Outer wear – it’s the designation given to a certain type of couture dominated by such brands as The North Face, Patagonia and L.L. Bean. Think parkas, insulated bibs, boots and gloves and you’ll know the kind of manufactured protection I am thinking of. Meant to help us survive the harsher environments of winter, if we are dumb enough to think of blizzards as playgrounds, outer wear still must submit to the same trendy rules as anything else in the way of decorative clothing. To be seen in the latest fav brand is oh so chic, while sporting last year’s model, which is doable because of its durability, is to advertise that your sense of styling in outer wear is outdated.

Then there is Under Armor. This is a brand name, but it is also a misnomer. Under Armor is still a type of outer wear, this one specializing in the proper attire for the more sensible fair weather sports; the ones that do not require an insulated jock in order to survive the elements. Tops, bottoms, shoes and everything in between can be found in their catalogue. And while the clothing brand may not make you the best athlete, you still might be the best eye-catcher on the court, links, bike path or diamond. Of course it helps to already have the desired physique on display underneath the latest glam treatment in sportswear. (Let’s face it, if this was just about functionality, you would still look like you had just suited up for your high school gym class).

When it comes to the best outer wear, however, we are millennia behind the ones who have modeled it best – insects. This week’s lesson in the master gardener program I am attending is entitled Entomology, which is the educated way of saying the study of these little beasts. Informed estimates place the current number of species at more than one million around the world, which is a rather intimidating number when you must pass a final exam in order to earn your certificate as a master of the garden. Still, there is some reprieve from buggy oppression in the fact that there are merely a hundred thousand species in North America and even far fewer in residence here in Wisconsin.

Our goal in our study of insects is to learn how to manage our shared place on this planet. For the home gardener this means mostly coping with them since 99% of insects do no harm to the garden. Therefore the humane thing for us to do in return is little or nothing in a managed, peaceful coexistence for the benefit of both our tribes. Intervention strategies addressing the remaining one percent, however, is necessary and calls for a surgical precision worthy of any special ops force on a mission of death or extraction. And this brings us back to the topic of outer wear.

An insect’s skeleton is on the outside of its body. Called an exoskeleton it is essentially a hard outer shell, which serves many purposes. It is in truth its outer armor. It protects them from their adversaries, prevents them from dehydrating, and allows oxygen to be absorbed into the body through tiny holes called spiracles. It also keeps them small by confining their growth. Despite what those really cool sci-fi movies of the 50s showed us with their terrifying scenes of giant grasshoppers, ants and other mutant ninja insects, these little guys are destined to stay small. Their outer wear defines the outer limits of their ability to grow. But like they care! Insects preceded and outlasted the large lizards we call dinosaurs. So maybe in the claim that size matters, diminution has proven to be the preferable condition after all.

What does matter in the lawn and garden wars on the home front is how to protect our most precious plants from the ravages of the one percent of the insect world. Not that we are necessarily bug-o-phobic. But for those of us who do want to enjoy the fruits and vegetables of our labors, or to see our flowers bloom with the coming out beauty of any debutante, some means of intervention must be employed and that is where knowing about the insect’s outer wear, as well as the design of its mouth and method of eating, is of value.

Insects do have an Achilles heel, or should I say heels since they have three pairs of jointed legs? The protection of their exoskeleton can be compromised by using an insecticide soap or oil that plugs those spiracles through which they get oxygen, causing them to suffocate. Other insecticides are lethal when ingested proving that even with insects gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. They are even vulnerable due to their sexual proclivities, but, then again, who isn’t?

Bottom line, when all else fails, we can simply crush the little beggars. We are, after all, far larger and stronger than they are. And there is a simple delight, even if it is puerile in nature, in hearing their little bodies crackle under the vice-like grip of their homo sapien adversaries. Being born with the outer wear of a natural body armor has its advantages. But having an opposable thumb is even better.

Here in Wisconsin we have a law for just about everything. Our elected representatives, in their drive to make our state the world’s first utopia, have determined that laws make perfection. Paradise, therefore, is just another legislative session away, or so we dream. In the meantime the future residents of this proposed Nirvana ignore stop signs, run through red lights, put their trash in recycle bins, jaywalk, speed, and hold grudges of various dimensions against their neighbors despite their neighbors’ protected status. Laws pretend to make us civilized. Being human, we pretend to obey them.

One law we have on the books, which affects our gardening habits, is that leaves, grass clippings, brush, twigs and small branches cannot be dumped in our landfills (aka garbage dumps). This is not a problem for me. As a landowner of even modest proportions, I have a use for such things to help me replenish the earth that I make use of in establishing my own Eden. What doesn’t warm my passive sense of well-being of an evening by being consumed in my homemade fire pit is stored in a compost pile for future use as rich, organic material to amend the composition of the dirt I wrote about last week.

The current lesson in my pursuit of becoming a master gardener, as defined by legislative fiat, is about composting. It is something I have been doing all along. But having read the latest assigned chapter, I can now do it better by virtue of being better educated; a certificate in composting will be in order if I pass the exam as I expect to do.

Putting those leaves, grass clippings, and small twigs as well as food scraps (non-meat or dairy), coffee grounds, paper and manure in a heap and letting it all percolate for a while provides multiple benefits. Besides maintaining our status as law-abiding citizens by not putting such things in the landfill, our creation and use of compost saves us money since we do not need to buy expensive fertilizers, improves our lawn and garden soil structure, promotes plant growth through the provision of added nutrients, and helps the soil’s cation exchange capacity. That last item, or CEC, refers to dirt’s ability to hold nutrients for future use. And just knowing that such a function exists makes me feel smarter about my own gardening knowledge exchange capacity, or GKEC, which is an accolade I just made up.

My compost piles are just that, heaps I create in a suitable location without the benefit of any formal structure to confine the various ingredients which comprise my compost composition. But people of more affluent sensibilities invest in constructing or buying compost bins in order to show off their decomposing wealth. Bins can be constructed from wood or plastic frames and wire mesh, although the extremely committed go so far as to erect a block structure as their monument to composting. I prefer space. It comes cheap and I have sufficient quantities of it to meet my gardening needs.

Composting is as simple as what passes for cooking these days. Just add water to whatever ingredients you have on hand, stir, and wait. The only drawback is instead of the usual six minutes it takes to cook or microwave, a meal, good composting takes about six to twelve months in order to achieve the ultimate in composting flavor. And just like good food, good compost will have the right appetizing color, aroma and texture to appease the palate of every lawn and garden of every size, shape and density.

One added feature of composting is that you never do it alone. Worms, beetles, mites, centipedes and various other creatures of diminishing size will help you in your labors. You will be feeding them and their gratitude will be amply expressed in their castings – a polite way to indicate the waste products they will create in their pursuit of gluttony – which will add nutritional value for the ultimate benefit of plant and lawn life. This makes composting a charitable endeavor, which is far better than any act of any legislative body.

This week’s gardening lesson was entitled Soils. My preference for an alternative title is to simply say dirt, something I have known about since childhood. Besides, in my mind soil is a verb. It is what old men do to themselves when they are incontinent and I have not reached that stage in life just yet. So today’s message is about dirt.

The diss on dirt is just that; it is dirty. To most people that implies filth, which is something we expend a great deal of time, energy and money to avoid it if possible and eliminate when we become contaminated. The stain on our skin and on our clothes is seemingly nothing compared to the corruption of our self-esteem when we believe that others are judging us for our inability to be sufficiently sanitized to attain hygienic sainthood.

Dirt is a marvelous thing. People who study it tell us that it is a composite of decomposed rock (in the form of sand, silt and clay) and organic material. Plants of various kinds thrive in it based on their compatibility with its nutrient value. And we in turn rely on those plants for our food, clothing and shelter. The child in us, however, is primarily concerned with only one thing; how well does it hold up to the games we wish to play, whether that means making mud pies, constructing roads and tunnels for our toy trucks to traverse, or its suitability as a baseball diamond. Too many rocks spoil the trajectory of an aptly named ground ball.

Dirt is literally beneath us. It is up to us each one to decide if that imparts some kind of indignity for its being so lowly. As a child it was in the perfect place for me to get down and dirty. Playing in dirt was therapeutic and I wore the evidence of my therapy sessions well. My mother liked to commiserate with her friends by telling them that her devil-may-care son left home each morning dressed in clean clothes only to arrive at school a short time later besmirched with either dirt, mud or grass stains (or all of the above) obtained on the short walk to my elementary school. That made me a dedicated participant in the ways of a dirt devil.

As an adult not much has changed. Dirt is still beneath me, which means I still enjoy getting down and getting dirty. At this stage of life, though, my pursuit is one of enjoying the aroma and textures of lawn and garden, which I continue to wear well. My role play as an amateur horticulturist is a little more informed (as the name implies) than it was in my youth, leaving me with my only complaint. Getting down these days contains the difficulty of getting back up again. Otherwise dirt and I are good friends as demonstrated by how enthusiastically it still clings to me and me to it.

I do bathe and I do my own laundry. I still start my day by going outside wearing clean clothes and a passion to improve on their appearance a short time later with the ample marks left by the oh-so-good earth.

I just learned this morning that I passed my criminal background check. The flowers and veggies in my soon to be planted garden will be pleased to know that they are in the hands of a non-felon. Their growth will subsequently be a more blissful experience since all they will have to fear is the prospect of drought, blight, invasive species and hail storms. I will not be included in their worst case scenarios unless they have any lingering doubts about my fidelity in keeping them properly bathed in both water and sunlight, which is not an issue when it comes to criminal investigations.

The reason for my being subject to this type of intrusion into my previously veiled and oh-so-exclusive past is that it is a requirement of the Master Gardening Program I am attending. It is a presentation of the University’s extension service and from their perspective the subject is not roses. Rather their whole point in making this investment of knowledge into a gang of amateurs, meaning my fellow classmates and me, is that they want us to volunteer in their community outreach programs as a means to reach a much broader audience by sharing our new knowledge with others in our respective communities. And for some reason they perceive that a criminal mind is not conducive to planting the seeds for a bountiful harvest in community relations.

I am technically free of a criminal record but that does not keep me free me from guilt. Fortunately there is a limit to what they can do when foraging through my background while I study foregrounds in the form of learning about soil composition. Dirt does not seem to care about your filthy conscience. If there is any blood on your hands it might help to improve the soil’s pH balance, making life and growth better for all concerned. And there is some justice in this week’s lesson, which will cover soil testing. So, just as my background was subject to examination, so it will be with the foreground that comprises my property. It will come under some scrutiny before I trust it to nurture my vines, shrubs and bulbs.

One can never be too careful when cultivating soil. You never know what lies beneath until you get your hands dirty. And in this case dirty hands are the gardener’s playground digging in foregrounds while ignoring one’s background.

Horticulture is the art and science of producing, using, and maintaining ornamental plants, fruits, and vegetables.

With those words I am launching on a new adventure. Not as the author of such a statement but rather as the student. I have enrolled in a class offered by the University’s extensive service, which is entitled the “Master Gardener Program.”

I have enjoyed gardening to a very limited extent, the limitation coming primarily from time, energy, space and money. It has also come from a lack of knowledge in the science and art of anything let alone gardening. But now that I am firmly rooted (pun intended) in the category of being a retired professional, I have the time and the inclination to pursue a hobby to the extent of being well informed.

If I wince at any aspect of this program it is its use of the word Master. It is a little intimidating in its application since I really don’t want to get so immersed in this topic – in order to merit the title master –

that it overwhelms my life like a yellow squash plant gone rampant. I am okay with it, though, as I have been assured by the instructor that we will in no way approach the august image implied by this one word. The final exam will be open-book, after all, so who can lay claim to such a vaunted title as master when they do not have to know their topic well enough to avoid copying from a book, a neighbor, a crib sheet or one’s cell phone conveniently linked to a horticultural web site?

Classes start this coming Monday. I am reading ahead in the assigned textbook and know already that I am doomed to be lost in a whole new jargon surrounding plant life, root structure, soils and past management. If I master anything it will likely be the art and science of staying awake as we learn about xylem, phloem, cultivars and meristems.

If nothing else my garden will be better appreciated for its academic pedigree even if I get no further than knowing to press a seed into the soft soil and adding water on an occasional basis. The master in me will be providentially accidental. And that is something I can confidently know for sure at the outset.

It is spring. The calendar says so. We may not feel like the climate is treating us justly, once again, or we may have the sneaking suspicion that the calendar has lied to us just like our bathroom scale. Feelings are often gullible, however, and just as likely to mislead us as any faulty GPS system purchased from a cagey salesman dealing out of the trunk of a car with no visible license plate.

It is spring. The signs here in Wisconsin are unmistakable. The robins have returned. The geese are doing their flyovers. The daytime temperature gets above freezing and the nighttime temps never go below zero. Snowfall is wet and heavier than the winter storms. It is more likely to stick to the trees, melt a little in the daylight and then create hazardous ice conditions in time for the morning commute. And who can mistake the appearance of road construction signs on the side of the road, indicating that once the ice is gone our travel times will actually increase as we detour down unknown side roads or are forced to wait for the heavy equipment to casually yield the right-of-way rights to those of us who have some place important to go or actual work to do.

It is spring, the time for our annual do overs. Nature is renewing itself, so we are certainly justified in doing the same. Only our renewal is an attempt at remediation. The management of nature we cultivate in our own yards is never quite the achievement we want it to be. The arrival of warmer temperatures temp us with the pleasures of leisure activities that are so joy much more enjoyable to bask in than the sweat equity of pruning, planting, mulching and mowing that hold the promise of constructing our garden paradise.

It is spring and the pleasure domes designed for us modern day Kubla Khans can already boast of green grass forming in the elysian fields of right, left and center, chalk lines to warn us away from foul territory and surrogates to do the sweating for us as they throw, catch, hit, run and argue with the god of home plate.

Ah, spring. It is the long awaited season for do overs, correcting our landscaping misdeeds of prior years. It is a time to invest in garden tools that may never touch dirt, fertilizer that will never be spread, and plastic flowers that will never die due to replace what we could not grow. Tis the true season to be jolly as we do over the same mistakes we made last year, when we yielded to sumptuous indulgence while working on our tans by the pool, ocean or lake. We only need to make sure that the Sun Protection Factor of our chosen sunscreen has the right numeric value to offer us the best defense against the unremitting, unrelenting performance of the sun’s UVA and UVB rays. Otherwise we will find ourselves overdone with the promise of wrinkling, sagging, leathering and other light-induced effects gained from enjoying the great outdoors.

Ah, spring.

I have been writing about my exploits in taking an on-line course for learning how to work within the confines of a child’s picture book, while telling an engaging story. That course is now complete and ended with me mailing my story to a publisher. This was the final, though not required, assignment. The courage to put one’s manuscript in the mail is considered a private matter and left entirely to one’s own discretion and strength of conviction.

I considered it the final exam but perhaps my sense of personal courage came from the encouragement found in the instructor’s comments about my completed manuscript. Of particular note was the magic word she included, affirming my work as marketable.

The joy of writing during the four-week course was always mitigated by the doubt of whether or not I was actually creating something that people would willingly buy. Her use of the M-word was all I needed to motivate me to undertake the half mile walk to the post office to buy the right amount of postage to send my brainchild to its intended destination. I would suspect that for any writer this is the equivalent of the empty nest syndrome.

There is, however, one remaining word I need to hear that is even of greater import than marketable and that is the word accepted. Even a synonym of equal merit would be acceptable to me. But this is something, which can only be voiced, written or e-mailed by the publisher and due to the limitations of their workload may require four or more months before it can be delivered.

I will be here when it arrives. I will even leave a light on in the window for it at night as a sign of my unfailing interest in the prospective, positive outcome of my work. For I have already started on my next bestseller so that I will have a completed manuscript on hand to offer as a follow-up piece, deliverable upon request.

Spring is here, when an old man’s fancy turns to seed catalogues, pruning, yardwork and the budding of a new, childlike career.

I am down to my last assignment for my on-line class about writing a child’s picture book. The process so far has taken me from drafting a statement about one of my own childhood (think 1950’s) experiences to transforming that brief essay into a modern day story and finally editing a reflective piece into a page-turner imbued with a cliff-hanger type of suspense.

What I found to be surprisingly helpful was the requirement of creating a dummy layout. Not that any publisher would necessarily follow what I inserted as page breaks in the manuscript. The point was to force me to place the sequence of the story within the confines of a picture book’s page limitations to better understand what a child would see or more likely hear as an adult (parent, grandparent, guardian or teacher) read to them this epic tale of baseball lore. This caused me to make some further edits.

To complete the final assignment I spent a good deal of time researching the picture book publishing business in order to find a likely publisher for my book. This was another insightful episode as I had never really looked at what the expectations are in this field of writing and how extensive the competition is for gaining a publisher’s attention let alone acceptance of a manuscript. Depression ensued. Publishers are generally helpful in providing you with their guidelines for how and where to submit your story. But many will also tell you that they are so inundated with submissions that they will only respond to those in which they are interested. This can take anywhere from four, six or nine months during which time a would-be author is left to speculate in solitude and silence about the fate of his or her labor of love.

Rejection, they say, is not a reflection on how poorly your writing skills are. It is just the reality of not fitting into their current publishing interests. This may be true, but I suspect it is a ruse to avoid being honest about the fact that your work is not marketable. Publishing children’s books is a business, after all, and the people making the decisions about the fate of your manuscript are as mindful of making a profit for their company as they are in discovering a new artist of childlike proportions. Depression reigns.

Sunday midnight is the deadline for submitting my final assignment to my digital teacher and the primary piece she wants to see is the cover letter that will accompany my manuscript, which I am to mail to the publisher I selected based on my research. The letter has three parts to it; all briefly stated since the people in the publishing profession are constantly harassed by all of us wannabe writers and therefore have little time to linger over a lengthy letter describing any personal visions of fame and fortune as the next great Dr. Seuss. So here is the breakdown of the cover letter I will submit to my instructor.

Paragraph one is brutally brief, stating title, genre and targeted age level. I wrote: Charlie’s Golden Glove is a picture book manuscript, targeting 4 – 8 year olds, who love sports and most especially baseball. The current word count is 1,132 words. (Note I added the word count as a bonus piece of information to instantly satisfy their curiosity).

Paragraph two is a little more expansive, allowing you to use three sentences to summarize your entire story. The instructions emphatically state that you are never to leave the reader-publisher wondering about how the story ends, suspense not being an inherent part of the cover letter. I wrote:  Charlie loves playing baseball more than anything else in the world, but he has one major problem and that is catching the ball with his old glove. He is reluctant to say anything about it as opening day of the Little League season draws near until his parents surprise him with a special gift, his grandfather’s carefully preserved Mickey Mantle model glove made by the Rawlings Company. Charlie’s dreams come true on opening day, when he makes the game saving catch worthy of a Golden Glove Award.

Paragraph three is about you. Or should I say me? It entails what is supposed to be a brief biographical statement with any possible emphasis on prior writing experience and here I waxed eloquent. I wrote: During my professional career in museum management I had several opportunities to write educational and promotional materials, in addition to the monthly financial and administrative reports. The range of my output included research articles published in our in-house magazines, website and brochure text, scripts for television and radio commercials, and a weekly web log series on museum management, which I used to achieve greater transparency for the organizations I led. What was missing was entertaining and age appropriate materials for young children, one our largest audience segments. Now I wish to make amends by launching a new career in storytelling for young children.

That last little bit truly states why I am in the game. Half of my career involved managing railroad museums and what they uniformly lacked was good material for children despite the fact that young families with small children form a large audience segment. And there is in me the spirit of a teacher, frustrated by early career decisions, which led me away from the profession my educational choices prepared me for. Now I am trying to make amends for all of that by writing stories that children will likely hear read to them, ideally in the comfort of their own homes and the nurture of a loving parent, grandparent or guardian.

I am not sure my instructor will be attuned to all that or grade me on my good intentions. But I will say the journey so far has been enlightening for me. The greater challenge will be in not being discouraged if my submitted manuscript is rejected by my chosen publishing house after a protracted silence, while they sort through their workload. The approved therapy during that time will be to keep writing. For me this includes these weekly messages and my next great picture book epic.

This week’s message is part of a mini-series I stumbled into two weeks ago when I lazily and shamelessly posted as my web log message a writing assignment I had already completed for an on-line course I am taking. The subject was baseball as played by my childhood friends on the street where we lived.

Last week’s message described the refinement that reminiscence underwent as I was required to take my past and make it relative to today’s children. This was a challenge as what we did some sixty years ago in many ways is no longer acceptable and in some ways no longer legal for today’s families. We played in the same street where cars routinely drove, interrupting our games without anyone ever being bowled over, knocked down, drug or even clipped by a motorized intruder on our fun.

We bullied one another with taunts about athletic ineptitude, which often migrated into comments about one’s appearance and ancestry. And apart from the times when I played catch, alone, with Marj, girls were not allowed to play in our games. Exclusion was not a crime when we were kids, although I was guilty of innocent’s pleasure. All of the guys wore cutoffs during the warm weather days, but Marj wore shorts. And when she did, her legs held a certain fascination for me that those of my male friends’ could not even suggest.

I submitted my attempt at revisionist history, sans any reference to Marj and her legs, with all the self-confidence I could have of being in complete compliance with the rules of the writing game, just as I had once been with the rules for playing our makeshift baseball games. I was pleased, but not surprised, to read the instructor’s opening comment about my work since it confirmed by own perspective on my achievement. The evisceration which followed was not so pleasant.

I was guilty of committing three errors in paying homage to the game I loved as a child, which are as intolerable in writing children’s stories today as allowing one’s children to play in the street, bully, or exclude young women (formerly known as girls) from participating in activities which hold the promise of revealing their full potential (which is not to be construed as referring to their bodily form).

When writing for children, one must show not tell. My story had too much narrative and not enough dialogue. So I have axed the witty narrative and put the wit into the mouths of my youthful characters. One must avoid repetition, which I mistook as a clever way to build suspense. Apparently it does not, so that got axed as well. And finally there must only be one point of view in the story and that must be from the perspective of the main character. I transgressed in this one time by saying what the main character’ friends were thinking. That sin has now been expunged for the betterment of my story and my final grade.

One other error of mine was not enumerated in the instructor’s comments. But it did show in the edits she made to the content. And that error is that I start sentences with the word and. This usually happens at the end of a paragraph, where there is one more thing I want my readers to know. And so I start the sentence with the offending conjunction, apparently with the mistaken impression that it is effectively connecting all of the independent points of my narrative previously stated, showing the various points of view, which are germane to the point I am trying to make. And so I won’t do that anymore.

Last week’s message about how I came to be the proud owner of a Rawlings baseball glove with Mickey Mantle’s signature in the pocket was actually a cheap way for me to meet my own web log writing deadline by simply posting a writing assignment I had already completed for an on-line course I am taking. The course is about how to write picture books for children and the first assignment was to write about a personal experience from our past. This was easy to do as I wrote about the thing, which dominated my childhood experience, playing baseball with my friends from my neighborhood. Assignment two proved to be more of a challenge; that of translating the content of assignment number one into a marketable story of 1200 words or less.

My first draft came in at slightly more than 1400 words. Editing the story in order to meet the criteria of the established word limit proved to be a valuable process as it forced me to focus on what was essential to attain a realistic and satisfying conclusion. What proved to be hard was meeting my instructor’s secondary requirement, which entailed taking a 1950’s boyhood and making it applicable to today. The changes in our cultural norms and behaviors six decades later make an old man’s childhood unacceptable in today’s litigated and zero tolerance laced environment. For instance, I wrote:

A regular ball diamond was useless to us since there were too few of us to field two full teams. Besides our favorite playground was our own street.

I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in Southern California. One of the delights, as mentioned in last week’s message, is that we could play outside year round. And we played in the street in front of our homes. It was both a baseball field and a football field, where we played abbreviated games that could only simulate the real thing given the literally narrow confines between two curbs. Parents today would likely get arrested for child abandonment or abuse if they let their children play in the street. So that aspect of my experience was out (an appropriate baseball pun).

I mentioned three games that we played to accommodate the limitations of our avenue playground and the rotating number of kids wanting to play on any given day. These were Five Hundred, Hit the Bat, and Over the Line. In the twenty plus years that I have lived in a small community in Wisconsin I have rarely seen kids playing outside at any time of the year other than those engaged in an organized sport taking place at a public park or school. For most kids play today is digitized. Even baseball can be played on the small screen of your TV or computer. But why do that when you can murder and maim your way through any of a number of combat-themed computerized games that give you the vicarious thrill of annihilation graphically portrayed?

I also wrote:

Taunting one another about a person’s inability to catch, throw, or hit a baseball was standard fare and was an integral part of our bonding experience.

Today this is called bullying. It can get you in trouble quicker that the police can cite your parents for letting you play in the street even when supervised. We called this cutting or chopping. It was simply another part of our competitive natures to say something clever followed by the phrase “Chopped you low” with a note of triumph in one’s voice just as if we had hit a home run. And what does it say about me in that I look back at those times with affection? What it meant for the story I wrote was that I allowed a minor politically incorrect infraction to occur by including the nickname of the smallest player among us, who was a good friend and seemed to relish his subsequent status.

Then there’s the Mick. One of my greatest thrills as a child was the time my dad brought home a fielder’s mitt for me with Mickey Mantle’s signature in the palm of a Rawlings manufactured glove. Mantle was my favorite player, even though he played for the Yankees and I was a diehard Dodger fan. And as much as I cheered for Duke Snyder to homer every time he was at bat, and later did the same for Willie Davis, the Mick was just someone set apart. But how many kids today know who he was or could feel about him the way I did when I believed that he walked on pro baseball’s version of the Sea of Galilee?

To complete my assignment, I was willing to drop any reference to the short-handed games that we played, since there was not enough space to explain their respective rules. And that decision made it easier to eliminate any reference to the fact that they took place on a daily basis in the inferno regions of our neighborhood street. But I could not abandon Mantle’s significance to my reverence for the game. So here is how I resolved my emotional conflicts about making a story based on my personal experiences palatable and marketable.

The youthful hero of my story inherits his grandfather’s Rawlings manufactured model MM5 Mickey Mantle glove. Since I don’t have any grandchildren, I gave my son’s name to the boy in the story as a means for retaining a strong emotional bond with the main character. But even more important in my strategy for making it credible, I made his passion for the game my own. There are just some things you cannot fake and a love for the game is one of them.

I’ll know if I was successful by the grade I receive from my instructor. If she is attuned to my way of thinking, she won’t bother assigning a letter grade (if teachers even do that anymore).  She’ll simple say homerun instead of strike one. And for me, that will be sufficient.