The Bent Kinetics of Memory

In trying explain, elegantly he thought,
how to measure the trajectory of an object tossed into space,
or the effect of spin on flight, or the momentum equations of collisions,
Mr. Russell always turned to baseball.
Drawing tiny arrows of meaning on a chalkboard
to illustrate some home run parabola,
he would be transported in his own personal baseball time machine.
He would eyes-closed grin like we were all there with him.
Like the sun was shining and the beer was free.
Like we could picture it exactly.

He lost me immediately. 
It wasn’t his teaching style,
or the obviousness with which he favored the boys,
or even his obsession with the acoustics of wooden bats.
I had only just begun writing, but already,
I was entering the world through stories,
through the curious mechanics of narrative and connection.
My lack of concentration had nothing at all to do with Mr. Russell
and everything to do with the fact that in the baseball file in my brain
it was and will always be the summer of 1988:

the year my mother moved my sisters and I back to California,
the year I started refusing socks and cursing secretly,
the year I came home from the fourth grade in tears
because the kids had been playing AIDS tag in the school yard
a game in which the “It” kid was “a gay.”
One slight touch to the arm or back meant you were now gay too,
and had AIDS, which meant instant death,
an actual location beside the kindergarten water fountains.
It was the year I started to square with my intuition
that evil was airborne,
that it spread through what you said aloud.

And it was the year my little sister fell in love with Orel Hershisher,
who pitched 59 consecutive scoreless innings,
pissing off Don Dreysdale and any batter worth his salt,
taking the Dodgers to a World Championship that produced
so much pure joy in the city of Los Angeles battered wives got flowers; 
men laid off from factories felt their hearts charge with hope;
new kids at school could don shiny royal blue Dodgers jackets and belong.

“Don’t drop the ball!” Mr. Russell would say and laugh to himself,
while passing out quizzes on Magnus force or passionately arguing
that Babe Ruth could most definitely have hit Sandy Koufax.
I would be time-traveling a reverse chronology of a year—
the first time I snuck out of our cramped one bedroom apartment
to walk to the ocean and watch the moon arch its back light
across the hazy dark; the time my sister caught me
using her Mike Scioscia rookie card as a book mark
in a Nancy Drew novel and disowned me for three weeks.

When I should have been learning the practical applications
of force and speed and distance and power,
I was stuck in the wine colored upholstery of a 1982 Ford Fairmont
watching the corn golden fields of Iowa slip stream past
as my mother ran toward her boyfriend,
toward the pacific ocean,
away from her mother,
away from safe harbor of her hometown,
toward some freedom she could only imagine
and not yet understand,
three small daughters
and an empty bank account be damned.

© Mindy Nettifee, all rights reserved.