We were still wearing jackets and long pants when we ran outside at recess and found our baseball gear laying on home plate. April air said chilly, and the grass was soggy from the sudden thunderstorms that dumped an inch an hour. Baseball at my public school meant we rotated from right field around through the infield until you got your chance to bat. Sometimes the outs came one after the other, as in a couple of flies and a strikeout. Other times one batter dominated the rotation until the bell rang to go back inside. We didn’t do teams at recess, weren’t allowed to and that, until school was out at three and the teachers went home. That’s when we put on our gloves, picked sides, and chewed the Juicy Fruit we’d been saving all day. That’s when serious ball started, and the minor leaguers from recess went home.
I went home too that spring, because I got a lousy C in science and was grounded from anything after school until I had studied science for a solid hour. For me, that was hell to pay.
My grandmother noticed the agony I felt. She could read it in my face. She didn’t agree with my dad either, that decision to ground me. I knew she didn’t because she was there to meet me at our back gate after school, when I came in looking like spilt milk. We kids were everything to her, so much that she had passed up many a suitor who had come to call on her at our house, passed them up to help us kids grow up. She chose being a grandmother instead, chose to get to know us. She knew my temper, she knew how I liked my toast and that, and she knew about me and baseball in the spring. She knew what missing those after school games did to my insides when I had waited all winter to get my baseball mitt out again. I had a face like a walnut, ready to cry when I got that C, and she hurt right alongside me with that ugly face. One way or the other, even if it meant that she had to learn the periodic tables and whether Krypton had nine molecular molecules or ten, she was going to get me back on that ball field again and let me be a ball player. She was my Kryptonite.
“Come on in, let’s get started,” she’d say, and close the gate and I’d mope into her kitchen, part of a tiny off-apartment in the back of our house, and sit down to study cell division or the food chain in some faroff country I’d never go to. Next to a plate of oatmeal cookies, I learned that I wasn’t that bad at science, that I was worth more than that dang C-grade, and that my grandmother was going to see this thing through. She may not have known one single solitary thing about baseball, but she knew me, and we were like a science team, hand in glove. We read that thick book out loud together. We looked at the complimacated diagrams and then we underlined the important sentences together. Then we copied and underlined them again, this time in red because my grandmother was mad at the whole business, like me.
“G’ma, we can’t mark in the books,” I’d say. “Mr. Dadburny will fine us at the end of the year.”
“Let ‘em fine us,” she’d snarl out loud. “Anyone who gives my grandson a C is gonna get marked up,” and that was how she felt about science book vandalism. What began as my prison after school and boiled over each day as I saw my friends go out to play ball, slowly melted away in the few minutes around her, eating a cookie and marking science up with red at her Formica table. An hour later and not a second more, right when enzymes and protoplasm and metaba-bolism collided in my brain, she told me I was done and could put the book away until tomorrow. And every day after, Monday through Friday, the last thing I heard from her as I blasted out the door with my mitt, was, “Knock ‘em dead!”
Deeper still, what she did by meeting me at the back gate of my miserable science grade, helped me collect my anger towards my father. He wasn’t there helping me memorize the inert gases, but he had big plans for me to go to college, yes he did, andmajor in the organic chem or bio-chem or whatever. From there it would be on to medical school, then, right on schedule, take over his practice tosave people from being sick. It was planned, this whole trip up thedoctor scale, starting not with baseball, but in the pursuit of a medical practice, and something he called a legacy. That was what this grounding was all about, and it all began with good science grades.
For me, my discipline or punishment, or whatever that was, was really rooted down deeper in being out on that ballfield in the spring, a sport my father had no interest in watching or playing. He wouldn’t let us watch it on TV either, thought it was a waste of time. Baseball had no future, he said, and was a game for spectators, so we missed seeing Mickey Mantle and the series and Willie Mayes. Instead, the rotation of the earth on its axis was more important, which I could care less about. I sat slumped, laboring over Science for Thinkers: Observing _the World Around Us, but my mind was rushing back up to the baseball field at school, cutting across the boulevards, hoping the ball game would still be on when I got there. Usually by then, only a few second graders lingered, still waiting for their ride home from day care – not exactly the kind of competition I was looking for.
Late one day, I ran nonstop back to school using every shortcut I knew. No one was left on the ball diamond, but I caught a glimpse of my science teacher, Mr. Dadburny leaving the building late. I quick hid behind the backstop when I saw him come down the side stairs. I could see every detail, and I can tell you he was not carrying his science book anywhere. He wasn’t interested in science. I saw what he was interested in though, and it was my English teacher. She was young and not married, and new to our school, and his hand was lightly pressed on her elbow as he walked her to her car.
It wasn’t the first time I had seen him with her. “Mr. Dadburnit” – the name we called him behind his back – had been wooing this teacher gal since the beginning of the school year with overtures he thought none of us saw. But us kids saw him moving on her, and gossiped about the way he slipped down to her room between passing periods to talk in those low teacher whispers as we went by to our next class. Under his arm he carried a stack of papers to make it look like he was on a copying run but then, he’d stop when he got to her, start up a little chit chat, then compliment her on her dress. Never went any further down the hall with those fake copying papers, so we all knew it was her and not us kids he was working on. And I knew it wasn’t science he was working on either or looking to see if I had written down a two or a three for the H-two-0 water formula on my test. He didn’t look at my paper when he graded it; he had no science written all over him, front to back, and was about as slick as a cat in heat.
“Well, would you look at that,” he’d say, flirting with her between classes, “There’s the bell. I guess I better get back. No telling what the little rug rats will be up to!” Then he’d wink at her, up close, one of those winks that looks stupid, more of a nod-wink, a gesture just shy of what he was building to next. “Time flies when you’re having fun!”
Then his lady friend would smile, and say something, maybe like, “See ya at lunch Mr. D” and let her dress flow some, whereupon he’d lean back up to her and whisper, “Call me Chet, we’re all friends here,” and wink that nod again.
Well, we weren’t all friends. I got a crappy C in science, I couldn’t play baseball after school, and I had a science teacher who was a dadburn flirt. Now, after studying volcanoes, and sound waves, and some unknown planet behind Pluto I had run all the way back up to school and spotted him walking Miss Flimsy out to her car, touching her elbow on the way down the stairs. And it was then I had a flashback and understood something about how the world works, and why I got that C, and why it didn’t matter anymore.
I can tell you Mr. Dadburn-you, he carried no brief case or folder of papers to grade like the other teachers, nothing but his coffee mug in one hand and her on the other. Punched out of his job every day and left it all behind when the bell rang. He had another life, some life that didn’t include one thing about our edumacation or our progress or good grades. He had his meal ticket, yea he did, and he had a gal, Miss Wink-a dink he was working on that he saw every chance he got, like at her fund raisers and that. But he was a fake, a louse, and had no more interest in science or teaching than a rock. He gave grades, yea he did do that, when they were come due, but that’s all he did. He gave them away like candy, and without even thinking about the damage they were doing. They were packaged in plastic, cheap, in bags of a hundred at a time, like half-off Halloween candy at the drug store, and then he’d fling them on the ground for us to fight over like inmates in a prison.
As far as I was concerned, I got my low grade from him for one reason, and one reason only. I’m going to tell you about that and you’ll see how it all came together out on the ball diamond that spring, where the ground was still muddy around the bags and no kid in his right mind would cheat. That was the baseball field where a got my C from.
My average ability in science, I can tell you, had nothing to do with what I knew or what my test scores showed. That C that kept me grounded, it was about what happened one day when I was playing right field at recess, way out where no one ever went except the first graders who played tag. No one hit it out there, but that’s where it all started. And now, seeing the two of them together through the screen of a backstop, and the right field behind them, I knew where my C in science came from.
It was also the moment baseball came to life for me and everything about it, and the dreams I had of rubbing the dirt in my hands and holding that red leather stitching hardball on a cold day, and tagging a bully named Mike Hinkley out at second. And the dream of the one glorious catch I made that one day out in right field, a catch that changed my science edumacation and me… well, really forever.
Tune in next week for Part Two of The Catch, when everything I had knew about Mr. Danburnit and Miss Flimsy and my grounding came together in right field and stole a page out of the baseball handbook that you could never find in any classroom.