Baseball

Have you read the book or seen the movie 'Field of Dreams' based on building a field in a cornfield?

Maybe 'The Natural'? About an older baseball player who finally hits it big?

I thought they were okay too.

I wanted to play baseball my whole life. My father had to work for a living but he had been well known in his high school for his athletic prowess on and off the field.

He purloined a city traffic cone where he worked when I was four, setting it up in the back yard. He then placed a whiffle ball on top, handed me a plastic bat and told me to get to work. I did well, by the second day I hit it almost one out of five tries. I was proud, he was mad.

I figured out by the end of that summer baseball was not going to be my forte.

As I got older I was good at all the math involved. I could tell you that if you used a certain size bat and hit it with a certain amount of force in a certain spot the ball would travel a certain distance, I just couldn't be certain to hit the ball at all. I could give you all the stats on our local teams and even the big city's farm league.

Took awhile to find out that dad could not accept I was not 'gifted' in the athletic ways he was. I had, among other things, dyslexia and a touch of being cross-eyed but my biggest problem with it was I had been born a girl, ummm, a naturally top-heavy girl. I out did my mother before I was thirteen.

I did work the high-school scoreboard for my full four years of home games, along with Amanda Steward, she was a frustrated want-to-be cheerleader. Next to the last game of my Junior year Mike hit a screamer. I know, I was the one screaming as I fell the whole two feet to the ground when he beaned me.

He was my boyfriend until then, I know he did it on purpose.

Now? I work some adds for a secret lingerie company and a few other well knowns, but every weekend I go to the ballpark to watch the games and dream the dreams that never came to be.