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A number of years ago I had occasion to drive around the suburban neighborhood in which I grew up. Although things had changed enormously, true enough to Proust, some vivid memories were stirred up. There was a park just a block away from my apartment building, and I remembered the many times my father and I would go there to play baseball, during the years in which I played in Little League, when I was between 8 and 13. These were very nice memories of precious time with my father, and one feature of them stood out particularly vividly—his teaching me how to field ground balls. This had been one of those preconscious fragments that I had been aware of from time to time, but my visit stimulated me to dwell on the implications of that particular lesson.
Now the tricky thing about fielding grounders is this. Anyone in their right mind crouching down to try to grab a rapidly approaching, very hard ball traveling toward them across an uncertain terrain would turn his or her head away to keep from getting smashed in the face. But if you do that with most grounders, you are finished, because you can't see the ball well enough. My father taught me that I had to keep my face down, directly in front of the ball, so that I could move my glove quickly if it took a bad hop. I had to squelch the impulse to turn away. What would help me control that reflexive impulse was the belief that, ironically, turning away actually made it more likely that I would get hurt by cutting down my vision and, consequently, the mobility of my