On Bats and Bows - April 7, 2022 | Kids Out and About Seattle <

On Bats and Bows

April 7, 2022

Debra Ross

When I was a pre-teen in Cranford, NJ, I played baseball in my town's Little League. I could have played girls' softball, but I decided that a girl of the '80s should be tough enough to play with the boys. My league focused on playing ball rather than on training for the majors, but even so, I was the worst player. Danny Patalano's dad, who was the Panthers' coach, put me in right field; we both sort of hoped no one hit the ball in my direction during a game, but he gave me good pointers during practice. Before and after each game, he reminded the team that together we were awesome... even though I suspected he privately wished I'd go join some nice music group instead. I improved enough over my two years on the team that I hit a triple in my last game, but still decided to take the hint: after Grade 6, I found extracurricular enrichment elsewhere.

I wasn't quite as bad at the cello as I was at baseball, but I loved the music and the other kids in my school orchestra. During high school, I practiced hard enough to make it into a mid-level regional orchestra for other kids from Central Jersey. The music was more challenging than what you'd get in school, and it was the real stuff, like Fauré and Copland and Ives and Rimsky-Korsakov. The conductors hid me toward the back, where my mediocrity wouldn't matter. I was just glad to be playing with other kids who, like me, were there more to have a good time with nice people than to become star performers.

But during our final concert of my last year in that orchestra, I suddenly saw it all differently. We were playing the fourth movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony... and for some reason, I wasn't just sawing away as usual, trying to stay in tempo in the back of the cello section: Instead, I found myself listening to what we were playing. I don't know how it sounded from the audience, but from where I sat, it struck me as the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard... in large part because I was part of what was bringing that uplifting experience into being, me and all the other moderately-talented kids from places like Plainfield and Flemington and Matawan and Woodbridge. None of us is a star, I marveled. But together, we are awesome.

That experience helped me grow to understand later why Coach Patalano and the other coaches, and the orchestra conductors, and people like so many of you readers out there give up your evenings, your weekends, your summers to work and play with teams of kids of all abilities and interests. The lesson translates everywhere: Take a bunch of moderately-talented humans, put us into a room or onto a field with a leader who can inspire us to work or play with a unified purpose... and no matter how thoroughly ordinary we are as individuals, together we are awesome. When you help that fact click for kids, the lesson sticks for life.

Deb