Conversation with a Little Girl on my Daughter's Softball Team: In Imitation of the Style of Nathaniel Hawthorne

As I sat reading Blithedale Romance in the mostly empty dugout, a little girl clung to the outside of the chain-links surrounding the enclosure, her face pressed against the metal netting, staring at me. I pretended not to notice, until she mumbled something I could not make out. I begged her pardon and she replied, "Just the e-mail address." She was a conspicuously portly girl with muddy brown hair the texture of synthetic pillow batting.

"I'm sorry," I replied, "you weren't talking to me, were you?" She smiled and shook her head. She had, in fact, been addressing her grandmother, who was engaged in filling out a form for the purpose of ordering photographs of the waif, doubtless for the entertainment of herself and those of her friends and relatives who could be persuaded, perhaps by the application of deserts and stimulating beverages, to gaze at the images and express their obligatory admiration for the child's physiognomy and frame.

I had noticed the child at practice on the previous afternoon. The coach, Mr. Mike Akridge, had induced the girls to rehearse their use of the bat with the object of enabling them to more reliably strike the approaching ball and thereby propel it with greater force over the heads of their waiting opponents. My own daughter, Addie, a novice  at the sport, had so bravely acquitted herself, achieving, as she had, a solid hit on her first stroke, that I fancied myself fit to pronounce judgement, in the isolation of my own mind, on the performance of other parents' offspring. This girl's stance had been listless and unengaged and her strokes feeble and ineffectual. Mr. Akridge's kind and patient exhortations, as to the improvement of her fortunes that would come by way of developing the situation of her feet and the attitude of her grip, fell on deaf ears. The child slouched indifferently over the plate and made such half-hearted strokes as a thin and flaccid self respect compelled, neither hitting the ball nor, indeed, evincing any overt awareness that such a thing as a ball was even the nominal objective of her otherwise pointless exercise.

My mistaken intrusion, however, into a conversation between her and her grandmother, a conversation that did not concern me, seemed not to discomfit her in the least. "I'm so excited!" she said, closing one eye against the intrusion of a frayed, wind-driven twist of hair.

"About the game?" I replied incredulously, remembering her former indifference.

"Yeah!"

"Well, that's good," said I. "This will be Addie's first softball game."

"It's my second year to play. The people this year are nicer. On my other team, the girls drug me across the field by my ankle."

"Oh, no!" I exclaimed. "That was a very cruel thing for them to do."

"I know," she replied, with a look that suggested that she knew no such thing. "They used to hit me with the ball on purpose and the coach never did anything about it. One time, one of my teammates flipped me off at school, but nobody saw her except me."

"I'm sorry you had to go through that," said I, unable, in my astonishment, to dispense a wiser word. "Something like that says much more about those girls than it does about you. I was picked on in school, too, and look! I made it through all right."

She fixed me with a quizzical look, squinting against an errant ray of sunshine from the clearing sky.

"That's not much comfort now, though, is it," I admitted.

"No," she answered. "I think we're playing on Field Twelve." She turned and ran to join her new teammates and left me to gather my books and follow as I might.