THE FUN OF A RASPBERRY SURPRISE

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I thought I was getting smarter.

I stopped playing football. I haven’t picked up a street hockey stick in years. I only rarely play basketball, and when I do, it’s with friends who are as out of shape as I am, so there’s really no danger.

I figured I had eliminated all of the potential dangers from my life, accepting the fact that I had gotten a little older, and that the bruises healed a lot slower. I figured that playing softball would be an easy addition to the new Geriatric Mike’s Sporting Life. How can you hurt yourself at softball? There are folks in their 80s playing softball!

Well, I’ll tell you how you hurt yourself in softball: batting practice. Just look at the statistics: 100% of the people who are me suffered their softball injuries during batting practice. If that doesn’t scare you into taking a seat on the bench, I don’t know what will.

It happened a few weeks ago when my team was at the field for a practice game. We decided that we would all take a few swings of the bat before the game, just for the joy of hearing our joints crackle.

On your final out at bat of practice, you were supposed to run the bases, as if it were a real game. This is something we jocks like to call a Game Situation. So on my last pitch, I whistled a fiery line drive over the shortstop’s head. It was quite possibly the finest line drive ever hit in softball. The ball scorched its way into the alley, and I began my tear around the basepaths.

Now, I’m not ashamed to tell you that I have pretty good speed. When you have my size and my mouth, you learn to get very fast at a young age. I knew this was easily a double, but thought I may try and stretch it into a triple. As I rounded second at full speed, I saw the outfielder had sent the relay throw toward the infielder.

"Time to stop," my brain said to my feet.

"Time to fall," my feet said to the rest of my body.

I don’t know if it was the new cleats or the freshly packed dirt or the fact that I was exhibiting all of the coordination of a Toyota Tercel, but I completely lost all of my footing and did a lovely splat a few feet off of second base.

When I got up, I noticed my leg was stinging a little. I looked down and saw the all-too familiar signs of a budding raspberry. For those of you who have never been so fortunate as to have your skin forcibly scraped from your body, a raspberry is a nasty scrape that you get when you fall. Most every child on the planet has at least one raspberry at every given time. Raspberries are best formed when your knees meet asphalt, but hard dirt can do a nice job as well.

By the time I got home, the raspberry was really starting to mature. And, as an added bonus, it had brought some infield dirt with it, perhaps as a souvenir.

When I walked in the door, my wife saw me and looked at my leg. She shook her head solemnly for a moment, perhaps as she paused to wonder what kind of karmic mistake she had made in a previous life, and said, "Go upstairs and clean it. I’ll be there in a minute."

Now, you may think this is just a mild little scrape, but this is possibly the most severe raspberry ever. At least I think it was. For one thing, it was about the size of Sacramento. Second, it really, really stung, and the fact that the air touching it made me wince in pain told me that I wasn’t really going to enjoy my wife’s nursing session.

But, I knew that I had to clean the wound, so I went to the bathroom and commenced with the most painful exhibition of wound cleansing I have ever experienced. (Editor’s note: What a baby.) Then, because my pain receptors had not been completely overloaded, by wife put some sort of medicine on it. I’m not sure what it was, but I am starting to think it was hydrochloric acid. Or perhaps she was just repeatedly stabbing me in the leg.

After an eternity of what my wife insisted was good for me, I was sent to bed. Unfortunately, because of the way raspberries are, I had to sleep on top of the covers with my leg propped up, lest a sheet accidentally rub my leg in my sleep and causing additional horror. (Editor’s note: I mean, seriously! What a baby! Have you ever heard such whining? Sheesh.)

You will be pleased to learn that the leg is slowly healing. The raspberry now kinda looks like an overcooked piece of ham. Yum! I have made a point of reminding my wife constantly about the pain I have endured. For some reason, she often points at our daughter and says, "Try birth." I think she’s trying to tell me something. Must be how much she admires me for enduring my suffering.