“I follow a variation of Teddy Roosevelt’s advice: I walk very softly most of the time, but I carry a big baseball bat-shaped stick. Not that I would ever take anyone out with it.”
I tend to cling to a misguided belief that I can rescue people. I think that I, being very swift of foot but very slight of common sense, can just swoop down upon people in need and scoop them up in my velvet talons.
In reality, I’m incapable of saving even myself. Talons of steel couldn’t hold my distracted and flighty energy in their grip.
I follow a variation of Teddy Roosevelt’s advice: I walk very softly most of the time, but I carry a big baseball bat-shaped stick. Not that I would ever take anyone out with it. I’m so nonviolent that I probably wouldn’t defend even my own children if someone were to put a gun to their heads. If someone put a gun to mine, I’d rather die knowing I’d stuck to my nonviolence ethic to the very end. (I admit, however, I’d experience great remorse if my children were to succumb to my pacifistic principles.)
When caring for others, walking softly comes naturally. When caring for myself, I tread more heavily, plodding along life’s path with my ball and chain attached. I don’t anger easily, and cower among people who wield big sticks.
My own big stick I keep padlocked inside a shed whose lock combination I can never remember, except when I need it before heading to the ballpark to see the Giants whoop the Dodgers, or for psychological support before trading my car for a dozen baseballs autographed by the likes of Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, and Lou Gehrig. Then that stick seems to whip out of my shed like a bullet. I’ve never hit anyone with it, but I do wave it around a lot.
I realize I’m a little over-involved in baseball, for someone who can’t catch an infield fly except with her forehead or eye socket, and has a batting average recently estimated at .035. But hey, that’s an improvement over the target practice percentage I achieved in the Army, when I was forced to qualify on a 9-millimeter semi-automatic big stick—the only time I’ve ever held a gun.
I was supposed to hit at least 65 out of 100 shots on the target. I hit only three, and two of them didn’t technically make it within the red zone that demarcates an unsettling silhouette of a human head and torso. The supervising sergeant gave me a passing score, despite the fact that I scored only three percent. He was unnerved by my tremulous and spastic weapon handling, and worried when his lower-ranking enlisted staff scattered when I pulled the trigger.
Even the two-star general who accompanied me to the range after finding out I’d avoided the mandatory annual 9mm qualification throughout my entire twelve-year Army career agreed to pass me anyway. He advised that I ought never, ever hold a gun again. It makes no difference how large a gun may be—it will never be my “Big Stick.”
I may be equally inept with a bat as I am with a gun, but my bat is only one of two Big Sticks I ever want to get my hands around. But it’s extremely doubtful I’ll walk anywhere close to softly when I take it to the ball park and wave it around for my SF Giants.
