Jagged little pill

In the summer of my 11th year, I loved baseball. I loved everything about it. I was as good as I could be, which wasn't all that good, and I loved it. I loved playing it. I loved talking about it. I loved Mickey Mantle. I loved my friends. I loved our baseball team. I loved baseball.

Then on a short trip from our home in Meridian, Miss., to Demopolis, Ala., for a weekend of play near the Tombigbee River, I stepped on a broken beer can that had been throw out into the bushes. I was bare-footed. It cut me like a girlfriend's betrayal. Suddenly, I was without baseball. It was the worst summer of my youth, even the summer when I suddenly had to share the position of catcher. I was out. Cut-off. Without.

I felt something like that yesterday.

Truthfully I'm not that political. I'm really not. I did my share of campaigning, even speaking for someone when I was in college at a rally. But since I became of voting age, I've never been against anyone. I've been for candidates, not against others. 

Till yesterday. Look, I'm perfectly willing to allow and even suggest that everyone vote the way they desire. Nothing wrong with that, unless we are voting out of hate. It grieves me that on Facebook folks call candidates morons and idiots and such. They are not. You do not get where they are without a seriousness and an intellect that in many cases is far greater than our own. 

I've not voted winners lately, but I've voted with my head and my heart and that's about all one can do.

I've had a candidate who is my own for about a year, and he is going down like the Titanic. But like stepping on a broken beer can, suddenly I feel I'm about to be out of the game. What to do? What to do?

I suspect I will soon journey to another candidate, and I have one picked out. But the difference this year is that for the first time I am voting, I fear, for anyone but ... instead of voting for someone. That's not a way to go about it, but it's what I'm left with.

Here's the thing. The summer of my 12th year, I had the best season of baseball I ever had till I was a senior in high school. I remember even the statistics, hitting 32 clean hits in 50 at-bats, with 16 doubles. Somehow that sticks in my head. What doesn't is what I hit before I was cut when I was 11.

See, time heals everything. Time overcomes even the bitterness that has grown in this country. Time heals the wicked statements of the candidates. Time heals, but hatred kills. It's time I give up the notion of any candidate but and pick one.

The worry I have is of the jagged edge I can't see waiting for me in the weeds.