Sports
Pandemic Ponderings: Sports Edition
The visceral up-chuck I experience at the sound of Trump’s voice, or the imitation of his voice, makes me a dangerous driver. Therefore, I generally listen to sports radio in the car, as it is reliably a no-Trump station. As we headed into the pandemic shutdowns., I wondered how sports talk shows would fill the vast…
Read MoreDear Mr. Manfred, Major League Baseball Commissioner
Dear Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball Commissioner It is the beginning of baseball season, and I couldn’t care less. This is astonishing to me since I grew up surrounded by baseball. My mother taught me how to throw a baseball since she believed this was an important social skill for a girl. My grandfather taught…
Read MoreLast One Picked
Our seventh grade class was divided into several cliques: the boy crazy girls, the horse crazy girls, the sporty girls, the brainy girls and the blah girls, the default category of those with no mainstream identity. The boy crazy girls were defined by the fact that boys pursued them, the horse crazy girls by the fact…
Read MoreMy Short Sweet Life as a Human Target
I could think of nothing to recommend me when Susie asked me to join their senior women’s ice hockey team. After all I had only skated on figure skates, and that was over forty years ago, a time when hockey was still resolutely a boys-only sport. Susie explained the team was made up of moms…
Read MoreAh! Wonderlic!
I am a sixty year old woman with nothing obvious in common with a pro football player. My forty yard dash could be timed with a clogged hour glass, my bench press might not exceed a full load of laundry, and most embarrassingly, I throw like a girl. But today I have found some common…
Read MoreDeuce Bitch
I played a lot of tennis growing up, in part because we had a tennis court in our back yard, but mostly because my mother was an avid player. This was back in the sixties, in the days when women’s sports, competition and sweat were considered unseemly. I certainly didn’t have scads of lessons and…
Read MorePodcast: Baseball, Earlobes and Running Backward
Ruminations during a slow-paced baseball game, including people watching and categorizing different styles of earlobes, and considering the implications if the bases were run in the opposite direction for a change of pace.
Read MoreConversation Piece
I would not consider myself a good conversationalist, and you can’t convince me otherwise, because every time I take one of those personality tests, I end up with all the other socially awkward people. But I have developed a few work-arounds over the years, and the one that I have field tested the most extensively…
Read MoreBaseball, Earlobes and Running Backward
Chapter 1. In 2008, a Cubs road game scheduled for Houston got rescheduled in Milwaukee due to Hurricane Ike pounding the Texas coast. Therefore on a beautiful early fall afternoon, Nick and I spontaneously decided to breeze up to Brewer’s field rather than trying to slog our way through traffic to the friendly confines of…
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