Soft

"We played better last week."

-- A middle-ager on my dad's softball team, after a 16-1 loss

--

Maybe it's because I'm watching the Olympics all the time now, but I was sad and unimpressed as I sat and watched my dad's softball team lose last night. I used to love watching my dad play (back when he was young and spry, back in the hey-day of slow-pitch, when nothing got past him at short and he was always due for a double), but something changed. It seems like there are two kinds of men who play softball:

- Young yuppie goons with new wives and new babies, watching, bored, from the aluminum bleachers, with tons to prove and tons of attitude, lean as beef jerky and about as respectable as tuna;

- And middle-aged former softball players with hair as gray as their bicycle shorts and guts like bleached watermelons, guys who wear Terminator-style shades and jeer at each other about "old muscle" and "how's about a 401-K, Dan?" (That last one is no joke--I actually heard it at a church softball game and made no effort to hide my confusion.)

Softball games--at least the ones I've sat through lately--tend to pit the young yuppies against the middle-agers, or the middle-agers against themselves. Either way, it's enough to make me vow never to play softball. Ever. It's a twisted, slow-moving whirligig of stupid machismo, as clumsy and frustrating as actually trying to grip a softball properly in a baseball-sized glove. It feels like the Great American Pasttime stripped of its dignity--baseball as the patient etherized on a table--carelessly thrown together and expanded.

That's not to say I don't respect the sport, or that my father plays it every year, but it does seem a muddy reflection of what it ought to be. It's not even a proper workout: sluggish sluggers galumphing to base one, harumphing to base two, leaning like creaky rickshaws around base three, and walloping a victorious stomp on home, as if the journey was hard.

It wasn't hard, friends, fans, yuppies and middle-agers: it was soft.

--

As we drove home from the field in Council Bluffs, we took 13th Street back through Omaha and were startled to see, in the middle of the street, a distraught woman in a white and red sash walking at the cars. Brakes squealed and cars swerved, but no one honked or yelled at the woman, perhaps out of respect for the calamity that showed on her face. I've never seen a face so sad, except in low bars and on ancient masks. And she just walked slowly and parted the flow of traffic, making eye contact with drivers, silently asking why they didn't just hit her, just back right up and give it another go. We called the police, who took at least fifteen minutes to show, and by that time she had left busy 13th for a residential road on a hill, where she collapsed, catatonic, in the middle of the street, breathing only because that's what her body had to do. People popped out of houses: they were wrapped in blankets and jackets (but it wasn't cold) and they crept to the curb to peer as policemen and paramedics poked and prodded, prompted and petted. But the woman stared into the sky as the sun set in red, sad eyes crying upward tears, and we drove away as she was lifted on a stretcher, and the silence in our van was heavy as sand.