librarygrrrl.net

All throughout my younger years, I would run rather than walk, jump rather than stand still.  I was the fastest kid in my class, earning letters in high school track and field when I was in the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades.  (Oh, the horrors of hips and what they did to my fleetness-of-foot… but I digress…)

Because I was such a bouncy kid, it was natural for me to want to play sports.  I tried tennis (visions of Wimbeldon danced through my 10-year-old head), track (at which I was pretty good, until the afore-mentioned hips got the better of me), volleyball (a sport I still enjoy, even though I don’t play it often), and basketball.

I am not tall.  I am not particularly confident when it comes to team sports.  And I definitely did not like being jostled around by other people when I was a kid.  These days, I play ice hockey, so my feelings on jostling have obviously changed.  Bear with me.

Basketball was one of those sports that people in my hometown did in the winter.  There wasn’t much else going on in northern Minnesota in the winter for girls.  This was just post-Title IX, so in theory we could have pushed for more sports teams.  But really, when the boys didn’t have a hockey team, and the wrestling room smelled as bad as it did, we were happy for the opportunity to play basketball.

Except for the fact that it caused me anxiety.  Bone-crushing, searing anxiety.  I would beg my parents not to come to games.  Being on the court was terrifying, because at any moment, someone might throw me the ball. And then I would have to do something with it.  Like dribble, or pass, or, god forbid, SHOOT.

I played basketball from the time I was 10 until I was 16.  That was the year my family moved from the little town in northern Minnesota to the Twin Cities.  I was going to a local Catholic high school, and pretty happy to be playing sports there.  

But the year I was 16, in 10th grade, I stopped playing basketball forever, thanks to a girl named Jenny, her poorly placed foot, my weak right ankle, and an amazing leaping rebound.  After a disconcerting POP, a volley of swear-words directed at pretty much anyone within 50 yards of the north gym, and a phone call to my folks, I ended up in a cast for six weeks, and have been able to sense rapidly dropping barometric pressure in the atmosphere ever since.

It probably would have been less painful to just tell my folks how much I hated playing basketball and quit the sport entirely, but I’ve only recently learned that telling the truth in situations like that is easy.

When I was in the sixth grade, my best friend and I got into a horrible, evil, awful fight.  You know the kind of fight that only pubescent girls can have - we hated each other, we said mean things to each other, and we spent a lot of time in the school counselor’s office together, trying to work through our anger at each other.  Needless to say, neither of us were budging.  There is a long and involved story about why we were angry, but that’s not the point of this post.

Rather, the point of this post is to talk about what happened AFTER we got over being angry with each other.  See, in the sixth grade, we were the queen bees of the elementary school.  (Well, not US per se, but our grade was the oldest grade in the school.)  And then in seventh grade, we would change schools to the local junior/senior high school, where we were to become the youngest, lowliest, most ignored group of people around.  So the summer before seventh grade, we made up, deciding that it was probably really better to be friends than to be enemies in such a powerless setting.

So that fall, when the apples were in season, my mom decided she was going to make pies.  Apple pies.  And a lot of them.  What better way to keep a couple of 12-year-old girls busy on a Saturday afternoon then by having them peel bushels of apples?

We peeled and peeled and peeled.  We sat on the poppy-colored countertop in the kitchen, in our scrubby sweats, radio tuned to KLIZ at 107.5 FM, singing along to John Cougar Mellencamp’s anthem Jack & Diane (he was still Cougar back then).  And then we peeled more apples.  My mom probably made some super-tasty pies later that day.  I don’t really remember if I ate any of them or not.  I just remember peeling apples, laughing, and singing with my best friend.

I was just doing some Christmas shopping, and found the book “Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life” by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. There is something quite compelling about an alphabetic arrangement to the stories that make up a life. Recently, Dichroic has been blogging poets alphabetically.

Both of these things have gotten me thinking… I’d like to write more in the coming year, and having a method to the madness - and a method that works for me as a librarian - would really keep me on task.

So without further ado, I give you a new category of posts: A-Z. I’ll be writing in order, hopefully one or two entries a week. After I’m done, you’ll all probably know a lot more about me than you do now. Wish me luck on this little project. The letter A will start tomorrow.