It’s spring, a poignant time of year for me, for it was one spring in my youth when I learned I was ... different from other kids.
Like many a young boy, once I became old enough I signed up for Little League baseball. Getting accepted isn’t hard. All you have to do is pass a cursory physical exam, administered in my case in a National Guard armory where scary posters looked down on the assembled 9-year-olds and told us if captured by a foreign enemy we only had to give our name, rank, and serial number. In that kind of portentous atmosphere, you had to figure that the doctors on call would do their jobs diligently, but somehow I slipped through the cracks.
