Category Archives: Gender & Place

Finding Womanhood

Posted on by under Gender & Place

Dr. Tauer’s appointment schedule is shot. I wait with moist hands, survey the exam room, focus on dirt accumulated on the baseboards, and glance at the Holy Bible placed on a nearby table next to pamphlets arranged like a deck of cards. Women wearing colorful head scarves and wigs are on the cover of a small catalog. An anatomic chart shows a frontal view and cross-section of a woman’s healthy breast: nipple, milk ducts, fatty tissue, and muscle. I cup my right breast, still tender from recent surgery. I nursed my babies. This wasn’t supposed to happen. So much for statistics…

Dr. Tauer knuckle-taps the door, steps inside, and sits on a low stool; knees touch knees, warm hands cover cold hands.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” he says. “But you are healthy.”

Other than having cancer, I think. I appreciate his compassion, but I just want to get on with things. I want to go home.

“When you come in for your first treatment next week,” he continues, “you’ll have labs done first, and then on to the chemo room…” I knew all this from being a nurse, so I sort of tuned out. “…and you’ll have side effects…”

Yes, get on with it. I want to go home…

“…and you will lose your hair.”

I zero in on his Brooks Brothers tie, dotted in navy, knotted even and tidy.

“Love your tie,” I say, as he glances at my life on his computer.

*   *   *   *   *

I bring my face close to the bathroom mirror. My eyebrows are my best feature: low maintenance, nicely arched, no rogue hairs, no sparse areas to fill in like old ladies do with unsteady hands, drawing wobbly, thick lines in Maybelline black.

Faint lines radiate from the skin around my eyes. I smile and the lines squint and deepen, but they aren’t too bad. Given the circumstances, I’m looking pretty good. A woman’s neck gives away her age, but mine is still smooth with just a little droop under the chin. Nothing that a dab of moisturizer won’t hide.

I raise my shoulders, take a deep breath, and pick up the expensive hair brush I bought a couple of months ago at a salon. I attack my scalp, brushing hard. Harder. Thin strands gather in the bristles.

After dividing my hair into sections, I pull each section taut, cut 2-3 inches, moving from section to section. Angry, curt scissors clip, blade against blonde. Swatches drop in the sink. Laying the scissors aside, I inspect my work in the mirror.

I look like Cate Blanchett when she played Queen Elizabeth and chopped off her hair.

No, I look like someone with a very bad haircut...

“Honey, I’m through with the preliminaries,” I call to my husband, Tom. “Just wait ‘til you see step one to a hair-free life.” I put my hands over my face and peek through my fingers as he walks into the bathroom. Dropping my hands, I burrow my face into his chest.

Leaning over the sink, I stare at the shiny drain stopper. My husband guides his whirring beard trimmer over my scalp. Dark stubble from my roots scatters on creamy porcelain.

I hope my head is a pretty shape, without too many knots. Daddy always called me a knot-head.

The whirring stops. I raise my head and look up at Tom. His eyes are edged with tears.

*   *   *   *   *

I crawl into bed shy and tentative, like a bride on her wedding night. Will my lover touch me? Will I please him? Even though the rest of my body is covered with cotton and lace, baldness imparts a feeling of nakedness. I turn on my side away from him, clutching the corner of our quilt, trembling. He pulls me in close and strokes my bare head as he would if my blond tresses were spilling over his hands.

*   *   *   *   *

I sit around a table with five other women going through various stages of cancer treatment. Scarves, wigs, and hats reflect our individuality. I’ve arrived bald, sparkly earrings dangling, wearing a peasant top reminiscent of the sixties, embracing a bit of a rebellious spirit I had secretly wanted when I was younger.

We talk about how we looked before our appearance was altered by the benevolent poison. Laughter and moments of silence mirror the way we feel inside. I describe my pre-cancer hair:  blown-dry, hot curlered, gelled, hairsprayed, and teased on top if humidity threatened to flatten it. Growing up–even as an adult–part of me thought a Southern woman’s identity was in her hair.

We each have our own tabletop mirror, various samples of foundation, concealer, eye shadow, blush, powder, mascara and brow pencil. Volunteers from the American Cancer Society give us tips for applying cosmetics while dealing with the visible signs of chemotherapy treatment.

I begin applying a lighter color of makeup along my jawline, blending it to match the pale color of my skin; a low red blood cell count has robbed me of rosy cheeks.

Oh, my Lord. I peer into the mirror and realize that most of one eyebrow is gone. A lone misshapen eyelash, resembling a small spider’s thin leg, is dangling from a top eyelid. Short, stubby lashes on the other eye are all that remain half-way across the top and bottom lids.

Brows, usually my best feature, have lost their arch. To create a natural look is a challenge. I pick up a pencil as though it were a paint brush and apply a light brown shade with gentle strokes. I call one of the volunteers over to help me.

775713_10152119807977952_1675942785_o(1)“I am afraid I’m going to mess up!” She chooses a darker brown, guides my hand with hers, and we apply it carefully, a light touch to avoid an obvious line. With only a little bit left to work with, I add as much color and beauty as possible, typical Southern woman that I am.

*   *   *   *   *

I stored my shaved hair in a Ziplock bag and tucked it away in an old cookie tin, my treasure box, to keep it as a remembrance. Every now and then, I take the tin down from a shelf in my bedroom’s wardrobe and look at the hair that was scattered in the sink on that day when I felt bereft of femininity.

I imagine someday sitting on the side of my bed next to a granddaughter with the treasure box resting on her lap. Perhaps she will lift the lid and giggle or gasp when she spies the baggie. I will tell her why I kept it, my story of hair lost, but life gained, strengthened by God, family, and friends.

I will run my fingers through her baby-fine hair and hope she’ll grow into a strong woman like me.

*   *   *   *   *

The black-and-white photo of Lisa, above, is by Cellar Door Photography, Memphis, TN.

Lisa bio YAH

Nowhere Near the Sticks

Posted on by under Gender & Place

When the sound first came, it roused me enough to open my eyes and check if my husband was still asleep. It was just after 6 a.m., but his eyes were wide. “Did you hear that?” “Yes.” The sound came again. I pulled myself up on my elbows and looked toward our open windows. The sound had come from the east, from the window that most definitely did not face our chicken coop. Right?

“That’s not my rooster,” I said, and for a moment I believed it.

The crowing came again, tentative and incomplete, but undeniably from the west. “That’s not my rooster?” I asked, weakly. I rolled out of bed and walked to the window facing the coop. Crowing. I came back to bed, pulled a sheet up to my neck, and nodded at my husband.

“Yep, that’s my rooster.”

And then, with every subsequent crow, we doubled up with laughter.  

* * * * *

Pittsburgh Code, Title Nine, Zoning Code, Article V, Chapter 911 stipulates:

For property with a minimum of two-thousand square feet in size, the resident is permitted five chickens or ducks. For every additional one-thousand square feet of property, the resident is permitted one additional chicken or duck, with no other livestock for lots under ten thousand square feet.

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photo by Kham Tran

Also,

Roosters are not permitted.

* * * * *

“So what do we do with it, uhm, him?” I asked, knowing that my husband didn’t know the answer.

We ran through the possibilities: Kill and eat him? No. The kids were teetering toward vegetarianism as it was. We couldn’t chance it. Keep him? No. We could lose the rest of the flock if someone called the urban chicken police. (How does one call the urban chicken police?) Take him back to the farm that sold him to us as a female chick? Maybe. But was that really worth the hour-long drive? Give him to friends and let them do whatever they please with him? Probably. But who?

This was going to take a few days to figure out.

* * * * *

The next morning, I sat in a plastic green chair just after sunrise and watched our exiled rooster pace. The hens were locked up; he was locked out. He wanted to be with the flock, but after he had awoken to his rooster-hood, he began strutting, pecking, and chasing the hens. The smaller birds has stopped eating and hid in the nesting box, like they did during a raccoon attack.

Aggressive masculinity. Unacceptable.

Now the hens were eating again, and the rooster watched them from the other side of the fence. “We’re probably making him neurotic,” I commented to my husband, who had come outside to see what I was doing, “Not allowing him to follow his instincts and all.”  

“Yeah, probably doesn’t matter, though. He’s not staying here.”

“It’s too bad. I like his crow. And he’s a gorgeous bird,” I said, my eyes following the bright ring of feathers around his neck. “If we lived in the country, maybe they’d all figure it out in a bigger space.”

“They’d have to,” he said, “We’d need a rooster to protect the hens if we lived in the sticks.”

Squawk! Feathers flew as the rooster poked his beak though the chicken wire. The hens scattered, and I sighed. Maybe the city ordinance is a blessing. 

Maybe. But I will miss my rooster, if not his bullying behavior. I’ve never had such a wake-up call.  

* * * * *

jen bio YAH

Epilogue: After a chorus of ‘no, thank you’ from friends and a scroll through the ‘Free Rooster!!’ ads on Craigslist, the husband of this story put on his big-farmer overalls and beheaded the beast. A female observer, who had served with the Peace Corps in rural Rwanda, approved his methods and asked to be included in the Coq au Vin feast.

The children and their mother were conspicuously absent that evening.

 

 

Tankini

Posted on by under Gender & Place

I’m flat on my back, soaking up the luxuriousness that is Day One of vacation. My beach towel is freshly laundered and fluffy, my skin free of sunburn, and my bag packed with iced tea, still-crunchy Cheez-Its, and some deliciously unpretentious books.

Version 2For awhile it feels good to just lie here, relearning how to do nothing, but soon I begin to contemplate rolling onto my stomach to crack open a book. To roll over or not to roll over? That is the sort of question you face on a true vacation.

It’s not like shifting from back to tummy is such an ordeal, but it does involve a certain amount of resolve and strategic sand resituating. The butt-shaped hollow I created with a horizontal booty-shake when I first stretched out on my towel will need to be filled in with some sand, while new, boob-shaped divots—much harder to get positioned just right—will be called for. But that iced tea does sound good…

I decide to go for it. One, two, three…I engage and shift muscle and bones, my loose belly coming along for the ride, lagging just a split second behind the rest of me, as it does. Settling myself face down, with a wiggle of my hips to reposition the sand, I say a silent prayer of thanks for whomever invented the tankini.

Since having babies, the tankini has been my swimsuit of choice. The concept is simple, yet genius: the ease of a two-piece in wet-swimsuit-bathroom-scenarios, with the coverage of a one-piece for stretch-mark-riddled tummies.

It’s been nearly two decades since my body underwent the enormous transformation that resulted in the birth of my first daughter, and I’m just beginning to accept that no amount of cocoa butter or yoga or time will erase the marks pregnancy left behind. Time, in fact, seems to be hurting, not helping.

I suspect I’m not alone in this predicament. What else could have inspired and sustained the existence of the sensible tankini? At least the one I’m wearing is somewhat hip—chocolate brown with a sexy halter style top and retro ruching at the hips. Most importantly, I feel comfortable in it, even while rolling from back to tummy, where I now lie, popping Cheez-Its into my mouth.

I look over at my teenage daughters with their bikini-clad, impossibly toned skin, and wonder, “Did I really look like that 30 years ago?” I’ve earned my age, of course—I don’t expect to look 16 again, and I certainly don’t want to be 16. But there is a small tug in me—part vain, part nostalgic—that wishes I was wearing a bikini rather than its modest cousin.

My enlightened daughters tell me what many of you are thinking: I can and should wear whatever I want. It’s a topic that even gets my youngest daughter a bit worked up, and my firstborn goes so far as to proclaim, “You would look so cute in a bikini!”

I love how liberated and affirming my girls are—much more so than I was at their age. I grew up in the 80s, an era of many thin models and very few voices questioning the cultural expectations being set in the pages of teen magazines. Body shaming was both everywhere and nowhere—everywhere in the air we breathed, but also nowhere because “body shaming” wasn’t a phrase anyone used. As a teen, I didn’t hear voices of opposition, calling it what it was.

Now, in my middle age, I’m as troubled by my faint desire to wear a bikini as I am by my hesitation to boldly wear whatever I damn well please. What does it all mean? I suppose it means at least two things: my desire to wear a bikini isn’t all that strong, and being a woman at the beach is a complex thing.

My daughters give me hope, though, for a new generation of women. I marvel at their comfort level, both with their bodies and in standing up for issues. As I watch them get up off their towels to go test the temperature of the lake, I muse, “Where did these amazing girls come from?”

Oh, right: from my puckered belly. It all comes full circle.

That there’s a link between my pregnancies and my stretched-out tummy is no secret, but for years I had somehow isolated the two realities in my mind. That all changed the day I casually complained about my saggy skin to a friend, who suggested plastic surgery.

My anger was immediate, and with it came a burst of clarity: The physical record of my childbearing was not a “flaw” to glibly erase!

Ironically, it was the realization that I could take surgical measures that led me to accept my belly as it is, not as culture dictates it should be. I began to see the excess skin below my belly button, and the rays of scars emanating around it, as a history—a Curriculum Vitae of my body’s experiences and job descriptions: the once-home of my babies, the still-home of my aging self.

That doesn’t mean I’m rushing out to buy a bikini. I’m just feeling a fondness for what is tucked comfortably beneath this trusty spandex: the stretchy first-home to two remarkable young women, whose bodies are on their own journeys. Toned skin and flat stomachs are just the beginning.

I look over at my daughters, reading books on their own towels, and decide to turn myself over once again, taking with me my pouchy, ribboned skin: this record of miracles.

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  *   *   *   *   *

Kristin bio YAH

Powder Room Diplomacy

Posted on by under Gender & Place

The year is 2007 and our bags are packed with “layering tanks” from American Eagle, flat irons to steam our hair into long, flat planks, and short denim skirts. The manufacturers have carefully ripped the skirts to look like the storied clothing item of a ranch hand or someone who has army crawled through a field of barbed wire.

Well, not ALL of our bags share these contents. Mine didn’t.

It’s senior ditch day and I have packed the few items I imagined would be necessary for the sort of girls weekend where we’d eat ice cream out of the carton in between fistfuls of Cheetos: comfortable sweatpants, a swimsuit, and a small bag of hodge-podged toiletries and makeup that I don’t intend on using. photo-1453761816053-ed5ba727b5b7

When the other girls begin to rip open their overnight bags at the bed and breakfast, I realize my mistake. This is not that type of weekend at all. There are seven of us on the trip. Four of the girls are my closest friends at school while the other two are more acquaintances, friends of the others who tend to pull them in a direction where I fit in less.

Even though the temperature is well below swimming weather, the girls insist on shimmying into their bathing suits so we can take pictures on the dock. While my friends wore various iterations of the bikini, I brought what can only be described as a swimsuit designed for moms with ample bosoms. The Lands’ End two-piece is a tasteful navy and features underwire support for D-cup breasts and a control-top skirt designed to tuck in postpartum bellies. Even with these precautions, I nervously tug at the hemline, not having had the appropriate amount of time to tend to my forest of upper leg hair.

I take cues from my friends during the self-timed photos, imitating their pouty lips as we huddle under towels for warmth. I follow just a slight step behind, in the same way I’d slurred along with the lyrics to songs I didn’t know on the car ride up.

After our photoshoot, we decide to go out to dinner. I throw on a pair of jeans and declare myself ready, sweeping back my frizzy hair whispies into a messy bun. As I plop down on the bed to wait for the other girls, the rituals of the powder room begin.

Not only have my friends brought nice outfits for going out, they brought several nice outfits, each with corresponding layers of tanks and cardigans, items branded with size zero and XS labels, currency to be traded for the tiny clothes brought by the other tiny girls.

From endless compartments in their luggage and small floral zippered bags, they produce little black vials and canisters and line them up across the bathroom counter. Some girls use stubby makeup brushes to apply “bronzer,” something I’ve never even heard of. Not only do they know how to expertly apply it to the bridges of their noses and across their cheekbones, but they happily chirp back and forth about the merits of brand A and some horror stories about brand B, which they had switched to after trying brand C.

photo-1453822858805-7c095c06011eThese girls speak in a diplomatic language I don’t know, bartering trade agreements: help with the hair straightener in exchange for help applying “smoky eyes,” or a slinky sundress traded for a ruffled skirt that rests confidently at the upper thigh. One girl forgot her serum or pomade or spray and needs to borrow from someone else who happily supplies the product she can’t live without.

Alone in my bathroom at home, I’d cheer myself on for allotting enough time for a flick of a mascara wand across my lashes, or on an extravagant day, a swath of crusty bronze eyeshadow extracted from a cracked Cover Girl palette held together with a rubber band. I didn’t own a straightener and only occasionally pulled out our dusty hair dryer from a basket of abandoned hot tools, predominantly unearthed for formal events and Halloween.

Looking back at pictures of myself, I notice a layer of oily skin sheen and a characteristic zit by the corner of my mouth. My noise was spotted with wide open pores and many sprays of hair trailed around the outline of my already-too-thick eyebrows.

Even just looking into the face of high school Meredith makes my armpits sweat as I remember the way clothes chafed and tugged in all the wrong ways. My closet was full of clearance tops from Old Navy.com that I liked in theory, but never looked the same after a wash or two. Everything was either stretched out or rolled up my body like a window shade. The poor quality fabrics occasionally caused me to break out into hives and made me sweat everywhere they brushed against my skin.

Sitting in the bed and breakfast, it strikes me that no one sees fit to convert me, to make me their project. I long to be transformed by a fairy godmother with an eyebrow pencil and experience with contouring, but instead I sit silently, trying find small things to do to extend my preparation time. Clearly, it’s supposed to take longer.

My mind doesn’t often go towards beauty and grooming. It never became a part of my routine, and so I don’t often think about hair and makeup; I’ve long been accustomed to my bare, natural face, which most days makes me grateful.

I now have a basic grasp of the concept of cognitive load, that we each can give our concentration to only so many things, that I give mind space to things that others don’t have on their radar or would find trivial. The majority of the time, I’m not too upset with my cycle of forgetting about my beauty routine only to panic at the sight of my brows in the fluorescent light of a gas station bathroom.

But put me in a powder room or a hotel room or at someone’s parents’ house getting ready for a wedding and I start to feel the gap between my primping and that of the other women with me.

Now, I know to get up off the bed and humbly admit to my dear friends, I have no idea what I’m doing!

*Photos provided by Unsplash.com

Meredith-bio-YAH-1024x327

Holiness Standards

Posted on by under Gender & Place

Jesika, Jamie and I sat outside Sweet Frog, eating frozen yogurt. I dug down into the yogurt with my spoon and found a gummy bear. I chomped down on the sweet candy using the safe side of my mouth, but it still found its way to the cavity on my left. My mouth zinged in pain.

    “Dammit,” I said around the gummy. “That hurt.”

    “Just get it taken care of,” Jesika said.

    “Yeah, I know. I hate the dentist, though.”

Jamie pulled out the lipstick she’d just bought. “Isn’t it hot?” she said. She painted on a layer over the pink she’d put on at Sephora earlier. It was hot. It was an opaque neon pink. A Cyndi Lauper pink with electric attitude.

“You gonna wear it at the office?” I asked.

“Maybe. If I feel like it,” she said airily. It looked great on her tanned face. I looked over at Jesika whose face was powdered like an aristocrat, peach circles of blush painted on each cheek, blood red lips. She looked like a kewpie doll crossed with a vampire.

“Oh my gosh,” said Jamie.

“What?” I said looking up. “Oh.”

A group of young women were walking toward us. My stomach tightened a little as I put down my yogurt cup. The gummy bears smiled up at me. “Busted,” they said.

There were five of them. Each was dressed in what I could only call a uniform: long jean skirts–despite the 90 degree heat, long-sleeved tops and blouses, and uncut hair past their knees or carefully done up in pioneer women knots.

The girls wore no makeup. My own face paint, courtesy of Jesika’s industrious applications of the makeup counter’s free offerings, was starting to melt. I wished I wasn’t wearing that stupid purple eyeshadow which looked cool at the store and now felt merely ostentatious.

“Hey guys!” Jesika spoke. “How are you?” She smiled up at the girls and they came over and sat down with us. She and Jamie started talking with them at once. They’d all gone to the same church together in high school. I smiled at them and said nothing. Kept my eyes down on my dessert of drowned gummies. Thought about these girls. Thought about the many accusations, frustrations, and the general confusion in my own heart. Two months earlier I might have chosen to be one of those young women.

***

Whenever we talk about these girls, the many girls we know who are “in” this mode of dressing, Jesika laughs and rolls her eyes. She was brought up in that religious movement. “They’re just confused,” she says. “If they knew how great it feels to cut your hair and wear shorts and smoke Black & Milds, they’d be doing it. They wouldn’t think twice about their salvation.”

What she means–and what we who have been introduced to that particular faith know–is that the young women believe that their salvation hangs in a precarious balance. Along with their Christian beliefs come proscriptions against outfitting one’s body in a modern way: no makeup, no haircuts, no shorts or pants, no short sleeves. These admonitions are a part of the church’s holiness standards for its women.

Standards by which to measure a woman’s holiness.

nolipstick

I dated one of the men from this faith for a year. Though I railed hard against the prohibitions, my own hair was growing longer–longer than I liked, my skirts were getting longer, my makeup got lighter, my decisions deferred more and more to him.

     “Don’t cut your hair–promise me you won’t cut your hair again this summer,” he’d said to me.

    “That’s not something I’m going to promise you,” I said.

But I never cut it again until we broke up. I wanted to fit in. To belong with him and his mother and sisters. When we broke up, I looked horrified at my closet. I piled up all the “modest” clothes and threw them in a dumpster. I bought the shortest shorts I could find, had Jesika hack off my hair to the chin, and applied black eye pencil like it was medication. Round and round my eyes I drew in deft circular marks, writing my own standards with each stroke.

*  *  *

We said goodbye to the girls and threw our empty foam cups into the trash.

    “My house or yours?” Jamie asked, looking at us.

    “Yours!” Jesika and I said as we walked to our cars. In my rearview mirror, I saw the girls in their jean skirts disappearing into the shop. I shivered. Then my eye caught Jes powdering her face again in her own rearview mirror. I giggled. I tried to wipe off some makeup but it only made a mess.

The standards we live by vary. They are confusing. Chilling, even. We women are taught how to look and how to be from infancy. Those young women come to my mind often. But my own friends come to mind much oftener–the women who’ve shown me that feminine standards are variable, mercurial, and dependent on what we believe about ourselves at any given time.

*  *  *

Elena bio YAH

Love in the Time of Baseball

Posted on by under Gender & Place

I was a spindly-limbed, nine-year-old boy who enjoyed spending afternoons on the farmhouse porch reading Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis. I’d sit there for hours in the summer, moving my lawn chair so that I stayed in the shade, waving away the flies. Two huge oak trees stood like sweating sentries, their backs towards me, their faces looking at the small country church across the street, the one flanked by an enormous graveyard. The sky was vast and blue.

But I was also a first-baseman and pitcher for my local little-league team, Lengacher’s Cheese. We wore orange with the name of our sponsor emblazoned on the front in white. Our oversized baseball caps were made of mesh with the tab-and-hole size adjusters in the back. The pants were scratchy, some devilish form of polyester.

Two evenings a week and sometimes Saturdays I’d don my Lengacher’s Cheese baseball jersey and my parents would drive me to the ball field. Our home field was behind the local VFW, but on one particular summer evening an away game took us to the field of our arch rivals: Weiler’s Garage. Their uniforms were mostly green with a bit of yellow. Their players were all humongous, having been born and bred in a rough area we called The Welsh Mountain. They were legendary, a team to fear.

There was one player in particular who I felt anxious about playing against that night. Her name was Anne (obviously names have been changed here to protect the innocent). She had black hair and brown eyes. She was the only girl on the Weiler’s Garage team. I had a crush on her.

On that particular day fate would have it that my coach put me on the pitcher’s mound. The Weiler’s Garage field was at the back of a remote, overgrown park in the middle of The Welsh Mountain. It was lined on one side by a junkyard and the other side by a deep, impenetrable forest. Even with summer sunshine stretching late into the evening, the park felt dark and shadowy.

I took the mound. I felt the baseball in my hand, the red, raised seams rough on my fingertips. Their hitters were all strong, and I fought my way through the lineup. I looked up and realized Anne was making her way to the plate. She stood there confident and ready. I suddenly realized the predicament I was in.

downloadWhat if I struck her out? I didn’t want to make her feel bad – I had a crush on her! In my little nine-year-old way, I wanted her to know that I liked her without actually having to say that. Striking her out didn’t seem like the first step on a path towards a budding, elementary school romance.

On the other hand, she was a girl, and if she got a hit off of me, I would be humiliated. There it is, the plain and simple truth. Girls weren’t supposed to be as good as boys at sports (though she was a good baseball player). If I didn’t go up against her and win, I knew my friends would make fun of me for it. I would never hear the end of it.

I took a deep breath. She stepped into the batter’s box. The ancient trees leaned in closer, casting their shadows on the old ball field. The sun dropped down behind them. The fans in the small bleachers, normally loud and chattering, went silent. I felt the seams again. I reached back and threw a fastball as hard as I could.

I don’t know if what happened was intentional – I can’t remember the exact thought processes of my mind from 30 years ago. More than likely it was due to the fact that I was nine years old and only a marginally decent pitcher. But was it more than? Was my subconscious working overtime to avoid losing to a girl while at the same time somehow keep from embarrassing her? Whatever the case, the ball flew through the heavy, summer air. The red seams spun. The catcher reached for the ball with his oversized mitt. But the ball never reached him.

Because I hit her.

I hit her with the pitch, and she fell to the ground.

* * *

shawn bio YAH