Monday, November 21, 2011

Non-Commissioned

So maybe Kenny Davis and I would be Best Men at each other's teenage weddings, rather than go to Vietnam, but that was in the future.

In the present was the issue of team captaincy.

About halfway through the season, coach announced that he would name a captain. To formalize leadership, recognize ability - maybe acknowledge valor; I don't remember. Easy to make fun of (it's only Little League), but there it was, a real thing, status conferred, so you had to take it seriously.

Or I did, as that kind of kid.

Coach was going to wait a while to decide. He hadn't yet, he said. We would each have the chance to step up and earn it for ourselves, he said, or to lobby for someone else.

"What do you think?," I said to Kenny. "Should it be you, or me?"

"What do you think?," Kenny said. "We either have a chance?" His look said No.

"What do you mean?," I said, responding to that look. "Of course we do. Who plays harder than us?"

"We get dirty," he acknowledged. "But, come on. Konnie is the boy."

"Konnie" was Tommy Konwinski, our star pitcher. Big and strong, he also had a mean streak that intimidated foes.

The trouble was, it affected teammates just as much, if not more. Make a bad play and he might show you up on the field. Make a key out at bat and he'd rank you out on the bench.

"Konnie," I said derisively. "He don't lead, he - ", and I stopped, lost for words, for once.

"He leads the way coach sees it," Kenny said.

"Me and you are out here every week early and late, helping other kids with their game," I said.

"I'm not saying me or you don't deserve it. I'm saying we're not going to get it."

I frowned. No words.

"And me," Kenny said. "I got an even extra reason." He touched his fingers to his face.

"Oh, man," I said. We had never discussed race before. This was a hard place to start.

"Come on, man," he said. "It's like your grandmama said about wishing."

Huh. I had told him once how our grandmother helped raise us. And when we'd say, as kids will, that I wish this, or I wish that, she would scowl, comically, and glare, and bark in her brogue, so heavy with native - or immigrant - fatalism, "Well, wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first."

It surprised me that it stuck with him - enough to remember it, now?

"Kenny, she didn't mean that. She was just being funny."

"Well, it is funny. It's funny because it's true."

I got the feeling he was telling me something, that he knew more about than I did.

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