Those of you who know me, which is, I imagine, most of you reading this, would be hard pressed to describe me as athletic. “Quick, top ten adjectives for Mark.” I’m certain that would elicit more than one “Is asshole an adjective?” but I’d be shocked to see a single athletic.

And, yes. In this context, at least, asshole is an adjective.

So, having produced one singular slab of memoirage, and having apparently learned nothing, I shall now address a subject dramatically less interesting than my mother’s mob ties: my follies as a teenaged athlete. But don’t worry, my mother has a cameo. Even my father makes an appearance, and there won’t be much of that.

YMCA Caravans

These do not exist anymore, and there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that they never should have. It was just such a profoundly stupid idea. 20 or so preteen children stacked like cordwood in the back of a stake bed truck. One set of 20-something counselors who slept during the day and drove all night, another set who took the day shift minding us. It must have been just boys, as I recall that the protocol for peeing in the middle of the nighttime drive was to climb over the other sleeping campers to the back of the truck and let it go through the slats. Which was, objectively, hilarious.

Caravans were about a week long and traveled between national park destinations in the Southwest. I don’t recall all the destinations, but I know we went to Lake Mead. I remember because I was permitted to rent a canoe to noodle about the lake. As befit the generally loose oversight structure, no one bothered to check to see if I knew how to row a canoe.

I did not.

If I rowed on one side I spun clockwise. If I rowed on the other side I spun counterclockwise. Neither seemed particularly helpful. The rhythm required to alternate left and right to navigate in a more or less straight line never really suggested itself. So I drifted. Big lakes have currents. There I went.

Every boat I waved at for a rescue waved back.

It actually took the counselors a couple of hours to a) notice my absence, and b) spot me drifting on the horizon. A motor boat was sent out to rescue me, with a counselor rowing my canoe back. They kept a closer eye on me after that. I showed them.

My First Concussion

I don’t recall the order (I wonder why…), nor do I recall whether my Caravan Concussions were on the same or different caravans. But I had two of them. Both were softball related. Now that I think of it, I think they were on the same caravan, and that the outfield concussion came first.

I was clearly destined to follow in the footsteps of the great Jewish athletes of legend. So, picked last and parked in the outfield, where I was least likely to do harm.

Until a fly ball came my way. You’ve seen this scene so many times. The chubby-uncoordinated-friendless child goes back, back, back, and snares the fly ball to the deafening cheers of all in attendance.

I, on the other hand, ran forward while looking behind me to track the ball and ran skull first into a basketball stanchion. Concussion #1. Check.

The next time we played softball the counselors settled me safely behind the plate, which primarily involved chasing down bad pitches. Until one counselor was pitching and another counselor came to bat. Circumstances required that the pitches have a dollop of mustard applied, and one of these juiced pitches got past my small glove and modest reflexes, landing square in the kisser.

When I came to, I was cradled in the arms of one of the counselors, who took that opportunity to share that in addition to being uncoordinated I also threw like a girl. Those were the days, no? Can’t get away with that shit now.

But he wasn’t just painful diagnosis, he was also helpful prescription. He was an assistant coach in the YMCA’s gymnastics program, and he suggested that I enroll when we got back home. Assuming, as I’m sure we both did, that I made it home at all.

Gymnastics, Part One

Being a good boy, I did as was suggested and joined the Y gymnastics program. Who wants to throw like a girl? Do even girls want to throw like girls? I certainly didn’t.

I don’t have especially strong memories of the program. I do recall a man with an Eastern European accent slapping my calves to induce the pointing of toes. Those were the days, no? Can’t get away with that shit now.

I can’t honestly recall how long I stuck with it. It was more than one-and-done, but it fell short of triggering a life changing commitment. I jumped, I rolled, I stood on my hands. I don’t believe I demonstrated any particular flair for any of it.

Oddly, my strongest memory of the various YMCA programs from that period was from a swim class, where an instructor noted, for no reason that I can recall, that I had “musclebound thighs.” I’m sure now that he was moonlighting from his job at the parish. But I liked the sound of it. If I could only find a thigh-forward sport I’d be set.

I’m pretty sure that the main goal of the gymnastics program, to keep me from throwing like a girl, was a failure. Throwing is kind of a team sport activity, given that you were generally expected to throw to someone. Since team sports and I agreed to continue to disagree, there was never really any opportunity to test the no-longer-throws-like-a-girl hypothesis. But it was probably at least partially successful in rendering me slightly less uncoordinated.

Thus ended my brief flirtation with sporting activity.

Then Came High School

As high school years go, mine weren’t so bad. I know that middle school is supposed to be the worst, but grade school for me was the Stygian depths from which I clawed my way to the light. I spent a lot of my time getting beat up in grade school. Which, again, will surprise none of you who know me.

The absolute nadir was sixth grade. After a particularly noteworthy thrashing by a third grader, I announced to my mother that I wouldn’t be going to middle school. I simply refused to be the youngest and smallest, knowing full well what lay in store, surrounded by bigger, older kids. Jesus, a third grader had just taken me down.

My older brother, who walked in on this conversation, suggested I keep a roll of pennies in my pocket. I told him that he was insane if he thought a 50¢ bribe was enough to get me out of a beating, and he explained the concept of brass knuckles. Nope. A great way to get an even more thorough beating and lose 50¢.

I don’t recall how I was convinced, but I wound up going to middle school after all. Probably because I lacked any real agency. To my surprise, though, the beatings stopped. Instead, my middle school betters decided it would be more fun to stuff me upside down into a trash can. Repeatedly. I spent a lot of my time in middle school face down in trash cans. But you had to acknowledge both their creativity and their effort. They weren’t just taking the easy way out and hitting me. Props.

I finally solved the problem by befriending a very large person as my protector, in exchange for help with homework. What ensued were pitched playground battles between those who would stuff me in a garbage can and those, my new friend and his friends, who would prevent it. It leached the fun out of dumping me into a trash can when it became clear that this pleasure could only be enjoyed at great cost, so it petered out of its own accord.

After that middle school was pretty OK. I even had friends, which was a nice change from grade school. I recall the post-trash can era as mostly pleasant.

Since middle school had actually been an improvement over grade school, high school seemed promising. And it pretty much delivered. At the time, California high schools were three years, 10-12, and I entered at barely 15, just turning 17 by graduation. But despite being, once again, youngest and smallest, there were no more beatings or stuffings. In part, I think, because of exactly how I went to high school.

I was part of San Diego’s Independent Study program, their high-end gifted ghetto. There were two schools with IS programs, and students came from all over the county. At my program, at Clairemont High, we had a pair of joined bungalows on the outskirts of the campus, so we were away from the mainstream kids. We had our own library, and we each had a dedicated cubicle for study. We had two full time tutors, one for Math and Science, one for English and Humanities. We didn’t take any classes with the rest of the high school, unless there was a subject of specific interest that the tutors couldn’t handle. And foreign languages. Those were always with the normal kids.

Each school admitted about 6-8 students per grade, so at any given time there were about 20 of us, as all the grades shared the same space. It was kind of like a one room schoolhouse, but with two rooms. It made for an interesting echo chamber, a small group of super smart kids isolated from the rest of the campus.

Naturally, high jinks ensued. There was the day I couldn’t find my little Honda roller skate shaped car, because a bunch of my compadres had picked it up and moved it. Or the contest we had to do the most interesting, non-destructive thing to a particular student’s lunch. I brought a thermos of hot water, plastic bags, and jello to school, and encased the contents of his lunch within his lunch bag. I was sure I was the winner, but was disqualified when the bag with his sandwich leaked and I’d been deemed to have “harmed” his lunch. As if. That was lime jello, and clearly enhanced his sandwich. Obviously, the loss still stings.

Especially since the eventual winner involved hiding a walkie talkie in his lunch bag and having his lunch beg him not to be eaten. Funny, but weak.

My favorite was when we started comparing notes about the admission process and discovered that we’d all been told the same thing. IQ was one of the entrance criteria, and we had each been told that we were right on the cutoff threshold and had just snuck in under the wire. Obviously, that couldn’t be true for the entire group. We’d been told that to keep from getting swelled heads and totem poling one another.

Faced with that scenario, we did what anyone would have done. We broke into the locked file cabinet and located our admission packets. It’s not like we had a choice. And we discovered exactly what we thought we would: our IQ scores were all over the map, not clustered at the cutoff. But that information did not lead to the intellectual Lord of the Flies scenario they’d feared. We had fun with it for a bit, but it didn’t really matter. I don’t know, maybe it mattered to the kids who were genuinely near the cutoff, but the rest of us were fine.

Not for nothing, my two best friends, Bob and Bruce, my ride or die friends, came from the IS program. We’re still tight, fifty years on.

Gymnastics, Part Two

I suppose we all want what we don’t have. I had academic challenges galore, but excelling at them didn’t provide any sense of satisfaction. It just seemed like a parlor trick I was good at. I wanted to do something hard. So I decided to do the most unlikely thing possible. Despite my distinctly unsporting history, I decided, on entering high school, that I would be a jock. I was not going to leave high school without a varsity letter. In something.

But what?

Going through the sports offered at Clairemont was discouraging. I knew better than to try team sports. Too much picked-last scar tissue. It had to be some kind of individual sport. Wrestling involved someone else trying to hurt me. Swimming is hard. Diving is up way too high for my comfort. Tennis involved playing directly against someone. Golf…? I had never golfed, but I suppose it was possible.

But gymnastics. I’d done that before. Perhaps my musclebound thighs would be an asset. Plus, I didn’t think our team was all that strong, so three years to get a varsity letter seemed doable. I was on my way to the jockhood of my dreams, as a Floor Exercise specialist.

Of course, there were roadblocks on my journey. Like a complete and total lack of talent or ability. I would have to conquer the heights with the only tool I had available: effort.

And man, did I throw myself into it. During the competitive season I spent 4-6 hours a day in the gym, seven days a week. The rest of the year I was at the Y about 3 hours a day, 4-5 days a week. The thing about having no actual native ability is that it took an absurd amount of repetition to learn a new skill.

But it paid off. JV my first year, and then a week-long summer gymnastics camp I attended in Lake Tahoe with the rest of San Diego’s serious high school gymnasts, my off-season brethren at the Y. I was ready to explode my junior year.

The only noticeable downside to my gymnastics career was that there was only the one locker room, which the gymnastics team shared with the “real” jocks. Who seemed to think the gymnasts were a little gay. I came to that conclusion because we were constantly being called fairies and faggots. So I’m pretty confident in that assessment.

It didn’t help that the two best gymnasts on the team were completely, flamboyantly gay. But I didn’t mind belonging to that group, because I truly belonged. These were my people. Plus, I could flip over a football player’s head before he could catch me, so good luck trying to dump me head first into a trash can. I may have still been small, but I was now agile.

On the plus side, I had transformed myself into a dense mass of highly sculpted muscle. I was quite the nerdy little smoke show. It manifested in a sort of girl friend, but the fumblings were more panic inducing than fulfilling, so it never went anywhere. I suppose I didn’t like being objectified. I was more than just my washboard abs, dammit.

In fact, my parents were starting to worry about my lack of dating. And my carrying a teddy bear with me to school. Which still made me one of the least eccentric of my IS peers. My older brother was gay and out, and I believe the parents had concerns about me. My mother actually sat me down and suggested that sometimes when girls said no they meant yes, and that I should try being more aggressive. Those were the days, no? Can’t get away with that shit now.

I replied that that seemed confusing, and perhaps I’d be better off with the kind of girl who didn’t play games, who meant what she said and said what she meant. So… Horton. I was holding out for a Dr. Seuss character.

Our two best gymnasts had graduated, so the field was open for me junior year. But if I was going to score well enough to letter, I needed at least one Level F move in my routine, which was the most difficult level at the time. I had a book with all of the moves and grades, and I scoured it for a Level F move I could actually learn and perform. Something other than a double twisting back flip, for example. I’d tried twisting back flips, and found it disconcerting to rotate across two axes simultaneously. And I can assure you, I was the only one of my gymnastics peers who thought of twisting back flips that way.

I eventually found… something. Something so weird that no one else came anywhere near it. I’m sure it’s truly dead, as no serious gymnast would get within the same zip code.

It started with a standing back handspring. Not from a round-off, too much momentum. But instead of going all the way around to my feet, as my hands hit the floor I collapsed into it, so I landed on my neck, with straight legs pointing behind me and my feet behind my head. Then I kicked straight up in a kip motion into a handstand, but I used my momentum to push off the floor. I hopped up into the air in the handstand position, executed a half turn, and landed and held the handstand.

It was a completely bonkers combination of strength, fluidity, and ungainliness, and exhibited a shocking lack of give-a-fuck for a competitive sport. It was engineered in a lab to be my signature move. You could practically see judges flipping through the book. “Yeah, that’s a real thing. And it is an F move. And he did nail it, so… I guess we have to score it?”

I wasn’t good enough to medal at County that year, but all the guys who finished ahead of me were graduating, so I had a clear path to a medal as a senior. Meanwhile, goal achieved. I got my varsity letter as a junior. I wore the fuck out of my garish orange and blue official letterman jacket. It’s packed away in a memory box, for future spelunking.

By the way, Clairemont High’s claim to fame is that it’s where Cameron Crowe did his research for Fast Times At Ridgemont High in 1978. I graduated in 1974, so I was definitely not the model for Spicoli.

OK, What’s The Catch?

Senior year, my coach recommended me to a friend of his who was the head coach at Cal State Fullerton, and I went up with my father to tour the facility, meet the coach, and talk about the program and where I could fit in. I didn’t have the weight for a scholarship offer, but still.

I also decided that I’d be more valuable to the team, and as a college prospect, if I competed in all the events, not just floor exercise. So I committed to competing all-around, learning vault, high bar, parallel bars, pommel horse, and rings. It was a lot to pack in, at five to midnight.

Parallel bars was the easiest to pick up. It took advantage of my floor exercise skills in a fairly straightforward way. Pommel horse and rings both required ridiculous upper body strength, and did nothing to leverage my musclebound thighs. Super hard. But I could hold an Iron Cross on the rings, so that’s not nothing. Although I’m pretty sure I looked like my seams were about to split. Red is not my color. I’m a Winter.

Vault and high bar were just plain frightening. High bar because the only thing keeping me from flying off into outer space as I spun about in circles was my grip on the bar. Which seemed like a literally tenuous grip on survival.

Vault was terrifying for two reasons. The first is that it required running full tilt at a large, heavy, stationary object. Getting the timing right on that was tough, but the most terrifying part was when I finally did get it right. Once, and only once, I hit the board at exactly the right spot, properly in stride, with perfect timing, and took off like a rocket. My fingers barely brushed the horse as I flipped over the top. I took so much air that I quit.

In that moment, and with my experience on the high bar clearly in mind, I quit trying to compete all-around. The beauty of floor exercise was that I couldn’t get any higher off the ground than I could propel myself. That seemed like a safe, sane approach.

But I want to be clear about something that’s been left unsaid. I wasn’t a very good gymnast. There was only so far you could go on nothing but sheer force of will, and I’d gotten about that far. You don’t get to truly excel, at anything, without some degree of talent. I suppose I did have a degree of talent. Like literally one degree. Not enough.

Given my absence of talent, settling for a medal in floor exercise at County (it was a very weak year) and specializing in college seemed like a pretty good outcome.

Or not.

I’m sure you’d all love a tidy narrative arc, with our hero triumphing in his senior year. That’s certainly what I was expecting: the payoff for all that grueling work. But you all know better, even if I didn’t at the time.

The actual payoff for all that hard work turned out to be… arthritis. Specifically, osteoarthritis, the breakdown of joint cartilage. At 16.

Who knew that the constant pounding my knees and wrists were taking on my relentless program of self improvement would do bad things to my cartilage? Probably any competent adult trainer, but my high school coach was a wrestler who coached the gymnastic team. Not a deep subject matter expert in… much at all.

My doctor recommended against competing my senior year. He said the risk of additional permanent damage was super high, but he’d leave that to my discretion. But he pretty much forbade competing in college. I did the grownup thing and quit. If I couldn’t take it past high school, there was no point in risking crippling myself for a County medal.

No matter how hard I’d worked for it and how badly I wanted it.

I will say, though, that in a curious way this experience has helped me age. I think one of the hardest things for most people about aging is coming to grips with decline and disfunction. That whole raging against the dying of the light. But I’ve been used to my body failing since I was 16, so when a new system goes dark, I’m kind of, “Well, that doesn’t work now. Okie doke.”

Now What?

Truthfully, it wasn’t all that hard to quit, because by this point I was in an enormous amount of near constant pain, alleviated only by holding very still. I could walk about 2-3 blocks before needing a lie down. Thankfully, normal living doesn’t put a lot of strain on the wrists, so those recovered nicely. It took a couple of years before the knees came fully around, surrounded as they were by musclebound thighs and powerful, shapely calves. Strong muscles are a positive tonic for weak joints. A regimen of nuclear-grade anti-inflammatories also pulled their weight.

These days I’m pretty much asymptomatic. I’ve walked as much as seven miles in a day on our travels, and the knees are fine. I’m more likely to be bothered by the shin splints I also received as gift-with-purchase from gymnastics, since I don’t think they ever truly heal. It’s why I don’t run. I don’t lead a lifestyle that puts a lot of stress on my wrists (not even sure what that would be), but every once in a while I’ll try to unscrew the lid of a stuck jar and the wrists will scream at me. Just a friendly reminder. “Hey, remember when we broke you? Good times.”

That popped me loose as a 17 year-old freshman at UCSD. I’d applied to Berkeley and been accepted, but there was no money for me to attend sleepaway college, so I had to stay local. I didn’t really have a clue what I was interested in, since until just prior I’d been interested in being a gymnast.

What I was really interested in was figuring out how to work and put myself through school once I turned 18, since I had a deep-seated aversion to living at home. That’s because home was unstable. Literally.

Home Is Where The Dock Is

I’ve already written about the year my parents took me out of school and we traveled the US, Canada, and Mexico in a travel trailer. After we stopped in San Diego, we parked in a trailer park on Mission Bay and they put me back into school. So quite a few of my formative years were spent in a small metal can with my parents.

There was a brief interlude when I was 16 where we lived in a house in Ocean Beach like real people. I had my very own bedroom. With a door! Heaven.

Sadly, that wasn’t quite Bohemian enough for them, so when I was 17 they moved us onto a motor boat. My bedroom was the pilot’s cabin, with a custom-made Shetland sofa bed I unfurled to sleep. Along with a modest allocation of clothes, I was permitted room for a record player and a single box of records. I removed them from their jackets so more would fit in the box. The jackets, along with the records that didn’t fit and everything else I owned of value, went into storage.

A couple of stories will establish exactly how batshit insane this arrangement was. First up, the summer before my freshman year at UCSD. My mother announces that they’re leaving for a two week tour, and would I like to come with them? I exploded with something like, “Are you kidding? I have a job. I can’t just pick up for two weeks. I have responsibilities.”

My mother was very understanding. She said I could probably stay with friends for a couple of weeks, and offered me a sleeping bag so I could sleep in the back of my car if there were any gaps. And that was it. They left for a romantic tour and I couch surfed and slept in my car. That arrangement worked fine for them.

Then there was the night I came home to the dock and home wasn’t there. Remember that we’re talking about 1974. No cell phones. If they weren’t docked and tethered, there was no way to communicate. I waited on the dock until they came tooling up about an hour later.

I was sputtering, all splenetic Daffy Duck, but butter wouldn’t melt in my mother’s mouth. “Well, dear, you didn’t call to say you’d be late, and we wanted to take a little evening harbor cruise. It is a lovely night.”

I thought that they were clear that I’d be moving out on my 18th birthday no matter what, but I suppose they considered this an insurance policy, lest I become complacent. Mission accomplished. No way in hell I’d be on that boat the day after my 18th birthday.

Yer Out!

That led me to an athletic program at UCSD run by an ex-minor league umpire, who offered training in umpiring and an entree to paid gigs officiating youth ball. I knew absolutely zero about baseball, and even my scant softball knowledge had been literally knocked out of my head. But I was intrigued by the part-time income opportunities, and threw myself at it like I’d committed to gymnastics.

I got to my first paid gig as a base umpire, and the plate umpire walked me around the field before the game. “This is a base. If the defensive player has the ball and is touching the base before the baserunner gets there, the baserunner is out, and you make this signal with your hands. Otherwise they’re safe, and you make this signal. I’ll take care of everything else.” I don’t think I’d ever watched a baseball game. I knew nothing.

But baseball was a year-round sport in SoCal. If I umpired a game every weekday and a doubleheader each on Saturday and Sunday, that’s nine games. At $15-$20/game, that was enough to live independently. That would get me out of the house (boat), let me take classes, and leave me enough time for homework. I was in. I’d work my way through college the old fashioned way: as an umpire.

While on this journey I also explored officiating football and basketball. I had no feel for football at all, and I also washed out as a basketball referee. I really wanted to be good at basketball, because I loved the game as a spectator. But it put more stress on my knees than was comfortable, and I found it hard in unpleasant ways.

By the book, basketball is a non-contact sport, so literally everything in basketball is a judgement call. There are no clear, bright right-from-wrong lines. It’s all just a fast moving hash. Baseball, on the other hand, is almost nothing but clear bright lines. Where is the ball, where is the batter? Where is the ball, where is the baserunner? They’re binaries, with right and wrong answers. The only thing in baseball that looks like the kind of judgement call that basketball is built on is baserunning interference. That’s one of those is-that-too-much kind of calls, and even that’s usually pretty obvious. You kind of know when a baserunner has interfered.

Which means that it’s theoretically possible to call a perfect baseball game, which was fascinating to me. I spent all four years of college umpiring, and, unlike gymnastics, I got good at it. It got to the point where I could call an entire game behind the plate and miss maybe a couple of pitches. Which were close, and which I knew I’d missed. I never called a perfect, error-free game, but I got close. It was possible.

I even spent a summer in Fairbanks umpiring youth ball. The more experienced umpires were up there for the semi-pro league, which was quite good. They play a Midnight Sun game on the summer solstice which starts at 11 PM and is played under natural light. Pretty cool.

To this day, umpiring is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it scratched the same itch for me that gymnastics did. It required pushing myself to my physical limits, of both perception and processing. A lot happens in an instant in baseball, and you have to see it, process what you’ve seen through a set of rules that seem intentionally arbitrary, and render a judgement in about a second. Take two seconds and it looks like you’re not sure. Because selling the call is the final step.

In real life, you’re never called upon to make a complex decision that quickly. Worst possible case: “Excuse me, I need to use the restroom. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” Playoffs, stolen base, cloud of dust, runner and fielder looking up at you, thousands of people watching… After that, the rest of the world feels like it’s moving in slow motion. I am very hard to rattle.

So. A difficult, athletics-adjacent pursuit with the potential for perfection? I was hooked. After my first couple of years this was more than just a way to pay the bills. This was my new career path. Of course, I was told I’d never, no matter how talented I was, succeed as an umpire because I was too small. Impossible for a creature of my stature to command the respect of the towering professional specimens of MLB.

Well, that just made my blood boil. I was more committed than ever to follow the very specific path that led to the majors. It started, as all good stories do, with Harry Wendelstedt.

Harry was an ex-major league umpire who ran a racket pair of umpiring schools, one in Florida and the other, conveniently, in San Bernardino. Pay yer tuition, go through the program, and if you graduated high enough in the class you’d be offered a minor league A contract. Then you were on the same flight path as players. Shitty pay, part-year work, put your head down and move up one layer at a time, A to AA to AAA, to the Show, if you were good enough.

OK.

My plan was to save enough money for Harry’s school and start my journey. Which required leaving San Diego, where parking cars passed for a real job. I moved to San Francisco to make the big bucks, as a low-level grunt at stock brokerages. Which actually paid well enough to fuel my dreams.

Since you already know that I’m not a retired major league umpire, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that some interesting things happened along the way. First, there was no national association of umpires. Everything was local and regional. I worked my way up to playoff ball over four years in San Diego by taking every assignment, no matter how shitty. It was how I earned my living, but I also knew that the only way to get good assignments was to do the grunt work on the way up.

None of that experience meant anything in the Bay Area. Working as an umpire there would mean starting all over at the bottom, with the worst imaginable Little League games as my entry point. Given the full-time job to save for Harry, that didn’t seem tenable. So in order to fuel my dreams of Major League success, I’d have to stop umpiring.

Then there was my final year of umpiring in San Diego, before heading north. Umpiring trends dangerous, and I had a couple of notable incidents that year. At the time, about one Major League umpire each year went down with facial reconstruction surgery. A hard foul ball to the face mask could shatter the mask, driving the broken steel bar into the cheek. Masks are better now, obviously, but that was the context at the time.

The other context was that umpiring was a decidedly macho pursuit. A pretty interesting place to find myself, after prancing about a floor exercise mat in cunning leather slippers. Umpires tended to be ballplayers who couldn’t cut it, so they brought a jock mentality. But it was also a fact that players would pounce on perceived weakness. “Oh, you got hit by a foul ball and you’re limping. That’s why you were out of position and blew that call, you weak fucking loser.”

An injury prone pursuit in which showing the effects of injury made your job impossible. Nice.

I have a knot on the outside of my left foot. It’s right where the steel cap on my plate shoes ended. I had an unconventional stance behind the plate, which Harry would have squashed, where I wrapped my left leg to the side of the catcher. I felt like it gave me a better view of the strike zone, but it exposed the side of my foot. Inevitably, about once per game, I’d take a foul ball right behind the steel plate on my shoe, fracturing and refracturing the fifth metatarsal, without ever giving it a chance to heal.

Tough but stupid. I had what it took for success as an umpire.

But that was an ongoing thing. There were two specific incidents my last year that gave me pause. The first was taking a foul ball directly to my left elbow, which left my entire left arm dangling useless by my side. What did I do? I switched my ball and strike counter to my right hand and finished the last four innings of the game, whereupon I collected my check, right handed, and drove myself one-armed to the ER. No permanent damage, but it makes you think.

The second was taking a foul ball to my face mask. It didn’t shatter the mask, but it left a pronounced dent. It makes you think.

Or it doesn’t. I was still committed to my plan when I hit San Francisco. Except that I was forced by circumstance to stop umpiring, and I realized that, working at a stock brokerage, my risk of any given workday ending in the hospital was vanishingly low. Then I thought about the many years of low pay and half-year work slogging through the minors, if I even got there because I was, irrefutably, very small and that was a real thing…

So I quit.

But if quitting seems like a motif, I’ll point out in my own defense that I only ever quit long after quitting made sense. Tough but stupid.

Herman de Medici, Or How I Met My Horton

There is one final act in the extravaganza that was my youthful athletic career, but this one got me married.

Of the many shameful things I have confessed, in this post and others, this may be the most shameful: Dorothy and I met at the Society for Creative Anachronism. We laughed, we cried, we LARPed.

One of my high school friends (thank you, June Moore!) told me about the SCA’s weekend activities in Balboa Park, and suggested that I might come. Sure. What else was I doing? But I would need to go in character. Can’t play without paying for your ticket. I somehow found a motley costume and appeared, fully blown, as Herman de Medici, bastard outcast of the de Medici family and court jester to the Barony of Calafia in the Kingdom of Caid.

The Barony was unaware up until that moment that they possessed a court jester, but they were happy to welcome me. Court jestering, in my mind, involved primarily scampering about at ground level in the posture above, my primary jape being looking up the dresses of the Ladies. Those were the days, no? Can’t get away with that shit now.

Still, all in good fun, nothing to see with all those petticoats, and I took the swatting in good natured stride. Besides, I wore ankle bells, so I wasn’t exactly sneaking up on anyone. Only one Lady didn’t swat me, and that was the Princess of the realm. We became fast friends, along with her beau, the Prince, who had ascended to his lofty position by being better at hitting people with rattan swords than any of the other aspirants.

My other primary jestery activity was, unaccountably, tumbling. It turned out that if I kept my weird crab walking posture I could frolic about and do low-to-the-ground back flips without torturing my knees or wrists. Lords and Ladies alike found this bizarre performance entertaining, which endeared me to the Court. My position was secure.

I started to see Princess and Prince socially, outside of officially sanctioned events, and we became good friends.

Then came a Valentine’s Day tourney that Prince was unable to attend, leaving Princess and I to our own devices. Nothing… happened. But it was the first time we’d locked eyes and had the “Oh” moment. Or at least I thought we had the “Oh” moment. I’d never had an “Oh” moment, so maybe that look meant something else. Like, “Whachoo looking at, fool?” Best to just pretend it hadn’t happened and move on.

Trying to ignore it was painful, but it made sense from my perspective. Because surely I must have hallucinated the whole thing. Dorothy was perfect. She was the Princess for a reason. She was smart, funny, stunningly beautiful… Way out of my league. Sure, I had the musclebound thighs of legend and lore, but that was about it. Otherwise, 100% schlub. So net, maybe 98% schlub, factoring in the thighs.

I might have hallucinated the shared moment, but my “Oh” was real. Which was torture. Realistically, I had absolutely no chance. She already had a Prince. Who’d trade down for a jester?

There was no story I could tell myself where the Princess was my first girlfriend. I knew from long, excruciating experience that you claw your way up from the bottom. Step by painful step. Maybe I’d work my way up to a Princess someday, but no way was I starting at the top. Better to just forget the whole thing and stay friends. Because if I acted on what I thought had happened, and was as wrong as I thought I was, I’d destroy the friendship. Which would be heartbreaking.

So when I saw that Patti Smith was coming to town on tour with her first album, Horses, I did what any good friend would do. I asked Dorothy if I should pick up a ticket for her. Instant yes, but it wasn’t until she didn’t pay me back for her ticket that I realized we were on a date. That and the unspeakable things she did to my thumb while holding my hand. At that age, apparently, everything is an erogenous zone.

This was clearly a woman who meant what she said and said what she meant. I’d waited long enough and kept true to my heart. I’d found my Horton.

So much for ignoring it.

We still celebrate Valentine’s Day as an anniversary of sorts. Our daughter, Ruby, has dubbed it our Romanciversary. We’ve never had a name for it before, so that’s nice. We’ve always referred to it as The First Time We Realized We Wanted To Fuck. Which is a little unwieldy, and isn’t graceful on a card. Romanciversary is a marked improvement.

We started dating, but sub rosa. We were careful to only go places with low probability of running into someone who’d recognize us. Nothing like the added frisson of danger. One of the things I learned during this period was that Dorothy was as desperate to leave home as I was, despite being land-based. Her entire dating life was centered on identifying the best horse to ride out of town on. So not only was there myself and the prince, there were two other beaus having their gums checked at the same time.

I felt like I had the inside track, if only because she’d confided to me about the stable, while the other horses were all in the dark. But I desperately needed to come out on top this time, no quitting, so I did something uncharacteristic: I asked my father for advice. Specifically for romantic advice. Surprisingly, since he was a hardcore asshole, he came across.

An aside here, as if this whole thing wasn’t 100% aside, to establish his hardcore-asshole bona fides. Dorothy and I didn’t live particularly close to one another, and at one point while we were dating he and I were driving somewhere and he started giving me a ration of shit for all of the miles I was putting on the car. He wound up to the payoff, which was telling me to stop thinking with my dick. I made him stop the car and I got out. I preferred to walk the miles home than spend another moment with him.

Which story also establishes my desperation to win. That’s who I went to for advice. Unaccountably, he delivered. He told me the trick he’d used on my mother, telling me that I had to get past how corny it sounded, as it was guaranteed to work. He told me to send her 11 flowers, with a card that said, “For the 12th. You complete the dozen.”

Holy shit did that work. I wish I could buy stock in that trick. I almost forgave him.

I’m pretty sure one of her beaus was visiting at home when the flowers arrived, so a little awkward. We became an official, out-in-public couple, and we vowed to move in together on my 18th birthday. Dorothy is a year older, so she had to wait for my emancipation.

To this day, I have never given Dorothy a dozen flowers. Even though the request confounds florists. It usually ends with me saying, “Fine. I want a dozen flowers. Please throw one out before you wrap them up.”

I’m sure there were bruised feelings amongst the other beaus, as no one expects the story to end with the Princess and the Jester making merry. But you have to break a few eggs to tell a love story. Preferably over three befuddled horses.

Many years later I asked Dorothy how she’d picked me as the winner. The flowers helped, but the real answer was that she considered herself a little timid, and the future she imagined for herself with the other three beaus looked stable and unexciting, while the future she imagined with me seemed full of adventure. She knew that I would prod her and challenge her and take her places she didn’t even know she wanted to go. She made a choice to accept being uncomfortable in order to avoid being bored. I think it takes enormous strength of character to pick the hard thing over the easy thing, for your whole life, and I loved her even more for that. If possible.

And that’s the future that came to pass. No one can say that our lives haven’t been full, and full of adventure. It’s a future we’re still living. Every day.