One Hundred Years of Solid 'tude

Many years later, as he face the firing squad, Colonel Glen Cebulash was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover wiffle-ball.  At that time, New Barbados, later to be called Hackensack, was a Dutch-reformed village of 200 red-brick homes, built on the bank of a river of dirty water that ran along a bed of grackle and stones.  The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.  Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions.  First they brought the discourse.  A wiry gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Kurt, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned sophists of the midwest.  He went from house to house dragging two texts and everyone was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Kurt's magical and forked tongue.
A year later the gypsies returned.  This time they brought a long yellow stick and a hollowed-out gourd the size of an orange with lozenge sized holes carved out along one of its hemispheres.  These items, they claimed, had been exhibited worldwide as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam.  They placed a gypsy woman at one point of a large diamond they had drawn in the dirt with the branch of a small ash tree, and nine gypsies arranged in symbolic order around the rest of the diamond.  For the price of a single goose egg people could gather around to watch the gypsy woman hit the hollowed-out gourd with the yellow stick.  Nobody moved when the gourd was hit.  They stood motionless.  Some sat.  "Science has eliminated the need to move", the gypsy called Kurt proclaimed.  "In a short time, men will be able to form groups, or squads, for hitting and scoring without ever getting up."

Years later, on a hot August day, many miles and a lifetime away from New Barbados, Glen Cebulash would give up 7 runs to 3 intinerant minstrels, one of whom was said to worship at the altar of a Sarah Palin and one who squatted over the pitcher's mound and gave birth to what is now called a wiffle-ball.

There were many other narratives spun out on that day, including a phenomenal catch, but as the bullets left the barrels of their guns it was the baby blue hashmarks scratched into the ground reading  9-2 that flashed into Glen's mind right before his head burst open like a ripe melon.