Never Blame the Umpire (7 page)

Mama and Dad both went to work today, so I’m at Ginny’s when the phone rings. The second she’s done talking she starts squealing and jumping up and down.

“I got it! I got the part!”

I know without her saying any more just what she’s talking about. She’s been in enough plays you’d think she wouldn’t be this excited. But I guess if I kept getting game-winning base hits I’d probably be just as excited as I was the first time. Not that I ever expect to get another game-winning hit.

“The lead?” I say. “Did you actually get…”

“I did! I did! I get to play Annie!”

Annie
is a musical about a girl who grows up in an orphanage run by a mean woman. She’s about ten or
eleven when she gets picked to spend the Christmas holidays at the mansion of Daddy Warbucks, who I guess was the richest man in the United States. The play takes place a long time ago, like the 1930s or ‘40s. It’s a whole new world for Annie because she’s never had anything. Not only that, she’s treated like a princess when she’s at Daddy Warbucks’ mansion, while the woman who runs the orphanage treated all the girls like slaves. It’s a really neat play. I know Ginny will be great as Annie.

She auditioned at the Children’s Theater for the part a few days after we started at Valley Lakes School. She got a callback last week to come and read for the part again. She said she knows of at least a dozen girls who got callbacks. She said a lot of the others who didn’t get picked to play Annie will probably get to play some of the other orphans.

Annie has curly red hair and gets to sing a lot of solos. Ginny doesn’t have red hair. I guess she’ll have to wear a wig. The hair’s not important, though. What’s important is that she’s a great actress and she can sing. I get goosebumps when she belts out songs like “Tomorrow” and “It’s a Hard Knock Life.” I could listen to her all day.

She started practicing for the audition a few weeks ago. I’ve watched the movie with her five or six times, and I know she’s watched it by herself a bunch. She’s been practicing Annie’s songs, too. If
you ask me, I think she sounds just as good as the girl who plays Annie in the movie.

I’m really happy for her, but I’m sad, too. Rehearsals start next week. She said they’ll be rehearsing three or four nights a week most of the summer to get ready for the September performances. That means I won’t see her nearly as much. And there’s no chance now of her playing baseball this summer. First of all, she won’t have time. Secondly, she’d have a hard time singing with a puffed-up lip if she got hit in the face with a baseball again.

But it’ll be so much fun seeing her up on stage.

“Sing ‘Tomorrow’ for me,” I say.

“Now?”

“Will you? Please?”

“Are you sure?”

“I really want to hear it.”

“Really?”

“Really, truly.”

So she does.

And I get goosebumps all over.

When Ginny first said she was going to audition for
Annie
, I’d never seen the movie. Even when we started watching it, I never felt bad for Annie, not even when she was in the orphanage. I mean, the movie is mostly funny. Even though she didn’t have any parents and she was treated bad, I never thought about the bad things.

After I found out about Mama’s cancer, I started to see the movie in a different way. I know it’s only a made-up story, but still, none of the girls had parents. Some of them, like Annie, never knew their parents. But some of them must have known their mama. Now there they are, without any family except the other girls in the orphanage.

If God won’t cure Mama’s cancer, I’ll at least have Dad and Ken. I won’t be alone. I won’t be sent to an orphanage. But maybe God won’t be that mean. He wouldn’t. He has to save her. Maybe if I pray harder. Maybe if I can just find the right words, I can convince God to take away her cancer and make her well again.

I take out my notebook. I try to think of what I can say to God to make him listen. I know I don’t really have the right to expect him to listen to me. If I were Allison, with her faith, maybe he would.

I start to write. I want it to be a prayer, but it seems to be taking the shape of a poem.

God, are you there?

I just don’t see you anywhere.

God, oh God, why don’t you care?

What can I do to make you see

Just how much Mama means to me.

No, that’s not right. That’s not what I mean to say. Don’t do it for me, God. Do it for Mama. I’m not important. She is.

When Mr. Stone, the poet, came to my school, he told us to never throw away anything we write. But I take the page from my notebook and crumple it up. I toss it in the waste basket. What I wrote was dumb. It was selfish. Not only that, I kind of sounded like
Dr. Seuss with his silly rhymes. I can’t be silly when I ask God for help.

Besides, when I said he didn’t care, that probably made him mad. It won’t help Mama if I make God mad. I start to write.

God, I know you’ll do all you can

To make my mama well again.

I cross out the “again.” This prayer will be better if it doesn’t rhyme. I read it over. I don’t like either line. I scribble them out and try again.

God, I know you are good.

I know you can do anything.

It’s so easy for you to just reach down

and take the cancer from Mama’s body.

Why won’t you do that?

I rip the paper from my notebook and ball it up and slam it down into the wastebasket. I can’t stop the sobs. I fall onto my bed and bury my face in my pillow. Why can’t I do it? Why can’t I find the right words? I’m probably just making things worse by trying to convince God to help Mama. He hears words all the time from people who really know how to pray, who aren’t selfish.

Please God. Please don’t make Mama suffer
because of my foolish words. She needs your help. She deserves your help.

Suddenly I’m biting my lower lip so hard it hurts. If I make it bleed maybe that will get God’s attention. Maybe he’ll realize I really care.

But I start to sob again. Because I realize that God has probably already stopped listening.

The auditorium is packed for our program. It’s mostly the families of the more than sixty of us who decided to spend three weeks of our summer vacation in the classroom again. The reason for the program is to show the parents what their talented kids have created during the three weeks. “Talented” isn’t my word; it’s what the director of Valley Lakes says when he talks to the audience at the start of the program.

I wish it were true. I don’t feel especially talented. The worst thing is that in a few minutes I’ll have to stand up in front of an auditorium full of people and read some of my poems. My stomach is turning somersaults just thinking about it.

Most of us have to perform on stage. The visual arts kids are the only ones who don’t. Their art work is in display in the lobby for everybody to look at when they come and go out after the program is over. All the artists have to do is stand beside their work and talk about it if anybody has questions. And of course get their picture taken alongside their work by somebody in their family.

I’ve been backstage with the rest of my class while the vocal and dance classes went on. It’s given me time to get even more nervous.

My class all walks out on stage. We all have to be on stage together while each of us goes up to the microphone to read our poems.

My hands are shaking when I get to the microphone, but I take a deep breath and feel a little better. I manage to get through my first poem okay. It’s a tennis poem, “World Class Lob.”

My opponent’s lob shot

Played with the sun.

It finally turned and sped away,

Back toward where I waited

To punish the ball

For taking so long to arrive.

The sun saw the danger,

rumbled from the sky,

Stuck its blinding rays in my eyes,

Letting the ball land

Softly, happy – safe

From my waiting overhead smash.

I wrote that poem the first week. Most of what I wrote the last week rhymed. We’d spent two whole days of class this week writing nothing but silly poems, kind of like what Shel Silverstein writes. That was the assignment. Mr. Gallagher said, “Some people think that silly poems are harder to write than serious ones, so here’s my challenge: I want you to spend the next two days writing only silly poems. If you can try ten different poem ideas and two of them are good, you’re ahead of the game.”

I was glad he gave us that assignment. If I wrote what I was really feeling, I’d end up with poems too depressing to read, or else poems so personal I wouldn’t dare read them.

None of my silly poems are anywhere near as good as Silverstein’s, but I picked out three of them to read anyway, mostly because Mr. Gallagher said he liked them. He said I have a good ear for rhythm. I don’t know if that’s true, but it made me feel good when he said it.

When I read, I know I read faster than I should. It’s just that I’m nervous and want to finish as soon as possible.

Baking Watermelon

I baked a watermelon cake

With green rind and black seeds.

I used some sand for icing;

For candles I used weeds.

It tasted far too gritty,

And, sad to say, too dry.

I guess next time I’ll try to bake

A watermelon pie.

Friday Is My Day

Friday is my day to do what I like,

And what I like best is to ride on my bike,

To ride across recess, to ride down the hall,

To ride in my classroom and laugh at them all.

They are sitting there workingfor teachers who yell

From the morning announcementstil the day’s final bell.

My classmates just sit there, all writing a poem,

So I zoom out the door and I ride my bike home.

Sally, Eating a Bar of

Chocolate in Sunday School

The chocolate bar she tried to eat

Had melted in the summer heat.

The chocolate dripped off Sally’s nose

And landed on her best church clothes.

Sally’s favorite yellow dress

Was now a brown and gooey mess.

Some chocolate fell with a kerplop

And formed a heart-shaped chocolate drop

On one of Sally’s new, white shoes.

The moral’s this: if you should choose

To ever eat a chocolate bar,

Remember when and where you are.

I actually wrote that last one for Allison, but I changed her name because Mr. Gallagher said we shouldn’t use the names of real people in our poems, because it might embarrass them or make them feel bad (even though the poem isn’t true). It could have happened, though. Allison actually was eating a candy bar one day before Sunday School. She had on a really pretty dress. I kept thinking, “I hope she’s careful not to get chocolate on her dress.” She didn’t, but she could have.

Mr. Gallagher told us more than once, “Poems
aren’t always ‘what is.’ Most of the time they’re ‘what might be,’ or ‘what could be.’”

Allison’s the last one in our class to read. I love her poems. I think they say a lot about the kind of person she is. Whether she’s writing serious poems or silly ones, most of them are about God or Jesus or church or prayer.

She starts out with “God, Sticking Up For My Brother.”

I saw God sitting in a tree.

“It’s only an owl,” my brother said.

“Just listen to the sound.”

It sure sounded like God to me.

Then in the middle of the night

I awoke to see God

in the shadows near my window.

“Why,” I asked Him, “aren’t you

still in the tree where I saw you

when I was in the yard with my brother?”

“I wasn’t in that tree,” God told me.

“That was an owl. Even brothers,”

God said, “are not wrong all the time.”

Her next one is “Samson.” Allison sure knows more about the Bible than I do.

Talk about being hoodwinked! He never did

see the truth until that final moment, chained

like a wild animal to be spit on by Philistines.

God could have given up on him; no one

would have blamed Him, gullible and ungodly

as Samson was, murderer of thirty men at Ashkelon,

of a thousand at Lehi. The woman of Timnath and

Delilah both saw the human Samson, Samson the weak.

But Samson, at the end, learned in time that prayer,

not hair, was the source of miraculous strength.

Allison reads one of her silly poems next. And it has nothing to do with religion.

A Cuddly Pet

Mom asked what I wanted for Christmas. She said,

“I’ll try as hard as I can to get it.

I told her that pandas are furry and cuddly

And I’d like to have one so I can pet it.

There were none to be found, so Mom brought me home

A substitute pet, and she warned, “Don’t upset it.”

The pet that she brought me, a fat porcupine,

Was all right, I guess. But cuddle? Forget it.

“My last poem,” Allison says, “is one titled ‘A Child Knows God.’” She smiles out at the audience. She doesn’t seem nervous or self-conscious at all. She says, “I thought back to when I was real little and first discovered how good God is. I didn’t know anything about poetry then, but I think this is what I would have written if I had. It’s exactly how I felt. It’s how I still feel.”

She starts to read.

God made the grass; God made each tree.

God gave me eyes so I can see

The grass he made and see the shade

That comforts me.

The way her face glows lets everyone know how much she loves God. She’s not pretending, the way some people do. I wish I could feel the way she does. I want to. I really do.

God made the night; God made the day.

At night I sleep so I can play

At morning’s light and do what’s right

In every way.

God gave us life; he made us all.

And even though he made me small,

His love for me will help me be

So big and tall.

I know that God will help me grow

And learn all that I need to know

Of his kind deeds. He’ll fill my needs.

I love him so!

When she finishes everybody claps hard. She hadn’t seemed self-conscious before, but now she looks likes she’s embarrassed. I think it’s because of all the clapping.

She looks over at me. I wait for the clapping to stop. Then I walk out to the microphone and stand beside her. We’re going to read a poem we wrote together, and that will end our class’s part of the program. By together I mean we’ll read alternate stanzas. The poem is the one we wrote in class about the months. We ended up spending a lot of time on it. It went through a ton of revisions, but I think it turned out pretty good. Allison wrote most of the best lines.

We wrote it in a series of couplets. A couplet is a two-line stanza. We’ve practiced reading it a lot. We decided that Allison will read the first couplet and I’ll read the second one. We’ll just keep alternating.

“This last poem,” Allison says, “is one Kate Adams
and I wrote together. It’s called ‘Parade of Months.’”

January skimmed on skates and did a figure eight.

February sloshed on boots; he didn’t hesitate.

I’m nervous, but as soon as Allison finishes reading “hesitate,” I read:

Arm and arm with Abe and George he rushed a Valentine

To March, who gave him in return a ray of spring sunshine.

We read the rest of the poem and don’t mess up once:

Sweet April walked ahead of them, white blossoms in her hair.

She carried baseball bats and gloves through breezes oh so fair.

A long way in the distance she saw May, who was no fool.

For May was sprinting far ahead to reach the end of school.

Perhaps the most distracted in the parade was June.

Her thoughts were full of weddings and of summer, coming soon.

July’s straw hat, wide-brimmed and orange, received its share of smirks

Before it got knocked off amidst a blast of fireworks.

Poor August was so hot he sat and rested in the shade.

If somehow he could change with March he’d surely make the trade.

September marched triumphantly to school bells loud and clear.

She wore the lovely, fragrant smell of autumn growing near.

Some golden leaves blew on the path where crisp October strode.

With black cats, ghosts, and skeletons he headed up the road.

November had to wear a coat because of cooling weather

As it and friends and family all gathered close together.

December led the big parade with robust Christmas cheer,

And saw ahead a new parade of still another year.

As soon as we finish, everybody cheers. We even get a couple of loud whistles. I’m sure one of the whistlers is Ken.

Our class goes to a room offstage until the program is over, so we don’t get to see the other two classes perform, instrumental music and drama. I don’t really mind, though, because we got to see them all in rehearsals yesterday and today.

Ginny’s class isn’t doing anything from
Romeo and Juliet.
Instead they’re acting out scenes from three different plays.
The scenes were chosen so that each of the students has about the same amount of time on stage to act their part. In Ginny’s scene she plays an old lady. She’s made up to look old, and she does a great job with her voice. She sounds like she’s about ninety. She’s not the only good one, though. Just about everybody on stage does a great job. It makes me glad I was chosen for creative writing. I could never in a million years be an actress.

We have a final curtain call, when everybody goes on stage. As soon as the curtain call is over, I run down to find Mama and Dad and Ken.

Dad hugs me first, but Mama’s not far behind. “I’m so proud of you, Kate,” she says. “Your poems were wonderful.”

“I didn’t know you could write that well,” Dad says. “You never cease to amaze me.”

Ken taps my shoulder and says, “My favorite poem was the one Allison read about the owl. I loved that line about brothers not being wrong.”

“If she knew you better,” I say, “she never would have written it.”

“Ha ha,” Ken says.

I’d been ready to quit the school after I found out about Mama’s cancer. I’m really glad I stuck it out. The last week especially was fun. And I know if I hadn’t been coming to school I would have spent every minute worrying about Mama.

But there’s one good thing about school being over. Mama quit her job this week. Now I’ll be able to be with her all the time.