We’re picking up from last week where I was stuck at home studying science, a subject I had no capacity for, and then had run all the way back to school, hoping some semblance of a ball game was still on. But I was about to see more than I had bargained for…
Way down deep where a willow root meets reason, pieces I hadn’t understood at the time came together and began to make a whole picture. I wanted to yell across the field, when I saw them two love birds together, my teachers both, and yell out something that would ruffle their feathers and it was all I could do not to. I’m glad I didn’t though because if I hadda I wouldn’t have seen that flashback of me on the field catching that once in a lifetime ball and all the things that happened after, and the reason I got that C from Dadburny. I would have gone right past that picture in my own head and gone into science the next day the same way I came out, ready to light a fire, mad at the world, but I didn’t.
Instead, what happened in right field replayed itself down to the last detail, and like I said, made sense of everything forever.
First off, you gotta understand that recess bell meant we were out the door for baseball. You gotta know that was all of what was on our minds. We had to be excused of course, but when my lunch table was dismissed and that, I found David Upland, the biggest kid in the fifth grade, and stayed right behind him, straight out to the ball field. I had to give him my package peanuts for it, but it was worth it because walking behind him was like having a bulldozer in front of you. There wasn’t anyone gonna bet in front of David Upland and beat us out to the ball field.
So, about the time jacket weather came in and we were out on the playground rotating around, dodging the puddles to make a catch, we found ourselves looking at a brand-new batter one day. It was Dadburny. He was on lunch duty that week and had decided he could take a turn at bat anytime he felt like it, and not to be surprised, I noticed his lady, the one with the soft elbows, was out there with him, pretending to grade papers, and hooting for him like a cheerleader.
This wasn’t rocket science, no sir, what I was watching.
Dadburny came up to the plate like he owned it, carrying, mind you his own bat. That bat wasn’t wooden either like from our gym class but made of the same thing they make rocket ships out of. Rumor had it that NASA make it for him from a combination of nitroglyceride and Boron, which turned out to be one of those periodicals on the table that would blow up like lighter fluid if you jingled it, which explained why he could hit it so far.
Anyway, Dadburny waltzed up to the plate, looking over at his gal, his prized possession with her dress flowing in the spring breeze. He had his sleeves rolled up and his tie tucked down in his shirt, and began to hit pop flies out to us, the whole crowd who’d seen him come up to bat and come running. Nobody pitched the ball to Dadburny either. He pitched to hisself! Toss the ball up a little outa one hand, then clock it clean out near the fence every time.
Every day on his duty, pop up after pop up, he’d knock the cover off the ball and it would sail towards the fence, become like a dot in the sky and sometimes land in the crossing guard’s yard across the street. What’s worse for those of us trying to get under it, he’d hit it straight into the sun, so kids would run like Jim Thorpe to get under it, knocking each other down, stepping on the first graders, yelling “I got it, I got it, It’s mine, it’s mine, look out and so forth and so on and what have you, and then when that ball started its accel-er-i-zation down like an arrow towards our hands held straight up, it got lost in the sun and came down like an arrow and land with a dead thump in the grass that hadn’t been mowed yet.
We were all there, right under it, a ton of us, every single kid that had ever been at that school and some that hadn’t, were standing there like it was Jesus second coming, and not a one of us could do anything about it when the ball accel-amalated down that last twenty feet.
And then here it comes, the excuses.
“I had it but you got in my way. I called it when it left the bat you idjit, next time I’m pushing you away,” and so forth and so on and what have you. No one dared pick up the ball laying there like a bomb ready to go off, so here we go again with the excuses. And I was joining in with the worst of them.
“Dadburny said it was my turn to catch it, Dadburny said this and he said that and my dad said I could catch it today,” and on and on it went until Dadburny hisself had to put the bat down and come out and keep us from the kind of annihilation piled up on top of one another. It was the biggest, awfullest bunch of whiners you ever saw, and then recess bell rang and we all had to go in dirty from fighting and mad and ready to go home and slam the door on our way in.
Truth was, we were scared to death of those pop flies. And Dadburny could hit them like no tomorrow, one after another. They left his aero-nautical baseball bat like vengeance in a bottle, and they went up and up and up. Whatever wind repellant or resistance on the chapter on the physics of flight in the science book went right out the window and broke every rule. Man, how those pop ups flew!
And truth, there was no way on God’s green Earth any of us had the guts to get underneath one of them and catch it. Kids would beg him to hit one right to them, and I tell you he would! Right to them on the nose, with strict instruction for the rest of us to let Jamie, or Sally catch it. Here it come down, and they’d step away at the last instant, just like the rest of us, right when they could have stuck their hand out and caught it with their eyes closed. It was pitiful cowardly.
For us fifth graders that had to put up with him in science, it was even worse. Dadburny, gloating after recess because no one caught his flies again, sat back watching one his projector movies he’d put on so he didn’t have to teach, showing black and white movies from the 1920’s about the production of bombs, and the invention of first Henry Ford automobile, and then we watched another one on the first flight with Wilbur running after the first plane to get off the ground, like what was Wilbur going to do if’n he caught up with that plane? Grab it and hang on for dear life in mid-air? I saw that Kittyhawk film a dozen times, and every time I watched it, I still thought Wilbur’d jump on with Orville and take a ride with this brother. That’s what I would have done. If my brother went up in a paper airplane like they was, I’d grab something, maybe a wheel or the antennae or something and go for a ride! You go all the way out there in the field with your own hand-made airplane and not go up in it with your brother? That just made no sense to all to me.
So, I raised my hand one day and asked Dadburny the question all of us had talked about at lunch and was all thinking.
“Sir, is there more to this film?” I asked him after the film ended, two minutes before the period bell rang.
“No, Jeff. Why do you ask?” he answered.
“I just wondered if both of Wilson and Otis ever went up together at that first flight at Kittyhall.”
“It was Wilbur and Orville at Kittyhawk. And the answer is no, that’s a silly question, and the film is over,” he said looking right through me. Then he went over to the door, leaned out and looked down the hall to see if Mis Flimsy was out there with a new dress on, while I sat with no answer to my first science question ever.
So, with science there, and Kittyhawk and flight and the Russians attacking us down in Cuba at a missile conference, we kids were pretty riled up by the time it came to the ball field and catching one of Dadburny’s interstellar pop flies. We loved baseball, but we were scared to death of being clocked in the head and being laid up forever with dane bramage and such like. It was a fear we had, and it built and built all week because we knew Dadburny would be hitting those flies higher than the ones he hit yesterday. All the power he could bring to the science was on the speed and trajectory God could muster. I read about it every single solitary day after school on account of that C, with Grandma right there. Rate times time, xylem and phloem and all kinds of rocket science behind it. I had read so much science that his pop flies had science written all over them. They weren’t even part of baseball I had read so much. They was just pure science, Astro-man-omical feats of space and time, calculated by my Grandma and me.
So I told her about it one day. It was on a Thursday, the day before the last day Dadburnit would be on duty. She met me there at the gate after school, like always and, for once, I couldn’t wait to get started on the science. I told G’ma the whole story about the baseball pop flies, and how I’d like nothing more than to catch one.
“How do I do it, Grandma? Every kid in the world is out there, and the ball comes down so fast.”
“Well, let’s see if there is anything in the science book about catching a ball,” she said handing me a cookie.
And sure enough, in the chapter on flight, there was a small picture off to the side of a little kid hitting a baseball out of Fenway Park, like an old souvenir postcard you’d find in the bottom of a box.
“Here, look at this, would you,” she said and pointed to the diagram. Underneath, in small italics, G’ma read the words out loud: “An object falling has no power against the unparalleled force of gravity. There it is,” she said, pointing to the picture, “there’s your answer.”
“Does that mean gravity is more powerful as that baseball comes down?” I asked, frustrated.
“Yes, it does. It’s coming down with gravity behind it. The closer that baseball gets to you, the more the earth pulls it down harder. It’s a fact of science,” she said, “so if you want to catch that ball, you have to go up and meet it before gravity has time to grab it away from you. You have to meet the ball,” she said and raised her hand up like she was out there stopping the ball herself, which she would never do in a million years. But I got her message like a missile meets the nanny and it took hold with me.
The next day was Friday, and the last day Dadburny would have duty outside. All our gear was out there on home plate, ready for the rotation to start, but here comes Dadburny ready to bat again and knock the cover off and embarrass us all as we stood there afraid the ball would come down and bust our heads open.
Tune in next week, friends and baseball fans, for the conclusion of The Catch. I was wishing I’d never even heard of baseball when I first got that C, but as I looked at the whole field from behind the backstop, I saw the mess Dadburny had got hisself into by showing off to Miss Flimsy and not teaching us a darn thing, and you’ll have a front row seat to the replay of it all.