Springfield, Virginia, USA. Professional sports embedded my growing up years in Cleveland, Ohio.

 

The football Browns were dominating and the baseball Indians were elite. We even had the Barons, the most successful team in American Hockey League history.

 

 

 

But, my true sports love was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). I heard of them in 1946 through my older brother. His search for extraOhio life had picked up the Racine Belles in Wisconsin.

 

The whole thing amazed this five year old. After all, Wisconsin was a planet in orbit around a star called Chicago!

 

Racine radio WRJN had play-by-play and direct wire broadcasts of games from around the league. It was white, of course; even ladies’ baseball couldn’t escape the times: there were no black women in the league. The players who did make it in had to wear dresses, attend charm school, and keep their makeup in order.

 

Dorothy Schroeder was a big star. She played for the South Bend Blue Sox, Kenosha Comets, Fort Wayne Daisies, and Kalamazoo Lassies.

 

No matter where she played, Dorothy (or, most often, “Dottie”) brought silky smooth fielding, steady hitting, and a sunny disposition.

 

Dottie was the only player who made it through 12 league seasons. When the All-American folded up after the '54 season, Dottie toured as part of the 11 All-Americans for three years. She retired after a record 15 seasons of professional baseball.

“There is no substitute for excellence - not even success”. - Thomas Boswell

Martin Heidegger analyzed the concepts of "care," "mood," and the individual's relationship to death in Being and Time (1927).

 

He related authenticity of being (and the anguish of modern society) to individual confrontations with temporality (mortality). 

In the face of dread, self-awareness leads to the authenticity of a life created out of nothing. It does so by reference only to one's own deliberate purposes.

 

For Heidegger, answering why there is something rather than nothing is the only genuine philosophical question.

 

Time is crucial: a dynamic temporal process constitutes our personal history. There is no abstract essence of human nature. What we are becoming is more important than what we are right now, this minute. In the end, this was his answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

 

Heidegger said it is only because we choose being-there.

While taking a break from work, I sat outside a coffee shop, with a latte, thinking of nothing in particular. Just across from where I sat, a group of little girls earnestly pursued a soccer ball.

 

I remember taking my son to soccer back in the '70s when he was in elementary school. It was a disorganized mess. No one anticipated back then how big soccer would become and a lone instructor had to manage (or not) a very large group of boys.

 

This was different, but the same. The girls were, maybe, 2nd graders, in an organized recreational league. Not like Little League, though: the parents and coaches were not blood thirsty at all and seemed very supportive. The kids ran about in their uniforms - tees, shorts, a few skorts, sneakers, and knee socks. Hair ribbons seemed in vogue.

 

Fun to watch.

 

I stood at the chain link fence, as they converged on the ball. No evident tactics, but the players all had different styles. Most skipped as they ran, while some just ran (getting there first).

 

Scoring? Well, there were two nets for goals but no goal tenders. Getting the ball somewhere seemed a lot less important than just being in the swarm. OK, it was a low scoring game, but no one seemed to care.

 

It was just then I had a powerful memory, interrupted only when a 30ish woman by the fence walked past and said "Aren't they wonderful?" I said "Yes, they are.

 

"They never had such things when I was a little girl”, she went on to say, “I am glad they have the chance". She added that her mother (maybe close to my age) complains that the boys got all the exercise and if she did athletics at all it was basketball with dumb girls' rules.

 

I nodded in agreement, then said "Well, all that is past. What I can do now is make sure that some of my taxes go to this kind of recreation and your daughters get the chance we never had."

 

She smiled and thanked me for caring so much, saying "Thank you, Ma'am", then went on.

The whores in Caracas did not know they were sex workers, preferring instead to be known as sex craftswomen like so many of their mothers.

 

Their medium just happened to be men.

 

The girls had to compete against a lot of other girls once the tourists ran away. Their market shifted with the gunfire.

 

I was a good tipper, but in the end a very bad customer who preferred just talking in the cafe and learning what I could of their lives. Rather insulting, from their point of view.

 

It is true: I never played soccer when I was a little girl. Never heard of it.

 

Standing at the fence before chatting with the soccer girl's mom, I remembered my life as a little girl.

 

The surviving neighbors might remember seeing a boy and his dog delivering newspapers early in the morning, but I was the girl in pink pedal pushers, on her bike, pigtail waving.

 

Then there was me fielding a hot grounder at 3rd base, skinning my knees. skirts flying.

No one remembers me at the prom: a tall girl stuck without a real date, dancing with another girl.

It is all here now, breaking through to the surface.

 

It is not so much that I rewrite my personal history but remember the way it really was, as it was always supposed to be, as my memories synthesize into a continuity that culminates in my life now, as it really is.

 

I consider mere existence a kind of death so different from living. For so so long I existed as the bearded lady at the circus. But: the grey cipher is long gone; I came to life, becoming: what?

 

The shapely trapeze artist, resplendent in her body suit?

 

To hell with Heidegger: I say it is only because I am being-here that I choose being-here.

 

Nowadays the girls - and boys - ask me to dance. And I do.

 

 

 

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