....With The Strength of Hercules

I was reading a comment that Cora made about the girl who gave me the wedding ring back after I asked her to marry me and it reminded me of my favorite story about her. Everyone on the military base where I lived played fastball. It was like playing hockey in the winter and bowling every Saturday morning, it was the thing you did. Now this girl who I grew up with and loved more than air was a great slow pitch player. She could play every position and knock the ball out of the park anytime she wanted to. I needed extra credit for shop class (because of what was known as the 'lamp incident') so I asked the teacher if I could make a baseball bat on the lathe. He showed me alot of little tricks and I must have worked on that stupid bat for two weeks. I even designed a label to burn into the wood and I promise you that NO bat ever made for anyone got more love and attention. I wanted this girl to have something special that I had made with my own hands...something I had made with love. Now there was a kid in our class named Miles Martin. He was two years older than everyone and had a mustache and drove a car in GRADE SEVEN. You could tell he was going places. To all the girls he was like Burt Reynolds (you had to grow up in the 70s to get the reference) and I hated him. Of course SHE had to love him. He wore a big ass belt buckle with the 'M M' on it and I got him with a zinger one day in class by telling him that if he turned it upside down he could be 'Wonder Woman'. He and I had no basis for a friendship. So I give her this bat and she is so impressed and she used it to play ball and its a beautiful ending to a beautiful teen moment, right? Well near the end of the season our team played Mile's team. The teams were divided by the unit our dads were in. Half way through the game I am playing short stop and he comes up to bat. (I think you can tell where this is going). Yes, he was hitting with my beautiful 'love bat' that she had given him because he had commented on how great it was. She of course thought nothing of how I might have viewed the incident through the haze of my youthful crush. So as per its magical powers the bat allowed him to hit the ball to the back of the fence and he takes off around the bases. I of course take off for home plate where I pick up the bat, go the corner of the backstop and with all the strength of Hercules I smashed this bat into a million shards with one mighty blow. Everyone thought I had gone nuts because he had hit the ball. Only she knew, and he knew and I knew the symbolism. Well, my dad knew. He thought, "we gotta get that boy some help" but he didn't tell me that he thought that until years later. I was always impressed by that. That is how you show your boy that you love him. You DON'T have him committed for doing something crazy over a girl. The best part of the story is that my 'moment' stopped Miles in his tracks between second and third base and he was tagged out. He never looked me in the eye again. I think he thought that if he did that I would do the same thing to him that I did to that bat. He was right. I only wish I had a picture of that bat today. It was some pretty sweet woodwork.