As athletic as some of my adventures tend to be (like hiking and snow skiing, for example), I am a notoriously poor competitive athlete. I don’t have champion hand/eye/foot coordination, I’m not very strong in the upper body, and I am dripping in nurdness. Despite this, I have tried to play sports all my life, and tonight I got together with some friends and went at it again.

As we were getting out the balls, gloves, and bat, I found a relic from my days playing on Ada’s perennial cellar-dwelling softball team, the Brown Rats. (The reason we lost all the time wasn’t clumsy geeks like me, but two or three hot dogs who fantasized about being in the major leagues; they would make a championship-winning throw to the plate from deep in the outfield [instead of just hitting the cut-off man], only to have the ball bounce to the backstop and allow two more runs to score. They weren’t team players.)

I digress. The relic, pictured here, is my right-hand batting glove, which I also wore under my outfield/first base glove. It got pretty grody during our five seasons at Matthews Park here in Ada, but I don’t remember it being this grody. I think maybe it deteriorated in the garage cabinets. So instead of saving it and risking a visit from the health department or the fire department’s HazMat unit, I scanned it for you to see, and tossed it in the trash. Goodbye, nasty glove!

Sub-story: when the East Central University Lady Tigers softball team breaks their huddle at the start of a game, their spirit yell is, “Balls to the wall!” I think that’s pretty funny.