…Mickey Mantle, he looked at me! And he spoke.
“What are you supposed to be?” he said. I froze. What was I supposed to say?
I coughed once “I’m Ariel,” I said.
“…Listen, I don’t sign baseballs for kids in yellow tights.”…He tossed my new perfect white baseball onto the floor…
The world should split in two. The world should split in two, and I should fall into the crack and never be heard from again.
Holling Hoodhood. Me. The boy in yellow tights with white feathers on his butt and a blue floral cape.
The boy Mickey Mantle wouldn’t sign a baseball for.1
You may be asking, “what kind of book are you reading?” One about a seventh-grade boy who is learning how to appreciate and analyze Shakespeare. Each chapter in The Wednesday Wars is structured like a short story. Each building upon dark things that befall Holling Hoodhood. However, by the end of each chapter, the light shines through.
December begins where Holling is coerced into playing the part of Ariel, a fairy, from Shakespeare’s Tempest. Hence, his ridicules outfit. On the very night that the play is showing, Holling’s number one favorite baseball star is taking autographs at a nearby sports emporium. Unable to change out of his fairy clothes and still have time to make it, Holling races to the sporting goods store. There, he is faced with embarrassment, insult, and injury, as you read. Holling goes on to say later, that, when gods die, they die hard.2 Hollings greatest hero was ripped from his heart and he stood, a 12-13 year old boy, in yellow tights with feathers on his butt. For a kid with low self-esteem, can it get much worse?
So, how does it end? Where’s the light after the darkness? It starts on the last Wednesday at school in December. All but two of Holling’s classmates left the classroom (that’s another story) and Mrs. Baker, Holling’s English teacher, gives the three boys brand new gloves and baseballs. Mrs. Baker’s brother-in-law owns the emporium and had arranged for the boys to get time to play with their new mitts. Mrs. Baker instructs the three boys to break in their new mitts in the school gym. Excited, they all make their way to the gym, expecting it to be empty. But:
The gym wasn’t empty.
Joe Pepitone and Horace Clarke were waiting for us in the bleachers. In their Yankee uniforms. Number 25 and Number 20. The two greatest players to put on Yankee pinstripes since Babe Ruth.3
The boys got the opportunity to break in the mitts with pro baseball players for the rest of their school day! Okay, I’ll admit, sometimes the things in The Wednesday Wars seem a tad far- fetched. Yet, they wouldn’t be at all believable if there wasn’t darkness looming over Hollings life for most of the chapter. Granted, in real life, we don’t get the far-fetched most times. Still, that’s the kind of phenomenon we want, right? And sometimes when the light pierces the darkness, it is so blindingly bright, that the far-fetched and unbelievable is true.
Rupert Anndelle
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
—John 1:4-5 (ESV)
1 Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2007), 91 & 92.
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