Or Much Ado About Nothing
It baffled high school classmates to find that next to slow pitch softball and Rosalind, my uninhibited passion was Shakespeare, introduced to me in a herniating edition of his annotated plays and poems by my third year English teacher, who had the crazy idea that I should be a writer. As soon as I got the hang of the Elizabethan tongue, I read and talked about the bard so often that friends called me Puck (although I was five feet too tall). What got me started was Julius Ceasar and the line I'd rather be a dog and bay the moon.
I was a rangy sixteen painfully in love with Rosalind, a dish for the gods if the devil dress her not, and a ringer for the Crabtown Baptist softball team intent on seizing the league championship from a pious bunch of Methodists who wore black and knelt in prayer before each inning. Of me they could have said (as Portia said of the merchant of Venice) How oddly he is suited in my patched up blue knickers, bright orange jersey (with number XIV on the back), oversized blue cap with a brim that rested on my nose, and orange Keds that exposed my toes.
I played centerfield and batted cleanup.
Never did I think my first real romance would wind up a Shakespearean comedy. Act One opened the night before the game when Chubs and I took Rosalind and Marie to a Charlie Chan movie, then to the Sweete Shoppe where we pooled our change, invested in a banana split, listened to Harry James on the juke box and talked about the big event which Rosalind looked upon with disdain, even when I said I'd hit her a home run if she'd come and watch us play. I raised the ante to two homers but all she did was sit there and lick the spoons.
Love crazed Romeos know no shame, and I groveled until finally the bright angel with sainted lips (and Queen of the Junior Hop) rolled her eyes and said she’d be there if I promised to hit four homers. I the motley fool said yes, knowing it unthinkable to hit four homers when I hadn’t hit more than one in a game all season. Chubs laughed and I reasoned it should be that none but Antony should conquer Antony. No one knew what I was talking about.
On game day Rosalind adorned the sidelines, and I got overheated staring at her in the vee neck sweater she must have borrowed from her kid sister. Next to her was my lexicological six-year-old nephew who studied dictionaries, spoke like Funk and Wagnall, and almost convinced me that I could slay the round-trip dragon. So with bases loaded in the first inning, I homered to score four runs, and that was all we got until the third when I came to bat again, with Chubs and Beau and Shorty on base and the count three balls two strikes, and thwacked another one out of the park (actually a small crabgrass pasture rimmed by oak trees so that what I did was lose one in the upper branches). We had eight runs, and the Methodists seven, which by the time I came up in the sixth had increased to thirteen, thanks to their persistent praying and a fluke home run that bounced along the field of battle and rolled into Chesapeake Bay, by a guy named Pede Herculem, whom I called Big Foot (my semantical nephew having said that was what his name meant in Greek). Anyway, with three men on, and after spotting my Juliet adding up her fingers, I spat on my bat, dug in my heels, lined up my sights, attacked the ball in the spirit I assumed the Moor would assault the evil Iago, and sent my third grand slam homer deep into the high grass in left field and loped around the bases, pausing to wave to my nephew and do a handstand on third. Everybody but you-know-who was screaming Puck (including my English teacher, and she cared less for softball than Rosalind).
My head was swimming, ears ringing, heart pumping.
Methodists thirteen, Baptists twelve.
It was dusk when I came to bat in the bottom of the ninth with two
gone (Cecil and Leroy had struck out) and the bags empty. I had to get a homer just to tie the game, but more to the point, to impress Miss Dark Eyes who was sashaying like a minor league Cleopatra, coming on to Big Foot as if he were the scarce-bearded Caesar. So the pitcher and his catcher had a conference, and I figured something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, and only the object of my fantasies failed to boo when the sneaky pitcher decided to walk me. I got in a lot of good sinning with all that hot language I was hurling at the mound and everything else within range (including the Great Umpire in the sky). Then from the sideline my nephew threw a linguistic fit, announcing that I was victimized, fleeced, swindled, hustled, flimflammed, cozened, and duped, as I reached beyond the batter’s box and popped up the world’s wildest underhand pitch to end the game. The one thing to come to mind was indeed the tears live in an onion that should water. I could always count on Will.
The final score stood them thirteen and us twelve. I knocked in all twelve runs, which they wrote up in the Crabtown Daily Press, calling me a hero in losing cause. Of course, they misspelled my name. When I sidled to the sideline to get much needed comfort, my fickle Roz, frosty in desire, dismissed me, saying I broke my promise and danced away with Big Foot.
Hey, I yelled. All he did was get one homer and I hit three. The shrew pouted her sugar lips and said, Yes, but his won the game. Sensing there was no way to top that I whispered, Get thee to a nunnery.
I left the field hand in hand with my nephew and the English teacher, advising me to put away the faithless bat and pick up a noble pen. My nephew called the game underhand corrupted foul injustice, unaware he was speaking Shakespeare.
I gave him my bat and blue cap.
