***
I walked back into the dugout to get my bag. Mine was the only one still there, everyone else had gotten theirs. As I picked it up, I noticed a piece of paper on the bench. I picked it up, checked to make sure that it was not mine. It was not.
***
I thought of asking if anyone was missing theirs so as to not get anyone in trouble, but several players had left already, and the others were signing papers with one of the coaches, so I could not ask if anyone had left theirs very well with the coaches there.
***
I went up to the other coach.
"Have you signed the papers yet?" he asked.
"Yes," I replied, "This was in the dugout."
"Oh, you saved someone's ass!" he exclaimed. "We'll find out who left it next practice." It was said in a nice tone, even though the words might not sound that way. I knew that they would handle it well.
***
I ended up getting to the next practice late. But at one point the coach was going over bunt defenses.
"Have you read the signs Joe?" he asked.
"Oh, I think I left it in the dugout-" he started.
"SHH!" a bunch of players said.
"You left it where?" the coach asked.
"He left it in his room," another player corrected.
"That's what I thought he said," the coach replied.
This is a nicely done linked-vignette series, but I don't think it has quite enough gravitas to be styled a "memoir." This is an incident only. To make it work as memoir, well, let's go back to Gore Vidal's distinction: "a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked."
ReplyDeleteWhat it lacks is context: we don't need your life as a ballplayer or your relationship to teammates or to coaches or your thinking about signs, sloppiness, and team spirit, or your thoughts on camaraderie. But somewhere in that list or in your mind is a bit more depth and context for this material. This is more like an illustrative segment rather than the whole of the piece.