must be this tall

As the 11-year-olds pass from the corral to The Scrambler, the carnie holds his staff against them: one little t of PVC pipe showing the height children have to be to ride with an adult, and a big T of PVC indicating they are big enough to ride it by themselves. As S and her friends get to the attendant, he lifts the staff over their heads, goes “uh oh you’re too little,” then lols to himself, lowers the staff and lets them through.

The Scrambler is a three-armed beast, each limb terminating in three fists that will spin when the hydraulics are turned on. It doesn’t go up in the air, just whips the riders around enough that they feel their ribcages flattening from a wide embouchure to a narrow one, the whistle of a known thrill. The girls arrange themselves so the tallest of them is on the outside. S is the smallest, somehow, and also the only child without sullen eyes, an all-black outfit, and headphones clamped over her hair. She is “graduating” fifth grade and one of her favorite t-shirts says “I’m moving up from pre-k!”

This is one of the few rides S will agree to go on (she is most excited about returning to the Teacups), choosing to sit out the roller coasters, river rafters, and other thrill rides her friends have graduated to. Already she has outgrown the smaller-scale rides of Kidztopia, which cowers in the space between the Spinsanity pirate ship and SUPERGIRL Sky Flyer. Looming over a cartoon character’s hand-ruler, she cried when they turned her away from the Wacky Wagons last spring.

The adults congeal in a floating pile along the white fence that rings the Scrambler, and watch as the attendant — a teen himself, not that old — walks from car to car to check seatbelts and metal safety bars. I gather that it is his job as operator to yank the seatbelt, and make sure the metal door has clicked in place and no eggs can tumble out onto the News@9. But he’s taking an awfully long time doing his rounds. At each car, he has some kind of routine he’s trying out on the kids. The girls giggle. He’s working the room, king of the zone of metal buckets at the Massachusetts/Connecticut border. The sun has stretched to a tauter position above us and he hasn’t started the ride yet. I lean on the dirty white fence. Has it been ten minutes of this?

“That’s it,” says a Karen standing near me wearing a child’s backpack. “He’s going to think I’m a Karen, but I’m going to say something.”

“Hey buddy! You’re spending 40 seconds each car, let’s get moving, people are waiting!”

The boy turns a speckled face her direction — won’t dispute the lady, in fact looks slightly hurt, like she took away his toy. He curtails his flirting, walks over to the booth and fires up The Scrambler, staring blankly into the blastocyst.

*

Many of the kids in 10U baseball are a full head taller than J. At the first practice, I worry I’ve signed him up for the wrong league, but it combines two calendar years and he’s a December birthday — the last to hatch. It is going alright until a few games in when they announce there is no more coach pitch. Nine and 10-year-olds can throw hard but not always accurately, so it’s a new game. J, who has been wielding a metal baseball bat since he was 3.5, does his best, but he is hit by a pitch in a game and goes down. The field takes a knee, as happens about three times a game.

And so begins a torturous month of dread — strikeout after strikeout where he steps out of the box away from the pitch. He walks to the dugout with his giant helmet hanging to his chest. I’m in My Slump, he says, with Norwegian gravity. His baseball bat has turned from Excalibur to a serpent.

We spend weekends in the cages, afternoons throwing tennis balls at him in the yard, we talk through what’s going on, buy the special training balls, we watch the Bluey episode about precisely this scenario (“Cricket”). I tuck him into his blue lightup bed in his bedroom with the Yankee Stadium rug and perform square back scratches and look at his nose, which still curves up the way it did on the sonograms.

We work him back up to swinging, and he gets a hit. When he runs home, the whole dugout is cheering him on. Even the Tough Nuts dad I’m scared of is yelling “Way to go, J, you did it buddy!”

“I’m out of my Slump!” J tells me when he runs over. He’s elated.

The next game, he is hit by another pitch. Then, while running the bases, he’s beamed on the helmet at second. The Slump settles over us again, broader and darker this time. I, a person who does not believe in the parenting advice industrial complex, except as an impulse purchase on Kindle, trawl through Reddit, which is the perfect place to go to hear people from the future who have solved the problem, reached a resolution, moved on.

Noodles and I text about the place of pain we are all in now with J. He sends this:

He says J would feel so much better if he could suck it up and get a hit, demons be gone. It would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Everywhere on the diamond, children struggle. A small child on the opposing team throws his bat when he strikes out, a coach immediately admonishing him to pick up that bat! You pick it up! The child kicks it toward the gate. D, you pick up that bat, says the coach. The child walks up to the bat, puts a foot either side, then kangaroo hops it into the dugout. By now, the coach is ropeable. Right now, pick it up, he says. At last, the child picks up the bat, waits a beat, then throws his helmet.

Every baseball movie ties up the narrative, but on June 17, it’s a perfect day and there is no resolution, just dread. The child who colored in his kindergarten shapes with Yankee pinstripes, who slept with his c-spine curving up into his baseball helmet on the pillow, who would stay on the diamond after the game to hit invisible home runs and lap the bases, is begging not to go to his championship game. He wants to go back to coach pitch, to whiffle balls, to tiny diamonds and easy runs. But he’s too tall for that.

*

How did the adults fare this June? In the words of my favorite writer, Jenny True, my eyeballs are floating (on pee) at this, the age of 44 and three-quarters. I go to the city for work twice, catching an old friend whose child actor is there for her film premiere. I ask the child what the movie is about. She explains brightly that her mother breeds babies, and is mean to her because her character isn’t old enough to breed yet, and then the mother kills one of the babies.

“So a horror film,” I say with respect.

They are only in town for a second and have to fly out to a zombie shoot. I will see my friend again when we are 64 and three-quarters.

I’m so busy working on the train back from the city that I don’t realize I’ve arrived in Albany and the car is empty. I look out the window and see the station sign — Albany-Renssalaer — and jump up with a fright, yanking my charger cords out of the wall before I can be toted away to Niagara Falls, but, alas, leaving all but the wall plug for my phone. I should probably just subscribe to an auto-replenishing supply of phone chargers.

Noodles decides to go to the Knicks parade, and sends a photo from the Depends aisle at CVS. I would. On June 18, 4 million people are eyeballs floating on pee to salute their team in downtown Manhattan. He called his dad at 11:30 p.m. the night they won and yelled, “They did it! And you’re still alive to see it! You’re aliiiiiiive!”

My MIL comes up to help for a day, but needs to leave while I’m on a call. After I hang up, I go out front and hear the high-pitched whinny of her backing our Pilot out of the driveway with the park brake on, so to get to her convertible. “Park brake on?” I ask. “Could you hear it?” she says.

Yes, I hear it all.

It measures about a centimetre wide.

A: $10.35 + shipping

Also, this came right on time for a major undisclosed fuckup:

Let’s see who earns one next.

This fridge is a national treasure

Also from oz, a great parenting tip: the waterslide rule

writing: “riding in a golf cart fatly”

Patricia Lockwood, gift to the world:

‘Ew,’ a groomsman was overheard saying, as one of my nieces stripped down to her nappy — the one who eats avocados through the bag and asked for pasta for Christmas. If you have enough nieces and nephews, you understand that people are just themselves; they come out that way.

This 1979 profile of David Hockney is worth the slow scroll of 30 mins. Here’s a bit on affection + art: “The people he draws best and prefers to draw are those he knows well — perhaps a dozen, like his mother, Geldzahler, and Celia. He can draw them again and again, showing changes in them. He is a domestic artist. He says, ‘The trouble with drawing people you don’t know is that you never really know what they look like. You spend a lot of time just trying to get a likeness. Whereas if you know them well you know there are several faces there. You can draw one of them, a face that belongs to a certain day. That’s what interests me.’”

Also lol: “The family know some of his failings: ‘He puts socks and shoes on his figures because he can’t do feet.’”

Thanks to Leave it to Leonor for sending me on this hop:

You never know when God will bring a wonderful new Christmas decoration into your life. My family got our light-up snowman when our neighbor shot himself.

Analysis of a Fight With My Boyfriend by The Real Sarah Miller

Good news: Nightbitch got a hot water heater. Goodbye, bag shower!