Mable Contemplates at The Picnic

Sunday was a lovely day for a picnic. It was even a bit warmer than yesterday. Actually, the weather was unseasonably warm for early November. The trees at Union Park were a little late getting color. Most of them appeared to be oaks and they always turn plain old brown anyway. It was still beautiful, though, with the sun sparkling through the leaves. It was a heavenly day to be eating outside. No bugs. No big breezes. No loud children. It was very relaxing, except I still had not decided what questions I wanted to ask Babe Ruth.

Union Park was on the east side of Des Moines, and Drake Stadium was on the west side, at 27th and Forest Avenue. It was practically brand new, having been built and dedicated in 1925. My father had helped build it, so I was excited to see it. We had driven past it a few times on the way to Valley Junction to watch the trains, but I had never been to a sporting event there. I was way more interested in baseball than in college football. High school football was a favorite of mine also, but I think that was because I knew the young men who were playing in the game. I just thought the whole game of baseball was more interesting in general.

I had put off thinking about the Babe Ruth questions while talking to Burnie on our morning walk yesterday. I had no time to think about it during the ballgame. After yesterday’s game, I briefly thought about asking The Sultan of Swat what had happened to his “swat,” but decided that would be too harsh of a question. I considered asking him about what it was like to travel from city to city. That seemed exciting to me, but then I realized that baseball players did that all the time during the whole baseball season, so he was probably used to that kind of life. I wanted to ask him about his family, too, but then realized he might be offended by too personal of a question. I only had about one more hour to come up with my questions. I decided to go off by myself for a few minutes and think. I told Mother that I was going over by bandstand, to sit myself down and figure out what to ask.

The grass under this tree was extremely lush and green. It was a perfect place to escape and create my interview plan in my head. This had to go better that my last plan. I didn’t even have a plan last time, when I spied Edith and her brothers at the game. I just had a hunch they would be interesting and they truly were, but I certainly could have done a better job on the interview. I just stumbled through the questions I had asked and left myself with so many unanswered that I would have to go back and see her, or write to her, to get the rest answered.

As I sat there, looking up through the leaves, my mind was going like crazy. I was actually more worried about how I was going to tell Mother that I wanted to drop out of college, than I was about what questions to ask Babe Ruth. Then, I started to wonder what he would think of my dilemma. He was competitive, like I was. I wondered if he had ever quit anything. I knew he quit pitching early in his career and now he just did it on the barnstorming tour for the fun of it. I had read all about how he came to live in the orphanage, which made me wonder if he missed not living with his parents, or why he became such a troublemaker at such a young age. Those questions were probably too personal.

With all those possibilities in my head, I could still not escape my own question; if I should quit college. That was what was on my mind all the time now. I realized this was the first real life decision that I had to make. Everything else had always just seemed like the next natural step to take. Whether it was going out for a sport or trying to get the sports editor job on the Oracle, or which college to attend; these choices seemed like they practically decided themselves for me. I was going to have to decide whether to drop out of college or not by myself.

Mother would not like it, Burnie already didn’t like it, and I doubted that Mr. Ashby would think it was a great idea either. They would probably all be asking me the same question, “What are you going to do instead?” I had spent considerable time thinking about that, but still had no clear plan. At first, I thought that I could just get a job writing for a local newspaper. There were local papers in Iowa Falls and Eldora. At least that way I could get more experience. Then I thought that finding someone to hire me might be a problem, with the economy going down so fast. Jobs in general were nearly impossible to find. Actually, more folks were losing jobs than were getting jobs. What was I thinking? A man would be hired before I would. A college graduate would be hired before I would. Even if I did get hired at a local paper, it would not pay very much, since I only had a high school diploma. They would probably rather hire someone who grew up in the local area, not an outsider like me. Rats, I was going to have a hard time helping Mother without a job.

So, if I quit college, I would probably not be able to get a real job. Perhaps I could do laundry or iron or clean houses. I wondered how many people in Steamboat Rock or Eldora could afford to have someone else do their laundry or clean their house? Surely there were not many, if any, who had that kind of money. I knew nothing about farming, so I certainly would not be able to work on one of the local farms. This line of thinking was going badly.

Okay, why was college so horrible? What exactly did I dread returning to on Monday in Iowa City? Well, to start with, I missed Mother. Her calm voice, constant encouragement, and reassuring hugs had always meant so much to me, and now I was going for months without any of them. I also had grown to hate synchronized swimming. It was an obstacle to my swimming competition. It was not real competition. All that work was not easy, but it was helping keep me in good physical condition, but basically all I did was swim around in circles.

My anatomy class was a nightmare. I used to enjoy classes like biology, and I knew a lot of Latin, which should have helped me. Nothing helped me. It got more difficult every day. I was taking it because I thought it would be easy and help me with my Red Cross certification.

There was another problem with college. I was a journalist who was not allowed to write or publish in The Daily Iowan. I was only a freshman, so no bylines for me! They had an underclass poetry journal that was published every year, but I did not write poetry. I wrote sports news, or any other kind of news, but not poetry.

I really hated making coffee and running errands for the men at The Daily Iowan, also. They were a bunch of fellas like the ones who were on the North High Oracle staff. They only wrote about sports and they had never really played them. Most of their articles about sporting events were either just about the statistics or they were personality pieces on players, and not at all about sports. They simply did not know any good questions to ask. I thought they were pathetic. I know this makes me sound like I think I know it all, but really, those fellas were the ones who should stick to writing movie reviews and horoscopes.

I must have fallen asleep while doing all this thinking, because I was totally startled when Burnie bounded over to the tree and said my name, “Mable, Mable! Nap time is over and it’s time to head on over to Drake Stadium!”

I opened my eyes quickly but was not quite alert yet. At first, I was not sure where I was. So many things had been swimming through my brain, I will admit I was a little disoriented. Then I remembered that I had sat down under the tree to do some serious soul-searching, and then I suddenly recalled the question I wanted to ask Babe Ruth. I was ready to meet him now.