Swinging for the Fences

I was five years old when I experienced heartbreak for the first time.

I did not grow up with a large family, or religion, or a strong sense of heritage—my ancestors came to the States from four different countries, none of which they were particularly liked in.

I did, however, have the New York Yankees. My pilgrimages were to a holy site in the Bronx to watch a game that—to five year-old me—cut through the noise of the universe and brought its central drama into sharp focus. The Yankees represented all that was good, pure, and moral; evil had its own dugout, and its fans were expected to behave themselves.

The trouble was, the Yankees didn’t have any girls.

“Never? Not even one?” I asked my father.

“Not even one.”

But time heals all wounds (except for the anguish of the 2004 American League Championship Series). Over the last 15 years, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll never wear the pinstripes. In truth, I’d have had a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming a professional baseball player even if I’d been born a boy—maybe gender is a social construct, but the ability to hit a curve ball is not.

But sometimes I remember that little kid with the Bernie Williams T-shirt and the broken heart. And I’m torn. I want to tell her that this is a great opportunity to build character, to learn that she won’t always get what she wants. Plus, with hard work and strategic bribery, she might even land George Costanza’s old job as assistant to the Yankees’ Traveling Secretary.

Yet I know how the story plays out—I’m going to ship her deep into Red Sox territory, to a school with a startlingly high percentage of self-described “American males” who don’t know the infield fly rule. She’ll consider “the world’s best education” to be a flimsy excuse. When I think about it this way, I can’t imagine encouraging her to bury her dream.

Now, for the past few hundred words you’ve been reading about the bad break I got—you know, the extra X chromosome. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest girl on the face of this earth.

I thank God, or probability, or whoever is running this computer simulation world for making me a) sentient and b) nerdy enough to have picked up Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” Thanks to Hawking and the internet, I understand—or, at least, appreciate that some people understand—that relative velocity affects our experience of time and that the universe, which already goes on forever, continues to expand.

An infinite universe means that any conceivable combination of circumstances (and many more inconceivable ones) might exist. Maybe what seems impossible is only masquerading as such; maybe the sky’s the limit, and it also isn’t. I like this idea: I picture an alternate universe through some hole in space and time, where I’m a Major League shortstop and I’m having a catch with Mariano Rivera before a game. If parallel-universe-Lisa hit enough home runs this season, the Yankees might still have a shot at the Andromeda League wild card.

But, somehow not paradoxically, the universe is also arbitrarily small. If everything we perceive has been filtered through our senses, it must, in a way, exist only in our heads. At first, that’s disheartening: Can reality be very meaningful if it’s contained within the mind?

Yes, I think. In fact, I’d say that this is empowering. If we’re all walking around in private perceptual bubbles anyway, then (as long as I keep up appearances in the real world) it’s not so outlandish that I sometimes prefer to live in my own world: one in which it isn’t cool to be jaded, a childhood dream isn’t crazy, and good and evil can have it out.

Fate may have its own plans for where we wind up. In my case, it won’t be a stadium on 161st Street and River Avenue. But the universe, even the parts that aren’t New York, is mysterious and beautiful. And if I choose to extract what I find meaningful, good, and true—to warp the universe to fit my bubble—I can sustain within myself an “invincible summer”: where it’s always time to play ball.

Lisa J. Mogilanski ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Currier House.