Gifts and Curses CH 7 of Becoming Thuperman

Little league is designed to let everyone who tries out play some position. It's supposed to be more about participation than winning. Since everyone wants to win - because there is hardly a reason to play a sport if you aren't trying to win - the rule about everyone having to play has several unintended effects.

First and foremost, putting in a player who isn't good at playing causes a team to make more mistakes and possibly lose a game. Although the rule is intended to let everyone participate regardless of ability - which is a good thing - the bad part of it is that all the other players who are better at the sport ridicule the kids who aren't and wouldn't be playing at all except for the silly rule. It's especially wrong when a game is lost because of some mistake that ungifted kid made. Life becomes unbearable for the poor schlep. I should know.

Also, the participation rule isn't really preparing any kids for real life. Grown-up people - a.k.a. adults - face situations all the time where they aren't allowed to participate at doing something they want to do because they aren't very good at it. There's a difference between what people dream of doing and the reality of what can be accomplished. Childhood is probably the best place to learn lessons about failure. Participation rules fly in the face of that.

When I was eight-years-old, I dreamed a lot. Never once did I dream of becoming an insurance salesman like my father. Maybe that's what he wanted me to do in life. He made good money doing it - according to Mom. He got to travel a lot, which might be the only reason I'd want to do his job. But selling insurance kind of seemed silly to me. It's like making a bet with someone that they are going to have bad luck or something - like putting a jinx on them. I wasn't sure I wanted any part of that, no matter how much money there was to be made.

For a while, I wanted to be an astronaut, then a police officer, a fire fighter, or a truck driver. A couple of times I thought about being a doctor or a school teacher but after realizing how much reading and studying those professions required, I decided those were probably not well suited to me. Every time I watched a western I wanted to be a cowboy. When I watched sports on TV I wanted to play that sport.

It seemed like every day when I woke up I wanted to be something different than the day before. That's some of what makes kids different from grown-ups. Kids can get away with changing their minds about what they want to be. Pretty-much, adults have to be what they are because somewhere along the way they decided to do things like having kids, buying cars, houses and things to fill up the house.

It all comes down to gifts and living up to potential, though. Since that summer when I was eight, I've given a lot of thought about that. As a result, I've arrived at some ideas about how some of those things actually work. You see, as a baby each of us has more potential than anything else. It doesn't last forever though. It's like having food stored in the freezer. No matter how cold it is inside, eventually the food gets to the point it's no good anymore, what Mom referred to as 'freezer burn'. You have to realize your potential before it's too late to use it otherwise you end up just throwing it away - or you use it to feed the dogs.

Another thing about gifts is that they exist within individual limits. You either overcome, accept or ignore the reasons you can't do something and that's based on who and what you are. Also, it depends on how much you believe in yourself and overcome things like how small you are or how big, whether you're smart or stupid and things like that.

A lot of people think they can't do something even when they've never tried - just because other people tell them they can't. Why would anyone believe someone else about something he or she hasn't tried? How does someone else know how high you can jump or how fast you can run until you do it? If they've never tried they don't know those things about themselves, either. So what ends up happening is people see all the things they can't do, including those things they have been told they can't do, and they get it in their heads that instead of gifts all they were born with were curses.

Here's a pretty good example. Some people have great ideas for songs and are naturally gifted at writing music, but they can't sing very well. Not being able to sing shouldn't prevent them from writing a song, but sometimes it does. Occasionally people have music in them and it doesn't matter whether they can sing or not, because the music is what matters to them. It's like it has to find its way out of them so they can share it. Some of the music Mom listened to when I was eight was like that. The singer wasn't very good at singing - not in my opinion. And when I told Mom that, she said I needed to listen to the lyrics. So, I did; she was right. The words were pretty good and the meaning more than made up for the guy's gravelly voice who wrote the song.

Music was never one of my gifts. I never learned how to play any musical instrument. However, Sandra had gifts. She had a pretty good voice and her mother was making her take piano lessons - which she hated. She wanted to play guitar because it was portable. "It's hard carrying a piano around," she pointed out in her usual, practical way. How could anyone argue with that logic?

Still, Sandra and her mom argued a lot about the lessons. They were scheduled on Saturday morning at ten o'clock, smack-dab in the middle of cartoon day. That's some of the reason Sandra hated taking them. Sometimes, when I went to her house early on Saturday afternoon I'd overhear the discussion. In the process of listening in on those arguments, I figured out why parents make their kids do things like taking piano lessons.

"I always wished I'd learned how to play piano when I was your age," her mother told her. But it was what she said after - about being born with gifts - that really made me think. "After you grow up it's harder to learn things. You might be a great composer but you'll never know it because you didn't want to take piano lessons." Okay, so maybe that was a stretch for her mother, but it was Betty's logic which only occasionally had anything to do with reality where Sandra was concerned.

In Betty's world, Sandra was going to be a beauty queen, earn scholarships for college and become a famous actress and model. Although Sandra admitted those dreams were pretty good, they weren't really hers, but her mother's instead. Sandra wanted to do things her own way and her special abilities as a super-heroine tied into that directly.

It did no good arguing with Betty, though Sandra tried. "Maybe I'm supposed to be a great composer with a guitar."

"Composers play pianos," Betty insisted. "It's the best instrument of all for learning music. When you're older, you'll thank me for making you learn how to play piano."

Parents always say things like that to shut down a kid's arguments - like their superior experience trumps everything. With some things it does, but this time Sandra was skeptical and, of course, I believed she was right.

My dad had a favorite saying about sage - which is another word for wisdom. "It's three quarters age." There's no arguing with that. But I think the other quarter is what matters most because getting older is something you can do just sitting around and waiting for it to happen. That doesn't make you very wise or experienced at anything but being bored and tired. I think people are pretty good at being bored and tired without practicing any more than they already do - just saying.

So, Sandra hated playing piano at least as much as I hated playing right field on the little league team, but whenever I pointed that out to her - and I did that a few times - she told me to shut up, saying it was different. It was different, of course, but only because one was about music and the other was about sports and it was about her and not me. What was the same about it was how it involved gifts or talents and how other adults were making good things seem like bad things to the kids. Gifts turned into curses just because parents and other adults wouldn't let a kid do what he or she felt naturally inclined to do.

In a way, Sandra was doing the same sort of thing urging me to try out for pitcher on the little league team. With total disregard for what I wanted to do or wherever my natural abilities might lead me, she was determined I would make it. I'm not sure why she believed in me, my talent or whatever, but she was convinced that not only I could do it, but also I should do it. We spent the rest of the afternoon in Sandra's backyard, from the time I returned to her house with my baseball and glove until dinnertime tossing a baseball back and forth.

One thing I noticed early on was that Sandra was a whole lot better at throwing the ball than I was. This was an update on my previous observations regarding almost anything she did that was sports related. She was better at basketball and football too. She could run faster, jump higher and - if she cared to - beat the crap out of anyone at school. It wasn't a surprise to me. So, I told her maybe she should be the one trying out for little league. Again we discussed her mother's idea of what was proper for a little lady and all that. That was Sandra way of telling me her Mom wouldn't let her do anything she didn't consider lady like.

Although I liked how Sandra looked when her mom made her dress up like a girl, it always struck me as something fake - almost like it was supposed to be funny. I mean, Sandra didn't usually look that way. Certainly, it made her uncomfortable. She was what my mom referred to as a tomboy. I'm not sure where that term came from but Mom used it almost every time she referred to Sandra out-doing me at anything athletic.

Sandra didn't like being called a tomboy. She asked me how I would feel if someone called me a sally-girl. Don't ask me where she came up with that term; it was one of her things. But I told her I didn't think I'd like being called a girl, no offense. I think what Sandra was saying was she was very pleased with being a girl just she didn't think it was fair to be limited in what she could do just because adults thought girls should do certain things but not others.

We talked a lot about things like that as we tossed the baseball back and forth. Then after we were both loosened up, we started what Sandra called pepper, throwing the ball harder and faster and doing it as quickly as possible, improving our reflexes and such. I was bad at that, but as usual, she was good. However, I got better at doing it the more we did it. That's why people practice doing things - not just the things they are bad at but also the things they are good at so they get even better at them.

By the time we were finished practicing for the day, dinner was ready. Suddenly, I remembered I hadn't really told Mom that I was eating at Sandra's house, but Betty told me she'd already called about it so, I was covered. Sandra and I took turns in the downstairs washroom cleaning up as best we could for dinner. Considering we had to take baths later anyway and after dinner there was more than enough daylight left to get really dirty again, about all we washed was out hands.

Bud was home by then; Spike wasn't. Apparently his band was rehearsing, which is what musicians call practicing. Anyway, the rest of us sat down together at the table, joined hands and Bud said grace like he always did every time I ate at Sandra's house. I guess it does it all the time, but I only know for sure about the times I'm there. Then we enjoyed my favorite meal, spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread and salad.

Afterwards, Bud told us a funny story, like he always did. That night's story was about a guy who came into his hardware store earlier that morning looking for the sort of lampshades you can clip onto bare light bulbs. He wanted a dozen of them but Bud only had six in stock, so he had to order more specially for the guy. But in talking with him, Bud asked the man why he needed so many shades. You see, the item wasn't all that popular so that made him curious.

"It's to get rid of my extra wire hanger problem, of course," the guy said.

Bud had to ask for an explanation of that. What resulted caused Bud to laugh. As he told the story he had to get up from the table and go into the kitchen to get a paper and pencil. When he returned he drew a diagram to illustrate exactly what the guy had explained to him was happening with his house's electrical system.

According to what Bud drew, which was a reasonable facsimile of what the guy had drawn in the store earlier, the man claimed that whenever a sock disappeared in the laundry it was transformed into an extra wire coat hanger in one of the closets of his house. The customer had determined, after giving it a lot of thought, the electric drier dematerialized the missing sock and its ions traveled down the 220V wires to the fuse box. There it was converted into 120V sent down the wires into the closets of the house where, through any bare light bulb, the sock rematerialized as a wire coat hanger.

"I figure the lampshades will interrupt the process," the guy told Bud.

Bud laughed so hard as he told the story that tears came to his eyes.

"I'm sure he wasn't serious," Betty said.

"Oh, I think he was, just he's crazy. But he wanted to buy dozen lampshades at five dollars each which I make a good forty five percent margin on, so who was I to tell him differently about his theory?"

When we finished eating, Sandra and I went outside again and we practiced baseball a little more, but mainly we talked about the Fourth Of July which was about a month or so away. Her family was having a big cookout in the backyard, sort of like they did every year. This year was going to be different, though, because her Uncle Ray, a.k.a Gasman, was coming all the way from Encino, California. Sandra was excited about that because he was bringing all his pictures with him so Sandra could see second hand what things looked like around where Ray lived.

Because I promised more so than I was tried and certainly more than I wanted to, before sunset I said goodbye to Sandra. I thanked her for keeping me company all day and helping me practice baseball. Like always we made plans to play together the next morning, and of course she told me to bring my ball and glove again, suggesting we could go to Tree Land, a.k.a the park. Then, I trotted off with my baseball and glove and returned to my house.