Wow, it's been a long time since I really wiped out. I was playing baseball with Cole today and he hit a ground ball rather sharply towards first base, which is a stone pillar, pictured above. It bounced off that, and by the time I caught up to the ball it had gone around the corner of the house after ricocheting again off of a cactus.
When I looked back, Cole was just rounding second, and since I was already down 4-0 in this game* I was determined to stop that little bitch from scoring again. So I kicked on the afterburners, or whatever you call similar equipment on a sedentary 44-year-old, and sped across the back patio rather impressively until I had to dodge a piece of fresh-looking dog poop and found myself trying to abruptly change direction in the soft muddy edge where the patio meets the yard.
You wouldn't know it if you've met me in the last couple decades, but in the first half of my life I spent a great deal of time playing backyard sports. Mostly football, but a little of everything else as well. I can catch almost anything that comes my way, I throw well, and I used to have some pretty decent moves for a slow bastard.
I am a bit larger now than I was back then, and all I can say is that, if my brain is the driver and my body is the car....I don't handle as well as I used to. I would love to see footage of me trying to correct what happened after my right foot slipped in that mud I was talking about. After five or six wild variations on stumbling out-of-control steps, I hit the ground with all my weight and skidded across the bristly dry grass for a few feet, eventually coming to rest in a rising cloud of lawn debris: Cole and I laughed pretty hysterically about all of it as the dust settled. Abraded and probably concussed, I went on to lose 7-1.
*There are restrictions on how fast I can pitch, and what kind of bat I can use.
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