fitness

My Glove (Guest Post)

Tracy I

by Shelley Tremain

Right-handed leather softball glove for a left-handed thrower. Tan leather, well-worn. The fingers are joined with criss-crossing strips of leather and the area between the fingers and the thumb is closed with a two-tone woven leather piece.
Right-handed leather softball glove for a left-handed thrower. Tan leather, well-worn. The fingers are joined with criss-crossing strips of leather and the area between the fingers and the thumb is closed with a two-tone woven leather piece.

I haven’t really run since I became disabled at twenty-five. Not that I have missed it. But when I was a teenager, I was a star softball player.

I started playing league softball when I was nine. By the time I was twelve, I was a better batter than the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in the league. But it was my role at first base that really stood out.

I’m left-handed, so I caught with my right hand and had a terrific stretch off the bag. I never missed a throw, not even one way over my head.

I had one glove for all the years that I played. I loved that glove. That glove was my summer. Softball was my summer.

I can still remember how, when I first got my glove, I greased it and tied a ball in it for a couple of days to “work it in.” I remember the colour of my glove, how it looked on my hand, the subdued shine of the leather. I remember how it felt, especially how it felt when the ball snapped in it.

We had the strongest infield. Me and Cathy and Sue. We won the league championship a few years in a row. We were first-draft picks for our team. All three of us were on the all-star team for our league. I won best batter in the city-wide tournament one year.

Then Bill, our coach, started standing close to me and putting his arm around me, saying things to me. I didn’t want to play first base for him anymore. I asked to be traded to another team and then asked my new coach to put me in the outfield. I stopped playing after a couple more years.

I don’t know what became of my glove.

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Shelley Tremain is a disabled feminist philosopher of disability and publishes on a variety of topics, including disability and philosophy, ableism in feminist philosophy, disability and bioethics, and Foucault. Shelley is the editor of Foucault and the Government of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2005, 2015) and is completing a monograph entitled Foucault and (A) Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). She derives pleasure from writing, long walks, and doodling and blogs regularly at the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/disability_and_disadvanta/

 

Published by Tracy I

Writer, feminist, vegan blogging at veganpractically.com, runner, philosopher, yogi, knitter, co-founder of Fit Is a Feminist Issue, co-author of Fit at Mid-Life: A Feminist Fitness Journey (Greystone Books, 2018). Current project: a work-in-progress book and blog on imperfect veganism (see veganpractically.com).

5 thoughts on “My Glove (Guest Post)”

  2. Since becoming [more] disabled, I think of the various pieces of my athletic life, much like your glove…it’s interesting to think back about past athletic pursuits in the way you did for this post.

  3. This is wonderful. I love your writing style. Thank you for sharing; you definitely look me back to what sounds like a different lifetime for you.

  4. Thanks very much for your kind words about my post! Since I wrote this piece the other day, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what happened. It’s very sad. Other women have written on my facebook page that they too had activities which they loved ruined for them, stolen, really. I’m glad that this piece moved you. 🙂

  5. What a touching post, and I’m sorry the way it ended for you. Stolen, like you said in the last comment. It makes me reflect on what I have lost of myself over the years.

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