{"id":2685,"date":"2018-07-11T16:18:25","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T21:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/?p=2685"},"modified":"2018-07-11T16:27:59","modified_gmt":"2018-07-11T21:27:59","slug":"first-evers-chapter-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/first-evers-chapter-2\/","title":{"rendered":"First Evers, Chapter 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

1.\u00a0 Respect<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had heard about athletes being \u201cin the zone.\u201d\u00a0 I particularly remember the Kansas City A\u2019s hall of famer George Brett talking about those out-of-the-blue days when a baseball inexplicably looked as big as a melon.\u00a0 Brett just couldn\u2019t help but hit a home run and \u201cgo downtown.\u201d\u00a0 It never occurred to me that I could ever be in that zone.\u00a0 This special grace could only envelop true athletes who had honed their skills with daily work outs, practices and swing coaches.<\/p>\n

This was not me.\u00a0 I was a slow moving first baseman whose offensive output was meager at best.\u00a0 Feeble pop-ups landing in the mitt of an immobile center fielder were my specialty.\u00a0 I had slowly drifted down in the batting order of our slow pitch softball team.<\/p>\n

One nondescript humid summer evening it happened.\u00a0 As I stepped into the batter\u2019s box, I felt a cone of magical light shining down upon me.\u00a0 Everything slowed down as the first pitch came in, the ball hung there as big as George Brett\u2019s melon.\u00a0 I stepped up and crushed it in a perfectly choreographed display of hand-eye-muscle mass coordination.\u00a0 This was no bloop, dying quail or Texas leaguer but an absolute frozen rope to dead center, blazing far beyond the dazed fielder.\u00a0 Not bad for the 7th batter.\u00a0 I slowly jogged around the bases to the cheers of my stunned teammates.<\/p>\n

Next time up, I nailed it again, this time over the left fielder\u2019s head.\u00a0 Another home run.\u00a0 The third time I was up, I received the universal sign of respect for a hitter.\u00a0 The pitcher recognized me, called time out, and turned around to her outfield.\u00a0 With a waving motion she yelled, \u201cIt\u2019s her again, everybody move back \u2013 way back!\u201d<\/p>\n

This of course is the flip side to the more typical gesture I have received when the pitcher waves the fielders in.\u00a0\u00a0My opponents were helpless \u2013 once again I hit a rocket to left field.\u00a0 There were no formal boundaries and so no official home run, but as I rounded third I could see the fielder was still chasing down the rolling ball.<\/p>\n

I have never been in the zone again, never had that kind of flat-out in your face, public display of universally recognized respect.<\/p>\n

Nor would I expect to.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Duty<\/strong><\/p>\n

Growing up in the early 1960s\u00a0our mother told us to clean our plates \u201cbecause other children are starving.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0The location of these poor souls varied, sometimes Europe, or China, but my mother favored Armenia.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know where Armenia was, or why children were starving.\u00a0 Even at eight years old I couldn\u2019t puzzle out why my clean dinner plate would benefit the Armenians.\u00a0 But I was a dutiful child and didn\u2019t probe.\u00a0 I cleaned my plate, though the two Hershey kisses rewarded for a clean plate might have been motivation enough.<\/p>\n

One summer I heard my mother talking about Daylight Savings Time.\u00a0 Like cleaning my plate, I just wanted to do my duty no questions asked.\u00a0 I went outside with a jar, let some daylight in, put the top on and stored it in my closet. Yes, I was a dutiful child \u2013 to the point of idiocy.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 Cleverness<\/strong><\/p>\n

My fifth grade English teacher, Mrs. Melton, divided our class into two teams for a vocabulary contest.\u00a0 Each team challenged the other to define a word.\u00a0 Most chose oversized words just entering our vocabulary, like obnoxious, democracy, institution.\u00a0 When it was my turn, I proposed the word \u201cthe.\u201d\u00a0 The other team was flummoxed. So was Mrs. Melton.\u00a0 Did the word \u201cthe\u201d even deserve a definition?\u00a0 It was innocuous, always there, nothing more than background filler. \u00a0An annoyed Mrs. Melton called me a clever child and told me to define the word.\u00a0 I pointed out that \u201cthe\u201d implied something more specific than \u201ca.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have often thought that \u201cclever\u201d is the best compliment.\u00a0 Dictionary synonyms include shrewd, original, inventive, nimble, handy, ingenious.\u00a0 All note that \u201cclever\u201d is a type of intelligence.\u00a0 For me, clever suggests a simple, elegant, and surprising solution to a complex problem, but I don\u2019t limit it to humans.\u00a0 Animals are clever, or more accurately evolution is clever.\u00a0 Consider the bee, whose comb consists of an array of perfect hexagons.\u00a0 Why hexagons? \u00a0Why not diamonds or squares? This question has puzzled great minds for some 2,000 years since the Roman scholar Marcus Varro proposed that hexagons were the most compact structure. His \u201cHoneybee Conjecture\u201d wasn\u2019t mathematically proven until 1999.<\/p>\n

Those clever bees knew it all along.\u00a0 A hexagon minimizes the amount of wax they must produce.<\/p>\n

My \u201cthe\u201d might have been momentarily clever but I am humbled by the bee.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0 Shame<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the affluent suburb of my childhood, there were many types of status \u2013 cars, clothing, jewelry \u2013 but as a child these were beyond my grasp.\u00a0 The one I knew for sure was that you absolutely didn\u2019t want to collect S&H green stamps to redeem for furniture.\u00a0 My mother thought it was a fun game, but I knew my friends might think our family was just scraping by, that we couldn\u2019t buy furniture on our own and had stooped to the ignominy of green stamps.<\/p>\n

I was so ashamed.\u00a0 Before friends came over, I frantically looked for stray stamps and swept them into a drawer.<\/p>\n

My mother was oblivious to the implications.\u00a0 She loved her S&H green stamp book, would tally up her growing stash, thumb through the redemption book and strategize what she could buy.<\/p>\n

After several years of saving she finally got that porch table she had craved.\u00a0 I thought I could relax, that her collecting might be done, but the next phase was worse and completely out of my control.\u00a0 She would usher people into the porch and gush over her new table, describing just how many green stamps it cost and encourage others to start collecting the stamps. \u00a0Why not?\u00a0 You could get free stuff! \u00a0I wanted to crawl into a hole.<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0 Pride<\/strong><\/p>\n

It took several years before the shame turned into pride, and to realize my mother was thumbing her nose at our pretentions community in creative and amusing ways, which went well beyond green stamps.\u00a0 She would comply with the country club\u2019s requirement to wear a pristine white tennis outfit but would show up in black socks from my father\u2019s drawer. (She preferred to play tennis in her romper-style bathing suit.) She would carry a purse to social functions, as was the norm, but the only thing inside was a decades old emery board in the remote chance of a hang-nail emergency.\u00a0 She just couldn\u2019t think of anything else to put in the purse.\u00a0 She wore plastic poppit beads instead of pearls.\u00a0 One evening I watched as she got ready for a party.\u00a0 She was wearing her \u201cpeek-a-boo\u201d dress, a bright pink number with a small, demur diamond cut-out on her upper chest.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s see, what shall I wear for jewelry tonight,\u201d she said as she rummaged through her motley collection.\u00a0 \u201cOh my, how about this?\u201d\u00a0 S&H green stamps had gone out of business, but she still had a few in her dresser drawer.\u00a0 \u201cPerfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

She licked the stamp, fixed it right in the middle of the peek-a-boo hole and sailed out the door.<\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>Share: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1.\u00a0 Respect I had heard about athletes being \u201cin the zone.\u201d\u00a0 I particularly remember the Kansas City A\u2019s hall of famer George Brett talking about those out-of-the-blue days when a baseball inexplicably looked as big as a melon.\u00a0 Brett just … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,11,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lists","category-what-i-did","category-what-words-mean"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-Hj","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2685"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2687,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685\/revisions\/2687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}