sunglasses for my regular glasses before exiting the car, and it was so bright out that I couldn’t see much of anything anyway. The truth sounds considerably less noble, doesn’t it?

**When I typed “behavior” the first time, I accidentally spelled it with a “u”: behaviour. I felt quite British, and to be honest, a little dangerous, for a moment there.

After that cursory glance, I continued on my way to the crosswalk, which I hate because it’s like nine miles long. You can start running across when the coast is clear and still get hit by a car before reaching the other side. I wish I could just get in my car and drive from one side to the other, but I can’t because then I would have to park the car on the sidewalk, and with my luck, there’d be a ticket when I got back even though I was just running inside for five freakin’ minutes.

But I digress.

I was about halfway across the crosswalk, about to stop off for a drink of water and maybe a snack before continuing my hike, when all of a sudden, the presumably attractive young woman began speaking to me*.

*I’m pretty sure she didn’t have one of those Bluetooths in her ear. I hate those things. They’re evil. Although the presence of one here would certainly make this story better.

“It’s SO WINDY OUT,” she said. “I HATE when it’s windy out.”

As anyone who knows me can imagine, this took several seconds to process. My conversation skills are bad enough when I’m expecting someone to speak to me; a presumably attractive young woman attacking me verbally from behind with small talk was just unfair.

Once those several seconds had passed, I decided to add to the impromptu conversation by saying the first thing that came to mind.

“Yeah.”

In retrospect, the look on her windblown-hair-surrounded face was priceless, a combination of “Is that it?” and “How exactly do you expect me to respond to that?” She regrouped fairly quickly though, smiled, and proceeded to her destination without another word. And after a few minutes of kicking myself for my brain freeze, I realized something: I still had a wife to go home to, someone who knows and appreciates my inability to carry on a conversation consisting of more than three turns with any degree of consistency. So I’ve got that going for me.*

But clearly, if she ever kicks me to the curb (or, as I like to say, when), I’m in trouble.

*Of course, this is the same woman who just told me that instead of buying a Christmas tree this year, we should just bring up the small artificial tree and “spray some Pine-Sol.” The lesson, as always, kids, is this: be careful who you meet on the internet.

The Beer

I was standing in Papa Gino’s tonight, waiting for one of the gentlemen I was with to finish up his conversation so we could leave, when an attractive blonde twenty-something caught my attention.

“Are you in line, sir?” she asked innocently. I told her I was not and she moved along, ordering her pizza or sub or whatever while it slowly dawned on me what had just happened: she called me SIR. There are people that I encounter in my life that I call SIR. These people are generally much older than I am. Ergo, she thinks I am old.

There’s no way of knowing with any certainty, but I’d like to think that at that very moment, my mood went from, “Well, this has been a shitty couple of days,” to, “Well, this has been a shitty couple of days. I need beer.”

The funny thing about this is that I don’t even really like beer all that much, and drinking it at home, where I inevitably make it through one or two before tiring of the taste and moving on to more exotic beverages like milk and flavored water, is highly unlikely to result in me becoming drunk enough to forget the reasons I bought it in the first place. (That might be the longest sentence I’ve ever composed.) Maybe it’s just that sometimes, just BUYING beer is enough to make it feel as though I’m addressing the problem in an unhealthy manner, which is really all that matters.

So after a couple stops on the way home (including one AT home, to use the facilities; the store is only a mile away so it’s worth the additional comfort), I rolled into Stop & Shop and headed for the beer aisle. (How much beer do I not drink? I’ve been going to this store for at least three years. I think I had been in the beer aisle once.)

After some consideration of the more exotic offerings – oooooh, Natural Ice? It must be organic! – I decided not to buy anything that sounded interesting for fear it wouldn’t quite hit the spot and leave me out somewhere between eight and ten dollars. This was an alcohol purchase for the sake of feeling better about my problems, not for making me remember the consistent tenuousness of my financial situation. With that in mind, I ventured down to the far end of the aisle, to the domestic beers, where I could take the first steps toward proud ownership of a six-pack of Bud Light bottles.

The whole time I was doing this I was wondering if I would get carded at the register. Blondie thought I was old enough to be her grandpa, apparently, so it seemed like a good possibility. I considered it while picking up a bag of Fritos Scoops (can you believe the price of a bag of chips these days? $3.99 – and they were on sale?! Outrageous!), and considered it some more while picking up a container of Helluva Good Ranch dip.

As I approached the register, I decided to leave it to the cashier’s discretion. Pulling my debit card from my wallet and my Stop & Shop card from my pocket, I laid myself at her mercy. The following is a rough transcript of the conversation that ensued:

CASHIER: [scanning the beer] Can I just see your ID please?

ME: You flatter me. Somebody called me “sir” earlier and it made me feel old.

CASHIER: You were born the year I graduated college. You’ve got a lot of years left.

ME: God willing.

CASHIER: Don’t worry, it only gets worse.

ME: Oh, I know. And the days I remember that are the days I buy beer.

CASHIER: I go with the wine.

So I left the store, content in the knowledge that I’m not the only one being sucked down by the soulless vortex called life.

Sorry, I don’t know what that means. I’m on number two and starting to feel a little lightheaded. Almost time to switch to water.

The Curse

For a long time, my son didn’t really talk. At his three-year checkup last summer, he was diagnosed with developmental and speech delays and referred to our local school district for evaluation and placement.

He began attending a twice-weekly preschool class in December, and after an initial adjustment period, his use and understanding of language has flourished. Just last week, we engaged in a spirited discussion about which television show he wanted to watch (the highlight was when he insisted on Scooby Doo, which forced me to put it on C-Span until he changed his tune), and at the grocery store over the weekend he told me we needed to buy cheese, peas, and musical jumping beans in order to make rocket soup. So there’s been some improvement in that area.

This is great on a number of levels, of course, but there is one major adjustment that has had to be made: the language my wife and I use. I’m not the most foul-mouthed person I know, but I do employ more than the occasional f-bomb…and a-hole…and s-bomb (that sounds stupid; why is there no good shorthand way to say that I say “shit”?). For the most part, we haven’t had to worry about little ears picking up the naughty words we say and a little mouth repeating them. Now, we do.

My wife and I were playing Words With Friends tonight, coming down the homestretch, while our son finished up his second viewing of Cars 2 and played with Lightning McQueen, Finn McMissile, and Mater on the living room floor (I think he’s actually working on the script for Cars 3). I had a pretty good lead until she played “pounced” across two Double Word spaces for a score of 69 and a 36 point advantage. I closed the gap to one, she surged ahead again with another solid total, and it appeared she had the game in hand.

Only, she didn’t. After I played an “it/at” combo by dropping a single “t” into a corner, just to pick up a couple points without substantially changing the board, she fired back with “eyes” for seven points. It was clear that she was just trying to clear her letters and seal the win, but in doing so, she put an “e” in perfect position between Triple Letter and Triple Word spaces. And, as luck would have it, I had a “j” (worth ten points) and the letters to make an actual word.

The result: “Jeer”, for 99 points and the game.

I hid a smile as she asked if I had played yet (we’re quite impatient with one another while playing a game when in the same room; it tends to turn into the Speed Version of Words With Friends) and awaited her reaction. It didn’t disappoint.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said.

That was to be expected. She’s been swearing at me for almost twelve years now. Twelve glorious years. What I wasn’t really expecting was the four-year-old voice that chimed in from the peanut gallery.

“You pucking kidding me?” he said (the letter “f” still gives him some trouble). Then, as my wife and I looked at each other and struggled mightily to avoid bursting into laughter, he said it again. “You pucking kidding me?”

My wife tried to be the bad guy - “No, Mama shouldn’t have said that. That’s not something you say.” – but he was undaunted. “You pucking kidding me…you pucking kidding me…you pucking kidding me…?” Finally, I managed to swallow a laugh and repeat what my wife had said. He eyed me for a second, considering it, the words on the tip of his tongue, before deciding that this wasn’t a limit he wanted to test. His voice dropped into a low growl that he uses when he’s being funny.

“Okay.”

Crisis averted, this time. But clearly, we’re going to have to start working on our euphemisms.

The Abandoned House

Down the street from my apartment, right next door to the Fred Fuller Gas & Propane Co. and within spitting distance of the new Chinese restaurant that used to be Elisha’s, is a house that I’ve often thought would make a great first home for my wife and son and I. It has obviously been vacant for quite some time, with knee-high grass in the front that was only recently cut down to nothing, and you can tell from the street that the building itself is a wreck inside and out, but it’s a nice enough place with a big side yard and a good location on the main drag. If nothing else, the place has potential.

It first caught my attention one day when I was walking by on the way to the store. I made a mental note of the address – the faded numbers above the front door appeared to say “140” – and looked it up when I got home.

While my original search turned up information on the street’s other abandoned house, a beautiful little place across the street that would be perfect if only it had a kitchen (like many houses in the area, it had apparently been converted to a business at some point, and businesses typically don’t require full kitchens; this really only becomes a problem when you then have to try passing the house off as a residence again), there was nothing on that mysterious little rundown building that intrigued me so. I didn’t pursue it; we were not, after all, in the market for a house. It was merely a bit of whimsy with which to distract myself from time to time.

About a week ago, I made a late evening trip down to Shaw’s to buy some fudge. I love fudge. After proceeding directly to the bakery and procuring a pound of the stuff, I decided to wander around the store for a few minutes to see if there was anything else I needed. As I passed the newspaper rack, a headline on the front page of The Cabinet caught my eye:

Brother of Milford homicide victim say it’s time family had answers*

*That’s the headline on the web version of the story. I don’t know that the print version was exactly the same, but I know it was similar.

I started to continue on my aimless travels before curiosity got the better of me and I stopped to read the beginning of the story about an unsolved murder in my cozy little town:

MILFORD – It’s been eight years since police found Paul Herlihy’s body in his Nashua Street home and eight years since an autopsy determined his death was a homicide.

No one has ever been charged in the crime, and no suspect, weapon or motive was ever identified. Authorities said the cause of death has been withheld for investigative reasons.

Now Bill Herlihy of Milton, Mass., says the family is tired of waiting for answers as to how and why his 51-year-old brother died in the summer of 2003.

Paul Herlihy, an antiques dealer and Massachusetts native, had been dead for several days when he was found inside 425 Nashua St. on Aug. 27, 2003, after a family member asked police to check his welfare. He had moved to Milford that winter, intending to open an antiques shop in the house.

Well then. My first thought was that my wife and I were engaged at the time Mr. Herlihy was killed, living just a couple miles away with her parents in Amherst, and I had absolutely no recollection of this incident. I’m quite observant.

My second thought was that this HAD to be the house down the street, the one I wanted to buy on the cheap and raise my family in.

In all the times I’ve walked and driven past this house, it never occurred to me to double check the address. The 140 was right there above the door, a bit faded by the elements but plain for anyone to see, and I never questioned the fact that it was way too far from the Oval, where I’m assuming the low numbers are, to actually be such a low number.

Confirmation was easy enough. Tuesday, I walked down to that Chinese place, Cherry Blossom, and checked the number on the house next door on the way. It was 433. A Google search for Fred Fuller Oil & Propane revealed that it is located at 419 Nashua St. So the location of this terrible murder was one of four places: a nice little home with a well-manicured yard; an oil and propane business; the hospital across the street; or the dilapidated white house that looks like it hasn’t been lived in for, oh, eight years. Hold on, I’m gonna puzzle over this for a while. I’ll get back to you when I figure something out.

After I realized that this was, indeed, the scene of the crime, I found myself wondering about its status, what will happen to it when the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit finally cracks the case.

“It’s still a decent little place,” I thought to myself. “I wouldn’t mind living there.”

Immediately after thinking this, of course, I slapped myself across the face. Hard. I’ve seen plenty of horror movies - it’s probably my favorite genre – and how many horror movies focus on THIS EXACT PREMISE? Violent crime occurs in a home, family moves into said home, weird shit starts happening, family flees in terror. The Amityville Horror, anyone? My wife loves Ryan Reynolds*. She would love nothing more than for me to BE Ryan Reynolds. But I’m pretty sure she does not want to me to be the Ryan Reynolds who makes the questionable decision to move his family into a haunted house.

*I don’t know how she feels about James Brolin.

Even after that, I found myself thinking, “This is just nonsense. Stuff like that only happens in the movies. Haunted houses aren’t real.” And I had to punch myself in the face again, because that is EXACTLY WHAT THE PROTAGONIST OF THESE MOVIES ALWAYS SAYS! “Haunted? Pfffffft. Please. I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost.” Then a week later, the entire family has moved halfway across the country because they refuse to go back into that house.

No thank you. I think I’ll stick with my apartment for now.

The Soccer Goal

For the past two months, my son has played on a U-6 soccer team in our local rec league. It’s his first foray into organized sports, and the results have been mixed. Sometimes he takes part in the entire practice, then refuses to play in the mini-game. Sometimes he does both. Sometimes he does neither. Sometimes he just wants to chase around the one little girl he holds in higher regard than all others.

(He’s so much like his daddy in this way that it’s frightening: he follows her around like a puppy and makes every effort to stand rightnext to her at all times, and she’s basically just like, “Okay, dude, leave me alone.” Get used to the reaction, kiddo, it’s how we roll.)

His attitude and ability are somewhere in the middle of the road. Our team has a couple kids who never show up, a couple who just kind of go out and chase the ball around (this is where my boy fits in, when he actually plays), a couple who don’t have immense natural talent but play hard and do well, and one who is the total package.

From the first practice, we could see how impressive this kid was. It’s not just natural ability – although GOOD LORD he can fly; more often than not, he simply outruns everyone else on the field – he obviously gets a ton of practice at home.

One thing he doesn’t do well is finish. Every week is the same story: our star player gets in the game, gets the ball, charges down the field, and shoots. Sometimes he makes it, sometimes he doesn’t. That’s not really a concern, of course – most five-year-olds don’t exactly possess deadly accuracy when it comes to putting the ball in the net (and these are small nets). And that’s generally what it is, an accuracy issue: he streaks down the field, kicks the hell out of the ball, it misses the net completely, goes out of bounds, and play stops.

Today, however, was a little different. At one point, he broke away like usual and fired a shot on goal. It didn’t go wide, though, and somehow ended up sitting right at the edge of the net. This was outside the normal routine, so nobody did anything. The kid who kicked the ball turned and headed back to defend the goal kick, as he usually would. One of the other kids started to do the same thing. The opposing team just kind of hung around, probably waiting for the coach/referee to grab the ball, even as parents and spectators on the sidelines shouted to all of them all at once to go get the ball.

And then something really awesome happened. Our third player (we generally play three-on-three, unless the opposing coach is feeling frisky and suggests adding a fourth), a little tiny peanut of a girl who almost never touches the ball, sprang into action. From about ten feet away, she ran as hard as she could to the ball, which was still chilling at the goal line, reared back, and blasted it into the back of the net.

That would have been great enough, but her reaction made it even better: she turned around, big smile on her face, and spread her arms wide in a gesture that could only be interpreted as, “Sup, bitches! How you like me now?” before sauntering back to the other end of the field (still smiling) and flashing her mother a thumbs-up. She knew she did good and she celebrated accordingly.

What made this so fun to watch was it's rarity. That star player who’s better and faster than everyone else? He’s gonna score lots and lots of goals before he’s done playing soccer. Sometime in the next couple years, he’ll learn to control the ball much better and before we know it, he’ll be punching holes in the back of the net on a regular basis. Watch him play and you know this to be true.

That little girl, though? I don’t know if she had touched the ball in a game all season. She certainly hadn’t scored a goal. She may never score another one. But today she got the chance and she did.

Bad Advice...Maybe

Midway through my sophomore year of college, I sat in a professor’s office and listened to some of the strangest, if not the worst, advice that I have ever received.

I was a business major. Thirteen years have passed since that decision was made, and I’m still not entirely sure what made me think I would be a good businessman. It was probably a movie or something – we watched “The Godfather” in my Latin class either junior or senior year, so it’s entirely possible that my teenage brain saw that and thought, “Money, power, success – yes, yes, yes.” Good thing we didn’t watch “Scarface”.

Funny thing is, I think I picked a major before I picked a school. (To say this whole process was not well thought out would be a huge understatement.) When the time came for that, I operated with two considerations in mind: one, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere “far away” (so said my older sister in response to a mailing I received from USC; she refused to bid adieu to her “comic relief”) and I wasn’t to let money stand in the way of my decision. My father was a firefighter, my parents by no means wealthy, but it was understood that if I wanted to go somewhere, they would make it work.

As has become the standard in my life, I procrastinated, and am fairly certain that the only school I ended up gracing with an application was Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts. WNEC was three hours from home (two if my brother was driving; he took it as a personal challenge to get me down there as quickly as possible) and within minutes of extended family: my godmother and her family lived in Springfield, and other cousins, aunts and uncles were in Windsor Locks and Enfield, Connecticut. Had I treated it as such, WNEC could have been like a second home.

It never worked out that way, mainly because I discovered that I’m not good at establishing and maintaining connections with people, even family members. I suspect that my godmother and her husband have always been slightly offended by the fact that I rarely sought them out during my time in Springfield, much like my in-laws are often unhappy that I appear to not want to spend “quality time” with them. Honestly, in both instances, it’s not them, it’s me. I just tend to be happy when I’m alone, probably because I wasn’t hugged enough as a child.

Still, the idea of home held a powerful allure - my family was still on the New Hampshire Seacoast (that shouldn’t be past tense – my family IS still on the New Hampshire Seacoast) and my closest friends still lived in the area and went to school at Plymouth State - so I decided to leave WNEC and transfer. The plan at first was to join Jason and Meredith at Plymouth, but that became complicated when I met my future wife just before the semester break my sophomore year. After much bumbling on my part, I decided that instead of transferring to Plymouth, I would be taking my talents to the University of New Hampshire (even that didn’t go smoothly – I originally transferred to UNH’s Manchester campus, then to the main campus in Durham). As part of the deal, I also planned on changing majors from General Business (code for, “I’m a business major but have no idea what I actually want to do”) to History. It eventually included a concentration in Religious Studies, though I wish I’d gone with something more relevant to my interest in sports, such as 20th century American history. But that part is neither here nor there.

All of this brought me to that professor’s office in...oh, it must’ve been in February 2000. The second semester of my sophomore year had just started and because I hadn’t actually finalized my plan to transfer (actually, this suggests that I actually had some semblance of a plan; my general modus operandi has always been, “Fail to plan, plan to…wait, what was I saying?”) when I chose my spring classes, and so I ended up with some 300-level business class that was required for business majors, but wasn’t a core class and wasn’t useful for my post-transfer major. It really didn’t matter at all for the future, so when I realized how much work was involved – we had to do, like, a BUSINESS PLAN and stuff - I arranged to speak with the professor during his office hours.

We sat in his office and I explained why I wanted to drop his class. He looked at me for a moment, then said, “You know, generally when someone gets two years into a degree program, we recommend that they see it through to the end.”

‘Scuse me? Not sure I caught that. Did you just say that even though I decided I don’t want to study business anymore, that even though it doesn’t hold the slightest interest for me, that even though I’ve come to the sudden and sad realization that I will never be an honest version of Michael Corleone, I should continue working toward a business degree just because I’ve already put in two years (most of which were core classes that people in any major had to take, incidentally)? Did I understand that right? Because that’s pretty much the worst advice anyone has ever given me. Here’s the drop form. I think you’re supposed to sign on this line right here.

I didn’t say that of course. I only thought it. But the sentiment still holds true a decade later. Sure, he was probably trying to say that once you get two years into something – anything, really – you want to think long and hard before you throw it away on a whim. Maybe he was just testing my resolve; in that case, I can dig it. Or maybe he was trying to keep the business school from losing its most promising student*; in that case, ‘twas a valiant attempt, Professor So-and-So. But not this time. The combined lure of history and New Hampshire were simply too great.

*My first semester GPA my sophomore year was 2.46, so this might not be true.

Of course, the rest of the story should be obvious. I transferred, took a semester off, changed my major, and graduated from UNH in 2 ½ years. In the eight years since, I have used my degree for…well…okay, not much. It’s helped me land a few jobs (including an internship at the Baseball Hall of Fame – one of the directors noticed Religious Studies on my resume and, having studied that in college herself, decided I was worth a phone interview) and probably made people think I’m somewhat smarter than I really am, when all it really does is show that common sense is not required to obtain a bachelor’s degree. So maybe that professor was right – I could’ve stuck with business, earned my degree a year earlier, and followed the exact same professional path (which is roughly equivalent to that “Bridge to Nowhere” up in Alaska, but I digress). Brilliant!

The Triple

I hit four triples in eighteen games as a high school junior, a positively Wilsonian pace that may lead to the assumption that I was fast. This assumption would be false. While I suppose it could be said that I had something that, at times, vaguely resembled speed, the main reason for all those three-baggers was our home field. Unlike the varsity field, which was completely enclosed (though with relatively small dimensions that once led a visiting player to lament that he could have hit twenty homeruns a season if he played half his games there), the jay-vee field I played on as a junior had just a short section of chain-link fence located three hundred-plus feet from home plate in straightaway right field. Anything hit to the left of right-center became subject to playground rules: run as far as you can and hope they don’t throw you out. There was a lot more Hank Greenberg than Carl Crawford in my triples.

Swinging from the left side of the plate, I was a pull hitter, but not a dead-pull hitter; the majority of my blasts – and as the high school version of a Quad-A player, I hit a few that season – traveled to right-center, just missing the homerun fence and rolling near a set of practice football goalposts several hundred feet from home plate. Though I would have loved to stand there in the box and admire my handiwork, the act of ball striking bat was just the beginning. Once that happened, I still had to run hard out of the box, moving just as fast as my short little legs would carry me (as a sophomore, one of my teammates watched me run and christened me “Scooter” because my feet barely left the ground), and try to figure out how far I could make it. Often, the result was a double. But on four very special occasions, everything fell into place, and either my coach or myself thought that I could take three. We were always right: I was never thrown out at third.

Of those four triples, I can remember two with some clarity. The first was one that I’ve written about before; it came in the middle innings, broke up a no-hitter, ignited an eight-run rally, caused my father to say out loud that he was proud of me (the only time I remember that happening), and ranks as one of my finest athletic achievements. I have some pretty good reasons for remembering it as well and as fondly as I do.

The second triple, I remember for a somewhat different reason. That was the one where I almost inadvertently castrated the opposing third baseman.

The game situation, unfortunately, has been almost completely lost to memory. All I can recall is that we were playing Pinkerton Academy and I hit one deep to right-center. I want to say that we were way ahead at the time and I didn’t need to try for the extra base, but that might be wrong. Pinkerton was usually pretty good; it’s hard to imagine us beating up on them. I’m almost positive that my coach tried to hold me up at second; if that first thought holds true, that we had a big lead, this would make sense – he wasn’t the sort of coach who derived any great joy from humiliating an opponent. Whether I’m right or wrong, though, it’s likely that he threw up his hands in the international gesture for “Stop running now or you will likely be out” mainly because if I did not stop running there, I would likely be out. It makes sense, in retrospect.

Now, I’m pretty open about the fact that I am not a fast thinker. Give me a few minutes to let my brain relax and puzzle through a problem on its own, without outside interference or pressure, and I’ll often arrive at a logical conclusion. Ask me to do the same in a few seconds and my brain closes the blinds, locks the doors, and hands the keys to my instincts, which are no better than George Costanza’s.

As luck would have it, baseball requires some snap decisions. It had burned me more than once in the past, often on plays in the outfield (when the centerfielder would call me off a fly ball, I’d hear him shouting, but my brain wouldn’t clue my body in to the change of plans fast enough to react appropriately), but we were about to take it to a whole new level, my brain and I.

A year or so before, during offseason football workouts, I had run a forty-yard dash in five seconds flat. The distance between second and third base, of course, is ninety feet, or thirty yards. Using some sort of math something-or-other, I figured out that it should have taken me roughly 3.75 seconds to get from one base to the next, not counting the fact that I had a full head of steam rounding second, the wide turn around the bag, or the slide that would surely be necessary to get me safely into third. So let’s round it off and call it four seconds.

About halfway down the line – two seconds into this mess, two seconds to go – I realized that I would definitely have to slide. This is where my brain betrayed me by trying to think on the base paths. See, every time I had ever slid up to this point (and I had been playing baseball for almost ten years), I had gone in feet first. Every single time, in my entire life. There was no reason to think that this situation should be handled any differently. But as I approached third with my blazing speed, the junior senator from my cerebral cortex asked to be recognized, and was granted the floor.

“Hey, remember that old picture of Pete Rose diving headfirst into the base?” he said. “He was like three feet off the ground, hair flowing behind him, totally stretched out. That was fucking badass. We should try that.”

Various other sections of my brain began throwing stuff at the idiot who put this idea up for discussion. Precious seconds were lost as I leaned forward slightly, almost giving in to the idea before thinking better of it. It took just a split second to remember that I am not graceful and going headfirst would probably result in one of the ugliest plays in the history of the sport.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really have a split second to spare. That small consideration, to dive or not to dive, had already delayed me far too long, so that by the time I decided on the good old-fashioned feet-first maneuver, I was practically on top of the base.

The third baseman was just hangin’ around, chillaxin’, waiting there with the ball (which had arrived some time earlier; Coach was right, I should’ve held at second), when I came rolling in. Because I was so close to the bag when I started my slide, I was still sort of half-standing when I got there. And because he was standing pretty much on top of the bag when I arrived, just waiting to tag me and send us both on our way, my knee kinda-sorta scored a direct hit on his junk.

His reaction was about what you’d expect: he immediately dropped to the ground and writhed around in pain (he also dropped the ball, so I was safe) before reaching into his pants, pulling out his cup, and dropping it on the ground (okay, so I’m not sure I was fully expecting that last part). My coach came over to see if he was okay and told him to breathe – good advice in theory – while his coach ran onto the field, tracked down the umpire, and started complaining that my failure to slide constituted interference and I should be called out. So everyone clearly had his priorities in order.

Our trainer came down and checked the kid out, then parked him on the ground next to his bench with an ice pack. As luck would have it, I was playing first base and the visiting bench was along the first base line, so on my way onto the field at the start of the next inning, I stopped off to apologize and make sure he was okay. After the game, my brother and I caught the team bus before it left, with the intention of once again saying sorry – the way I look at it, you can never apologize too much for a nut-shot. The coach met us outside the door. I told him why I was there, and he started telling me again why I should’ve been called out. He might have been having trouble grasping what was really important in this situation.

In the end, I’m not sure what happened to that kid, though it’s probably worth noting that in the last game of my senior year, we played Pinkerton, and I hit a homerun that just barely cleared the fence on the varsity field. It was so close, in fact, that the rightfielder actually ran into the fence because he thought he had a play on the ball. I can’t decide which idea tickles me more: that it could’ve been the same guy or that in the span of a year I was harder on the Pinkertons than Ben Wade.