Piled in a Corner

I’m trying to clean out the garage, which is a lot like Sisyphus trying to make it to the top of the hill with his boulder.  Stuff keeps getting discovered, and some of it even gets thrown out.

 

Among today’s discoveries is my collection of baseball bats, in far northwest corner; they were behind a plastic garbage can full of drop cloths.  (Another discovery.)  My guess is they date back as far as thirty years, more so if you include the John Roseboro Little League model.  That was a gift from out of our next-door neighbor’s garage.  Bill saw how Clare liked to hit, and he gave us two or three bats.  Lucky guy, he got to clear stuff out of his garage in the process.

 

The bats that I decided to keep all still have the signatures on them: Roseboro; Roberto Clemente; David Justice (youth); Jackie Robinson; Carl Yastrzemski.  The Justice bat I bought for Clare; I always wanted her to know what swinging a wood bat felt like.  I don’t have a particular memory of this, but I’m pretty sure we used it when I’d take her to the schoolyard for our own version of fast-pitch.  Clare would stand there next to the “box,” or strike zone, and I’d fire away.  This way she could swing up to four times in a minute, depending on contact.

 

I threw out one of the bats from neighbor Bill and one from Clare’s senior year of high school.  The good news there is it didn’t belong to Clare; she just broke it at the batting cages.  It was a demo belonging to the proprietors, who complimented my daughter for accomplishing something that hardly ever happened; they gave it to her in recognition of her feat.  After ten years, I decided it was time to toss.

 

My daughter has informed me the batting cages are open again.  “Maybe we can go.”  I’d like that.  But the next bat she breaks, she takes home with her.