Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by M.D. Mark Vonnegut Page B

and throw his glove and pick it up and throw it again. You could be sure that more errors were on the way. Up until Vinny made that first error, his demeanor and play were effortless, calm, and efficient. We spent considerable time trying to get Vinny to make an error as early in the first game as possible.
    Trying to play sports as if you were twenty-something when you are fifty-something causes pain and suffering. Bones that years earlier would have flexed, shatter. Fractures that would have healed perfectly in six weeks take twelve and are never quite right. Tendonitis only gets better quickly if you are young. My cousin Steve needs his shoulders replaced and wonders if he should do both at once or one at a time.
    I was expecting a slower decline.
    ——
    I didn’t play much baseball as a child. Part of the reason was I couldn’t see the ball. For years I had gone up to the blackboard to read and copy questions. I didn’t wonder why no one else did that. None of my teachers seemed to think it was unusual. I also had far and away the worst handwriting and spelling in the class. Needing to get up to read the board was just one more thing about me that was a little off. Closer up I could see well enough to read and did well on standardized tests.
    I got to be almost fourteen before I was diagnosed as having 20/300 vision. My mother asked why I hadn’t complained about things being blurry.
    “Blurry compared to what?”
    By the time I could see, Little League was done. In the sixties, aggression and competition were somehow implicated as root causes of war and misery and I was left high and dry as a pretty good athlete who loved trying to win whatever game was at hand. With the Bow Wow Boogie, it was a wonderful blessing to play softball every year with these guys who had been the Little League and high school stars. And if I came across a pickup game where they needed an extra player, I whacked the hell out of the ball and could play even more beautifully than I did in August. I don’t think I ever made an error or hit less than .600 in a pickup game. I have never anywhere run across people in their fifties who insist on playing twenty-seven innings of softball in midday August heat.
    I can also make game-ending jump shots when I’m playing basketball playground pickup games with strangers but not if I’m playing with people I know.
    At the age of thirty-nine, three months sober, recovering from what will hopefully be my last psychotic break and hospitalization,I threw out a runner at third to preserve the tie in the top of the ninth and then got the game-winning hit in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and two strikes. I felt like complete crap that day and honestly don’t know how I did either thing.
    At Vinny’s memorial service someone told me about watching him play football. I imagined a halfback so quick and strong he didn’t really need blockers. And he was gracious and kind to younger kids and kids who weren’t athletes.
    What could be more contingent-dependent and improbable than the individual human?
    Vinny quit Harvard midway through his second semester when he was accused of plagiarism. Everyone I’ve talked to was quite sure he hadn’t plagiarized, but honor was involved and Vinny preferred quitting school, full scholarship and all, to defending himself. He was a reliable and valued worker, but after Harvard he never did anything, more than barely, briefly, a step above a menial job.
    I’ve lived long enough now that if I condense time and look back at people I grew up with who have died, it looks like a minute or so of Antietam. There’s not that much difference between leukemia, heart disease, flying into mountains, and bullets whizzing through the air. Maybe, because so few of my friends have been armed at the time of their death, it’s more like soft-shelled newly hatched sea turtles heading for the water and being eaten by hungry gulls.
    Poem for Vinny

Your heart attack will not be