I help manage one of the worst company softball teams to ever don cleats (well that one guy) or drink a beer at a park after a game. Actually, right now we are in our winningest season, number 2 in the co-ed D League. I ought to thank Facebook, since one of our last wins were some sore losers associated with that bit of the interwebs, who showed up two women short of the required number and cried about their forfeit.
Still and all, we are not good in terms of softball. Some players are athletes, but not so much ever having played team sports. Runners and racquetball players, more like. Others aren't from one of your ball-playing countries, or more correctly the ball they know looks like this one:
The best thing about the team is the people, as the cliche would go. But, seriously, here it's not the awesomeness of people, it's the awesomeness of how surreal the collection is. Hands down, the most enthusiastic player is post-retirement age, like he's already essentially retired from two careers that by anyone's definition were top of the line, top of his field, moving and shaking all over the place. Although, he never will actually retire, I bet.
If I said what his past gigs were here, you could Google him the hell up and say to yourself, “What? He's your teammate?” You'd be like “Seriously, dee-rob, what the fucking fuckety fuck. Why is he hanging with riffraff like you?” You'd say that. I know it, even if you ain't never dropped no F-bomb or said riffraff in your life.
He's so enthusiastic that he regularly shames all us more regular, slacker company softball types into practice. The kind of practice that pisses off Allen Iverson, son.
We practiced. Yesterday, high noon, lunch time, middle of the day, straight up on the old sundial, the clear sky pounded 80-plus degree heat on our backs and faces.
The coach tossed a bag of balls at our waiting bats, and we all critiqued the swing and stance into the required poetry of solid contact. Then we switched up. I lobbed balls to the coach, and he simulated dingers and pop ups into the waiting hands of the fielders who mostly stopped the momentum of rolling balls by any means possible, trying to stave off an imaginary, error-caused triple and relay the ball into the infield.
“Mister, you have an water?” A woman passed with a ragged mop of a dog close behind. Despite the heat, we had none and admitted as much.
More of a pointer than a helper, I directed her to the nearby municipal park municipal bathroom. We got back down to the business of ball playing.
Minutes passed, and she came back into view from alongside the restroom facilities.
“Mister. Hey Mister, I think I need some help.”
A natural-born leader the coach trotted up to her, while I strolled with a little less purpose and the fielders mosied. “I think maybe I have sunstroke, or something,” the very pale and shaky-looking woman stammered, and just as I was walking up trusty cellphone at the ready, she was denying the need for 911.
She stallingly, unsure and worried not trusting her brain and recall, gave me the number of what she hoped was her husband's iPhone number, while explaining that he always had it with him and even stood in line for the latest one, no doubt in the first ever Apple store just up the street. I got his voicemail.
Right about then, I took a closer look. This woman wasn't young. She was well past getting an AARP card, definitely in the Medicare pool, and quite possibly had already eased into the “seniors ride for free zone.“
We sat her in the shade of a tree, the coach grabbed an empty plastic cup from his truck, a leftover from a recent post-game tailgate, filled it up with water, and she drank it down. The color started to return to her face, as we waited to hear back from her husband.
At that point, apparently deciding it wasn't life threatening, the coach and the enthusiast start smacking a few more balls out into the field. I hovered nervously, ready to dial 911, and hoping the woman's husband might actually call back.
At almost the top of the hour, we packed up our gear, and chivalrously the enthusiast who urged us onto the field that day, drove home the sun-addled woman and her hairball dog. The verdict by email a bit later, “she was OK, but she has a smelly dog.”
Many hours later her husband did call me back. Without thanks or worry to my message about his wife being sick, he had that puzzled greeting of the caller ID age “Um, ah, someone called me from this number and left a message.”
A brief explanation from me, and all I got was a “She must be fine, she's sleeping.”
I resisted the urge with every fiber and might to not reply, “Better check her pulse.”
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