True Wishes

    The first batter to step to the plate was Lenny. I thought of how nice it would be to be the pitcher right now. Send him a high, hard fast one right at the cheek. A little chin music. I laughed just a bit and I would have bet right then and there that Bobby could read minds. He laughed too.

     The first pitch was low, in the dirt. Lenny started whining to the pitcher to throw him a strike. The pitcher honored his request and put one right down the middle. Lenny swung and sent the ball screaming over second base. Lenny started his rumbling run to first. He rounded first, stormed in his slow, sloth like run to second just as the throw was coming in from center field. Lenny loved running over players, no sliding for him.

    I saw the ball hit the mitt of the second baseman and he turned swinging around his arm extended to put the tag on Lenny. The glove hit Lenny square on the front of his upper arm in an opposing force to Lenny’s run.

     I heard the snap of bone and Lenny yell out, falling to the ground. Play stopped and soon Lenny was surrounded by players, one yelling to get the teacher. Teachers in those does must have had ESP because two were on their way before the dust settled into the rocks around second base. I watched as they stood Lenny up, his arm grotesquely disfigured looking like it wanted to make a u-turn in the middle of his upper arm. A seventh grader taken out by a fifth grader. A feat that could be accomplished only by a hero. Lenny Newsome had been taken out by someone smaller with one flick of a baseball glove.

     That is what we thought at the time it happened. It was later that I realized the second baseman was only the means by which a wish had come true. Bobby never said a word. He just smiled and turned around to finish the day.