Baseball Fiction

Oona Short — Slow Trains Literary Journal

I’m a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, which is the biggest food coop in the country. Which means that I (along with my wife) swap 2.75 hours each of work every month for the right to buy the best produce, grass-fed meats, and other organic and artisanal products (like cheese, grains, and canned goods, and rainforest chocolate) for about 20 percent less than we’d pay at the local non-coop markets. That works about to about 35 percent off Whole Foods.

We think this is a pretty decent financial deal, but the fact is that working at the coop is almost always a gas. Want to know who lives in your community? Work with them.

I work checkout, which means I scan people’s groceries, mainly, which offers a great opportunity to talk to them about all the food they’re bringing home, how to prepare it, how to best appreciate it.

This past week I “checked out” the significant other of one of my co-workers and while weighing the produce we somehow got into a discussion about baseball (okay, she asked me what I wrote about). She teaches dance, and told me about a woman she had in one of her classes who loved baseball and wrote about it. She seemed to find it odd that there were two coop members interested in baseball, though I can testify that there are many more.

I Googled her student’s name and happened upon the story linked here. I don’t know anything about Oona Short except what I read in this story, which is 18 years old. The reason I link is because the headlong storytelling (which has an attractive velocity if not exactly an economy), about an aspiring Baseball Annie and her somewhat underrealized grasp upon reality, is rather deft.

Ultimately, Oona takes the details of her observations of the game and turns them into a tale of obsession and acceptance that does a good job of making her enthusiasm for the game (something all of us reading this share) feel real. Bravo.