The World According to Chuck

(For some reason, my weekly column isn’t online currently. I have no idea why not, but since some of you have e-mailed me I’ll cross-post it here.)
———————

My father was a latch-key kid, before that term was coined, before the metacultural era when everything seemed to be about us and how our lives were so different. The combination of technology, shifting sociology and a whole bunch of baby boomers let us navel gaze to our heart’s content, conveniently ignoring the fact that there have always been children, and some of them have always had to fend for themselves.

He was the eldest child of a single mother, and so sometimes he slipped through the cracks. He was shuttled, in the 1940s, between relatives and foster families, and what he remembered of his childhood (and he didn’t remember much) was mostly loneliness, wandering streets, sitting on trains, wishing for stability and relying, often, on the kindness of strangers.

He would muse on this, sometimes, and on how he was fortunate to have grown up in his particular time (he could be metacultural, too), when he was safer than he would have been a few decades later, or so he thought. I’d call him on this sometimes, argue that there have always been pedophiles and perverts, monsters in our midst, and he’d agree but qualify.

“People were better back then,” he’d say. “They took care of each other.”

I don’t know if this is true, or have the slightest idea of how one would prove or disprove it. I can only look at potential causes: Agriculture moved to industrial, rural moved to urban, community moved, maybe, to a closed circuit. Maybe we became self-contained, isolated, independent creatures who forgot how to socialize, and if that’s the case then it’s surely getting worse. If I want pizza and a movie on a Saturday night, just as an example, I can have them with virtually no human interaction. Add enough of those moments up and maybe we get a dysfunctional society; as I said, I have no way of knowing.

But maybe that’s why we crave stories like the one I’m about to share. Maybe we always have, and maybe we just like to be reminded.

You might have heard it already; it has a local flavor, and even though there’s been some national exposure it might resonate a little more here in the Northwest. I’m going to tell it anyway.

Sara Tucholsky is 5’2 and probably isn’t ever going to be any taller. As such, the senior right fielder on Western Oregon University’s women’s softball team didn’t hit for power, just placement, and with a batting average of .153 that wasn’t a sure thing, either. But as she came up to bat the last weekend of April in Ellensburg, in a crucial game against Central Washington, two players on base in the second inning, luck and timing came together in one glorious moment.

The ball sailed over the fence, Sara’s first home run ever, and as the crowd and her teammates erupted she watched the ball disappear as she rounded first base. Whoops. Missed the bag there, Sara. She stopped, turned to go back, and ended her college career with a twinge.

The anterior cruciate ligament, bane to athletes of all sizes, picked that moment to tear, and Sara crawled back to first while the crowd scratched their collective heads. Is there a rule for this?

It’s baseball. Of COURSE there’s a rule.

If a player is substituted, it becomes a two-run single. If she’s assisted by her teammates around the bases, it’s illegal and an out.

If she’s assisted by members of the opposing team, it’s a national story.

You can probably finish this one yourselves.

The picture of two CWU Wildcats carrying Sara around the diamond, stopping carefully to touch her foot to each base, doesn’t do the story justice. Nor does the coda, the fact that Western Oregon won the game and went on to the playoffs.

Nor, really, does the video clip of Sara telling her story, or Mallory Holtman, the greatest softball player in the history of CWU, the all-time conference leader in home runs, who came up with the idea of helping her injured opponent.

For me, anyway, it was the image of Gary Frederick, the Central coach for 40 years, now age 70, tears streaming down his face, talking on ESPN about his players.

Frederick reminded me of my dad, actually; about the same age group, growing up in the same era, the same beefy face and gray hair. My dad would have liked this story a lot.

And I infer nothing from it, no commentary on society at large, no silver lining in dark clouds, no glimpses of goodness in contemporary humanity. It could have happened anywhere, at any time, I’m sure.

But it happened in Ellensburg in April, a reminder maybe, a good story at any rate, and an answer for Tom Hanks’s surly coach in “A League Of Their Own,” who said, “There’s no crying in baseball!” There is.