Baby Fat

A non-fiction novella

By Lawrence Henry

c. 1985

I always wanted to write a spy novel: something full of glistening tarmac, perspex shields, and the acrid smell of cordite. In high school, I wore an Alaskan Tuxedo jacket from Herter's, and smoked a pipe, and affected a taste for Irish whiskey and Zen. I read everything John Steinbeck ever wrote, and wrote accordingly. "If it's got snot in it, it's Larry's," said one wag in my first creative writing class. Somehow I always missed the point. "Write what you know," my teachers told me. Why? I didn't want to know what I knew. I wanted to know what other people knew. I wanted to know secrets and portents and signs and symbols and hidden meanings. I didn't want things simple. I wanted to brood. I wanted to haunt. I wanted to suffer.

But we do tend to live up to our fantasies, one way or another. When I was thirteen, when adults asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'd say, "I want to be a freelance writer," not knowing what that meant. It sounded dangerous: "freelance."

Kind of like a gunfighter in black leather gloves. Well, it is dangerous--that's what I am now--, but not in the way I ever envisioned it. I don't run out of ammo; I run out of money. I don't ride a horse or pilot a fighter plane. I drive around town in a leased sports car, deeply in hock to half a dozen banks, and try to sell enough ideas to pay next month's bills, and most of the time, to the best of my ability, I succeed. The best of my ability starts with my grandfather, Henry Sabo. I named myself after him.

I have here a newspaper clipping, which I cannot date, from one of my mother's scrapbooks:

Bowling

The Arlington bowling team again defeated the Lake

Preston team on Wednesday of last week. This time by 42

pins. Following is the score [I list Grampa's scores only]:

H. Sabo 165 169 181 515

[In other words, competent, ordinary, plain-as-pan-gravy

bowling. The story continues:]

The same afternoon H. Sabo while bowling against a

traveling man broke the record for bowling in the northwest

when he got 2187 pins with an average of 218 7/10.

Following is his score:

234 215 193 228 224

213 192 246 216 226

These are scores of championship caliber, good enough to qualify for most professional tournaments. There are ten games' worth of these scores--by best guess, at least 160 times that Grampa rolled a 16-pound ball with killing accuracy. Remember, too, in bowling there is no defense. It's not like looking back 40 years and trying to ascertain how good a hitter really was in baseball. In bowling, your only real opponents are the lanes and the pins, in their unchanging dimensions. What happened? It takes a little reading between lines to reconstruct that afternoon--a little; not much.

As I said, I cannot accurately date the clipping. Judging from the type styles, the age of the paper, and a certain phrase in another clipping from the same scrapbook ("the Sabo boys," describing Grampa and his brother Lars) I'd guess that the story

appeared in the Arlington (South Dakota) Sun just after World War II. Arlington and Lake Preston were and are towns in Kingsbury County, no more than fifteen miles apart in only moderately decent farming country. It's a safe bet that all ten men bowling in the local competition that day knew one another--Scandahoovians and Dutchmen, most of them, with names like Friess, Boldt, Gunerude, Straube...and Sabo. Friendly local

stuff, Camel cigarettes and cheap cigars, some heavy-handed joshing back and forth, a beer or two for some of the bowlers (not Grampa; Grampa didn't drink). Grampa's three-game series of 15 wasn't even the best score of the day, in the ordinary competition. Uncle Lars beat him by three pins. One W. Wood, finishing third, scored 506. Everyone else bowled between 400 and 500.

As I said, ordinary, plain-as-pan-gravy bowling.

Now, "traveling man," in the vernacular of the time, meant only one thing: a gambler. Maybe a salesman, maybe a hustler--who knows? I like to picture a skinny city slicker in a hound's tooth check suit and a derby, hanging over the rail watching the rubes and not seeing anybody he couldn't beat for some easy money--certainly not the one all the other bowlers called Hank, the one with his already graying, already thinning hair parted in the middle, this very ordinary sized small-framed man with none of your powerful bowler's paunch, not much evident muscle, who hardly ever smiled and who scarcely spoke. And who, when the game was made, after the Arlington-Preston tournament, still

didn't speak, just let others speak for him--"Aw, go on, Hank. Show him a thing or two..."

Ten games. Ten games! What could that traveling man have been thinking, watching Henry Sabo roll an opening 234? Was it supposed to be a ten-game series at the outset, or did the city slicker desperately up the bet, as strike followed strike through

three games, then five, then eight, then ten? And who knows what the bet might have been--ten dollars was a lot of money in those days. I like to picture S. Skow and O. Gunerude and F. Massar and J. Friess and the rest of the Preston-Arlington bunch hanging around, dropping heavy old Norskie wisecracks, and making sure Hank's traveling man didn't skip out on the bet.

But that was one traveling man who must have hit the road in a hurry that long-ago afternoon--cleaned out, humiliated, with an aching arm and the wisecracks of the rubes still ringing in his head. Because Hank Sabo worked at that bowling alley, for his

father-in-law, and knew every board in every lane. He played pool every bit as well as he bowled, but the newspapers didn't report that. And I don't have any clippings to support what I've heard, that he pitched and hit a baseball with professional skill, and golfed, and was an expert with everything from a hammer and saw to a shotgun to a horseshoe.

There's my spy. There's my hero. And that's what I know.

* * *

When I was a boy, my grandparents and I used to visit Chester and Bertha Corey on their farm outside Arlington. Always three couples there: Chester and Bertha, my grandparents, and Merton and Nellie Evans. On a typical day in the pre-TV Fifties,

on that farm, I was perhaps eight, the other six, over 65. I galloped around in a red gingham shirt, bluejeans, and a monster gun-and-holster set, with a real 1874 Colt .44 sagging in the righthand holster and whonking against one chubby hip.

"Merton used to be a cowboy," Chester said.

"Did you, Merton?"

"Oh, yeah." Merton wore bib overalls and high-topped shoes from "Monkey Wards." His white hair stood up in an unruly shock, and he had no teeth.

"Did you wear a cowboy hat?"

"I give it up. Wind used to take 'er. Fin'ly had 'er blow off one day, an' she went rollin' down the road on the brim. I hollered, 'Take the durn thing, then!' Never had another one."

Stories. Of my grandfather driving home through a blizzard, leaning out the window to see the way, and coming home with frostbitten eyebrows. Of a freight train collision in town, and the fire that followed; and the death of a trapped brakeman. Of the murderer my grandmother, as a girl, wanted to taunt in his jail cell; and the bargain her father made with her, and his betrayal. Of land swindles, and weddings and funerals in the

living room. Of Mrs. Achterburg's Model T, and Gramma Fudge, and of girls in long white dresses limping home barefoot after midnight along the cinders of the railroad bed, their feet swollen from dancing.

There I am, a creature of a time I never knew, yelling, "Take the durn thing, then!" to a wind that blew a hat cartwheeling across the prairie in the nineteenth century.

Years later, in a song, I wrote the line "Grampa drove a forty-eight Ford, and it was just as old as me." Grampa was when I knew him Chief of Police of Arlington--a grandiose title; there were only two cops. Grampa shared 24 hours of duty with Carl Coy, who lived down the street. Carl had a .38. Grampa never carried a gun. These two elderly men drove no police cruisers, used no radio. They drove around keeping an eye on things, suffering the taunts of local teenagers who would set off firecrackers in one part of town, then race across the tracks to explode some more, leading the old men a merry chase.

Grampa used to take me along with him some nights, and mostly we'd park by the abandoned railroad station and watch the intermittent traffic barreling through on Highway 41. There we'd sit, eight years old and sixty-seven, talking wondrous boy-and-

grandfather talk of which I remember hardly a word. In a way I understand only too well now, I must have been a pain in the neck. Grampa smoked (Camels), and Grammy wouldn't ever let up on him about it. Having me along meant having a snitch in the car,

and intruded upon a solitude he must have treasured. Nights when I didn't go along, Grampa would come home (sucking a mouthful of mints) at midnight with a small bag of

groceries, entering the house through the porch we called "the little kitchen," where I slept in a high old hospital bed alongside a wood stove. Grammy and I would get up, and the three of us would sit at the kitchen table, toasting endless slices of Wonder Bread, spreading them with margarine, and talking. The smell of toast and coffee; balmy summer air drifting in through the kitchen windows; crickets: I'm a night creature to

this day.

Then there was church.

You always heard the best dirty jokes from the children of traveling preachers; and at least once every summer, an evangelist swept into town in an old Chevy with his wife and two or three kids and a guitar and an accordion. Revival time: church every night for two weeks, stemwinding sermons, the preacher and his wife and kids singing like the Everly family.

I'd sit enthralled, swept up in the theatrical magic of it all. At the end of the second week, as the music played, the evangelist would issue a call to Christ: "Come forward and

declare to me your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ before this multitude. 'O Lamb of God, I come.'" One summer an entire family came forward, and the next night, the congregation drove to Lake Poinsette (pronounced "Ponsit," South Dakota's biggest

lake) for a baptism.

Thunder and lightning cracked overhead, and the wind blew, driving three-foot waves to thud upon the beach. Grampa pulled our old Ford into the semicircle of cars parked facing the water. In the focused glare of headlights, the preacher stood hip-deep in the water, wearing bluejeans and a tee shirt. Husband, wife, children--one by one the candidates waded into the lake.

The preacher yelled into the wind, and over the thunder, "I

baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son--"

"Grammy, won't they catch cold?"

"Nobody ever catches cold when they're baptized."

"--and the Holy Ghost. Ah-men."

One hand over the nose and mouth, one behind the small of the back: The preacher dipped his convert backwards, and a wave crashed over them both. Earlier that day, in clearer weather, one of the preacher's kids had taken me into the yard behind the

church, where he pulled up a stinkweed, a pale, phallic plant, rubbed it between his hands, and thrust it toward me to smell. Stinkweed smells like sperm.

* * *

How my baseball career started:

In the Minneapolis suburbs in the 1950s, things were just getting properly organized. People played by the rules. People did things right. My mother tells me--nowadays, when I sometimes must ask her for money; me, a 38 year old newlywed, she sometimes tells me:

"Your Dad and I were so poor when we started out that one time we had to go to the store, and all we could afford was a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread. We walked. Your Dad found a quarter so he could buy a pack of cigarettes, and that was that. Then we went home and ate."

She always gives me the money. She isn't guilt-mongering. Just the opposite. She's trying to make me feel better for having to ask.

I remember moving into a wonderful house right by the railroad tracks. Trains roared through just two lots away from us, eight and ten times a day, and it was glorious...to a kid. Soon, I didn't even hear them any more at night, just slept straight through.

The house was one of perhaps three dozen on a two-block development. Our street was called Lakeside. The first year we lived there, the street hadn't been paved yet, and it rained torrents, flooding it (lots of dumb jokes about Lakeside really being Lakeside then). I looked out the window one day and saw our across-the-street neighbor, apparently catching a fish in the two-foot-deep waters. Mom assures me he had already caught the fish somewhere else, and was just out there seeing if it would

swim. It did. A big Northern, it swam away, was what it did. That same neighbor once stood in a downpour with his garden hose, watering his front lawn.

But back to baseball, roundabout: Everybody did things right. Those were the rules, you bought a simple tract house, and then you improved it. My mother dug the foundation for an extra room--"family room" was a new phrase then, and nobody had yet heard of buzzwords, but "family room" was one such--, and she acquired herself a modestly naughty reputation as "the lady who painted her house black" when she decided she liked charcoal gray.

All within the rules. There were a few older houses in the neighborhood, one of them the Habermans'. I played with Tommy Haberman, and knew somehow they were different than we were. Everybody near us, the Dads worked in offices: Mine sold newspaper advertising and wrote a column called "The Hutch Touch;" Ernie Martin sold insurance; Lloyd worked for Honeywell; Steve Everest's Dad worked for Skelly. Offices and Protestants, that was us. Mr. Haberman dug ditches, or drove a truck, or poured cement, or something like that, and they were Catholics. This is not literally true; this is the way it felt. To me. Lloyd and LaRue were Catholics, but, as white collar Catholics,

they were just as good as we were.

There were other differences, too, less clearly acknowledged for being all the more clearly perceived: Their parents drank, and ours didn't; and their parents yelled at each other and hit each other and spanked their kids with straps and sticks, and ours didn't, and...

Dad came over to Tommy's house one day to fetch me home, and I caught a snatch of conversation between him and Mr. Haberman just before we left, my Dad standing hipshot with his arms folded on his chest:

"...Of course, your house is a lot older than mine..."

Twenty-eight years old and bragging about his GI-bill house. Playing by the rules.

So when I tried out for Little League, I had to try out by the rules. Over on the playground the other side of the tracks, the officials had laid out a whole course full of tests. How far you could throw (they measured it); how fast you could run (they timed you); how well you could hit (you got five pitches). Never mind dashing to your right in the shortstop slot to stab a grounder, whirling, throwing; making the dancing pivot at second; stretching, digging out the low throw at first; ranging back for a basket catch like Willie Mays out in centerfield; showing off your little-boy-perfect three-quarter sidearm Lew Burdette motion on the mound--forget all that. You never even got there, if you

were me. You got to throw a ball against a tape measure, or run through the muddy judgment of a stop watch like a bad dream, or swing and miss five times with a big boy pitching, and it was all over.

And later, summer after summer, I went to Little League games with my Dad, and watched the little uniformed automatons playing ball, pitchers delivering their studied, homogenized curveballs with the herky-jerky motion I have only seen once in the big leagues (Ron Guidry), and I was never a part of it.

So when, in South Dakota, Grampa dropped me off at the big rickety green ballpark for the first time, and they put me in a game straight off, and handed me a too-big bat, and I stood in against Gene Olsen's frightening lanky fastball and closed my eyes (I think) and clouted one right over his head and watched him open his mouth and track the flight of the ball into short center, a clean single, I made my reputation with one swing: "Pudge can hit." They put me on a team called the Indians, Gene's team (one of our six; we had the Indians, the White Sox, the Yankees, the Braves, the Phillies, and the Giants), and let me play first base because I had a first baseman's mitt. Sometimes I pitched, because I could throw a knuckleball, and it was good till I got wild. We batted in order of position, so I hit third (first base is number three in baseball's official scoring system), right behind Gene. Maybe I hit and maybe I didn't, but that single had made me, and I always got to play.

Every summer, every boy in town bought a new baseball cap. Different choices in those days: You got a red one or a blue one. But they were sized; no one-size-fits all plastic tabs back then. Some of us had spikes; most played in tennis shoes -- tennis shoes, I mean, canvas Keds or Converse or PF Flyers, not jogging shoes, not warmup shoes, not aerobic shoes; we wore the shoes that we would have worn anyway, because they were cheap. We all played, every age, every size, in a league called Junior Junior. The Undem family showed up -- six boys? seven? -- ranging all the way from twelve-year-old Alan through six-year-old Tommy. Bill Cheney had a terrific glove his Dad had

ordered all the way from Chicago. Bill wore his blue cap low over his eyes. Our best pitcher, he took pride in throwing a no-hitter every day (there were enough fielder's choices and errors that he sometimes lost anyway). He could fire that thing, his left hand, his pitching hand, so small the league ball looked almost like a softball in his three-fingered grip. The Pickerings, Big Pick and Little Pick, rode in on a tractor. Little Pick was older; Big Pick drove--sometimes right into the board fence along the right field line, with a resounding crash. Larry Sturges, the son of the owner-editor of the Arlington Sun, was left-handed; he mostly played shortstop, which caused some problem, because he threw a natural palmball. "Do you play ball with a boy called Dynamite Moe?" Grammy's friend Laura once asked me, and I smiled in secret, silent contempt because she had the name wrong. It was Dynie Moe, in the nicknamery of the day and

time, in our secret society, but she wasn't supposed to know, and she didn't. Dynie was an athlete, a wrestler, husky and strong. Normy Buck, who mowed my grandparents' (and every else's) lawn for money to help out his family, wore painfully clean, painfully

old clothes. Steve Gunderson, Gundy, was a nice, nice boy with a ready smile; he played second base on our team and pegged nice, waist-level throws to me at first that I almost always caught. Senator Hofschild's boys, Willie, Bob, and Frank, took the middle

of the day off from working on their Dad's honey truck ("That thing'll pump a bucket of potatoes") -- one a redhead, one a blond, one black-haired. We had a little boy with one hand, whose name I don't remember, who played right field, caught fly balls, ripped his glove off, and threw. Gene Olsen, our pitcher on the Indians, with his wiseguy manners and his powerful arm, always wanted to play "burnout" -- that is, play catch, throwing harder and harder, till somebody (never him) cried quit. Boyd Parker caught Gene, and he was big enough, at eleven, to do it; he was already working at his Dad's filling station, busting his fingernails changing truck tires.

I don't remember who coached that first summer, the last summer of my grandfather's life. But I was part of a team for the first time, and in fact very nearly for the last, assigned by democratic whim to play first base for the Indians, to bat third behind Boyd Parker and Gene, and just before Steve Gunderson, to play every day and win most of the time. However it was figured out, we finished second to Bill Cheney's White Sox, mainly because of Bill, who, pitching from a mound forty-five feet away, blew one three-fingered corkscrew fastball after another right by us.

On the real Indians, the big-league Indians (Gene had named us after his favorite team) there were at that time Rocky Colavito, who could stand at home plate and throw a ball over the center field fence; Vic Power, with his magical feet at first base, catching balls with one hand; and Jim Piersall, who got beaned during one spring training game and showed up his next time at bat wearing a helmet with an earflap, and got a terrific laugh and his picture in the Sporting News. The big-league White Sox (Bill Cheney's favorites) had Nellie Fox with his bulging chaw, Luis Aparicio, big bare-armed Ted Kluszewski, Early Wynn glowering over his gut, and Jim Landis. That was a year or two after Gil Macdougald had caught Herb Score in the eye with a line drive, and Score was still struggling to come back.

All those heroes, and we held their bats in our hands. My first time at bat, for that first heraldic single, someone had handed me a 32-ounce Ted Williams (thin handle, fat head); swinging that club jolted my shoulders even when I didn't hit anything, and I eventually used a 30-ounce Nellie Fox, a thick-handled "bottle bat," and choked up on it. We had a 29-ounce Mickey Mantle for a while, but it didn't survive. We had to be careful; we didn't have many bats, and we had to share with the Legion team and the men's team, so most of what came out of the bat bag was too big and heavy for us. Every now and then one of us would try a Willie Mays 36 or something, and swing, and fall down.

At least half of us used the same bat, and I can't get a clear picture of the signature on it. Eddie Mathews? Seems like. Thirty ounces, a not-terribly-thin handle, but nothing

like the Nellie Fox, and a somewhat slender bat head. Just a stick. And it was broken. It had always been broken, as long as I was around. But some adult (I suppose) had taped it so tightly and so well that it was just like new, only better. You had to watch yourself using that bat. Everybody else did, your own team, your opponents, everybody. "Watch the label!"

The ballpark stood off to the east side of town, with tall ruined towers full of lights, most of which worked, one behind-the-plate grandstand, one set of first baseline bleachers, and a peeling green upright board fence all around. Behind the grandstand there was a padlocked, no-windowed cement hut full of gear: umpires' chest protectors, catcher's protector and shin guards, a messy stack of old cleated shoes knotted together by the laces, the heavy canvas batbag, and a worn leather satchel with a busted zipper for balls, some of them new, in boxes, which we never used. There were bases in there, too, real base sacks for the Legion and men's teams, and for us, squares of ivory-

colored plastic beveled at the edges. Chalk and a line marking machine, an infield dragger, wooden frames for making a batter's box, gray wool uniforms with "Arlington" lettered in Brooklyn Dodger script across the shirtfronts. Dusty, smelly treasure.

Coach would unlock the hut with a waist-high crowd of blue- and red-capped boys at his back, chattering and pushing, and he'd hand out the equipment. Big Boyd Parker would carry the batbag, while the smaller of us got the smaller pieces. We'd run out to the big diamond, measure off 25-pace baselines for the square plastic bases, mark a 45-foot distance for the entirely imaginary pitching rubber--and inevitably get into a squabble over which two teams got to play there, rather than on the two makeshift diamonds laid out in the outfield corners.

"Awright, awright, break it up!" Coach waded in. "Indians and Yankees, here."

"Awww..."

"Be quiet! White Sox and Braves out in left field."

(Bill Cheney never complained. Just trotted off to left field, leading two teams, on his way to another no-hitter.)

"Giants and Phillies out to right. Go on, now."

Coach would rotate from game to game, umpiring from behind the pitcher's mound.

Which meant that, in the remaining two games, we umpired for ourselves. Most calls at bases were obvious enough, and if they weren't, we argued, until--let me stop here. We knew our place. We had a very definite, if unstated, pecking order. And when the

arguments got too vociferous, whoever was top kid in that game (Gene or Bill, usually, sometimes Gundy) would step in and by force of personality make a decision. Occasionally we had to appeal to the coach. Not very often. Pitchers called balls and strikes. Roger Undem once threw a pitch to me that bounced right next to the plate, and

called it a strike.

"It bounced right there!" I yelled, touching the scuff in the dirt with the head of my bat. "See?"

"You just made that with your bat," Roger said. "Get back in there. It's a strike."

I stood back into the batter's box, determined to blast a Gil MacDougald line drive right back at Roger's head. I think I struck out. I never could play worth a darn when I was mad.

But on that same diamond (right field corner) I once hit a home run, with our best bat, the one I can't remember the signature of. Gene Olsen was on first. Normy Buck, pitching for our opponents, delivered a belt-high fastball. I swung -- oh sweet spot; I can feel it still -- and belted the ball on a line into left center. It bounced on second base on the big diamond, maybe two hundred and fifty feet away, disrupting the game over there, and just kept going. I tore around first, head down, running pell-mell, and almost ran over Gene -- the wise guy -- trotting nonchalantly between second and third. "Take it easy, Pudge," he said. "It's a home run."

Now, in the matter of Bill Cheney's daily no-hitter, I might perhaps have implied that we did not play too well. That's true. Whenever we got on base, we stole, because very few of our catchers had good arms (Boyd excepted--and even at that, very few of our second basemen could catch a ball reliably in the flurry of arms and legs and dust). Coach used to come around sometimes and make us stop stealing bases, it could lead to such chaos. We had a rule, "One base on an overthrow," because we overthrew

bases so often.

We had other rules, too, commonsense rules. Junior Junior was where you learned not to throw the bat after a hit, because somebody could get hurt. Our pitchers threw as hard as they could, but if they got wild, they came out. Somebody could get hurt. We played without sliding pads or batting gloves (I don't think anyone had ever seen a golf glove), and had only three batting helmets (no earflaps). Some of the smaller kids peered out from under those helmets' visors at the plate like a little old lady behind the wheel of a Buick.

But did I play baseball? I played baseball. Up in the morning and into the glove and cap and tennis shoes and jeans dumped on the floor from the night before, and off to the

ballpark. Junior Junior from ten to two, as I recall, a stop with all the other boys (except for the Pickerings, who usually had to take their tractor back to the farm) at the new town swimming pool. Back home to play a ritual game of catch with Richard Andrjezewski (Ander-jesky; from now on, Richard A.), my next-door neighbor, three years younger than I, with a whip of an arm. Richard and I set up, at an approximately sixty-foot distance, a plank as a pitching rubber and a garbage can lid as home plate, and took turns being pitcher and catcher. The catcher called balls and strikes. The pitcher got four walks or three strikeouts, then we traded places. Richard was better than I was, I with my restless curiosity, experimenting with forkballs, knuckleballs, sliders, curves, sinkers, different grips (no seams like Dizzy Dean, across the seams like Lew Burdette, with the seams like Whitey Ford). At the pitcher's rubber was a patch of rhubarb, and across the dirt road from home plate grew an apple tree. Hours of that, till suppertime, when Richard and I, arms aching, bellies full of sour apples and

rhubarb, headed in reluctantly to eat some real food. Then out again to the schoolyard, where there was a diamond and a backstop, and where all the boys in town tried to meet every night for more, more. One of us shinnied up a power pole and threw a switch, and presto! We had night ball, lit by three bulbs, at home, first, and third, the outfield in ever deeper gloom, daylight savings time or no. Overhand pitching again, but

we took it slow at the schoolyard; the idea was to get lots of hits and lots of fielding practice, and we did, but eventually came the summons from the surrounding dark, "Larr-ee!" "Alan! Roger! Danny! You come home right now!" Senator Hofschild's

piercing whistle, and the game dissolved, the lights went out (filaments glowing, glowing, dying blue in the clear old-fashioned bulbs), home. Bed. Start all over the next day.

Unless it rained.

Then I leaned on my elbows on the windowsill in the little kitchen where I slept, and I cried, watching the downpour, thinking how awful it was, because we wouldn't miss just that day, we'd miss three days while the clay-based soil of the big pallpark dried out.

"Grammy, why does God make it rain?"

"The farmers need rain, honey."

I would have cursed if I had known how to curse. I would have cursed the farmers and cursed the rain, and I would have cursed even God. But I wasn't that kind of kid, and it wasn't that kind of time or place, and more important than that I didn't know anything about damnation of any kind. I would learn -- oh, how I would learn. But for that time, then, I only knew heavenly baseball, and it would never end.