Betsy Joins a Team

Randall Nathan got word that his old friend, Jackson South, had died. Death always starts a person to thinking about themselves, their own mortality, their own identity. Randall began to wonder why he is an hermudgeon now, why he tries to avoid people. After all, he was a personable and popular pastor for fifty years. Well, he wasn't always popular, but he didn't avoid people. In fact, he sought them out, especially the ones no one else was seeking.

He decided that he is such an hermudgeon now because he no longer feels like he's part of a team. Pastors usually work alone, a staff of one, but Rev. Nathan always felt that he was on a team with all the other pastors, in different places, with different people, but working together to defeat the team of evil. In retirement he's lost that team identity.

Ben "Seymour" Bottoms, Sociology of Education professor at Cratchit State U, says that the reason teaching has the highest dropout rate of any profession is not because of stupid kids or mean parents or low salaries or moron administrators. They can survive those if they are part of a team. They don't survive if they don't feel like they're part of a team. They are like pastors, a staff of one in their classrooms. Those who survive, and even thrive, are the ones who feel that they are part of a team of teachers, who know that up and down the hall are others like themselves, alone but together, on the team of knowledge, fighting the team of ignorance.

So Randall Nathan is very pleased that his granddaughter, Betsy, or Elizabeth as she prefers to be known now that she is a teen, has joined a team at school. Being on a team helps a kid survive high school.

She is on the roller derby team. She wanted to be on the wing-walking team, because that is more ladylike, but she was drawn to Julie Wagler, the roller derby coach.

Julie married late in life, to Wally Wagler, the addictions counselor, who is going to baseball fantasy camp come spring training. Julie is the only roller derby queen to be thrice named MVP [Most Vandal-Like Player] of the Third Fifth Bank International United Divided Roller Derby League.

[Vince Pavlov, the owner of Third Fifth Bank, says he named it that because no one would buy a bank until after his/her third fifth.]

Julie Wagler's three Vlad statues sit prominently on a shelf in her classroom at Cratchit State, where she teaches kneeseology, the study of knees, when she is not practicing PT, physical terrorism, on patients at the CIA, Cratchit Institute of Awfulpuncture. She got a doctorate in PT after her career was over because she saw no reason, just because the roller derby league had defuncted because the financial crisis made Third Fifth Bank stop its sponsorship, to stop tearing people's limbs off.

She misses her roller derby years, though, the great contests against the Mississippi Marauaders, and the Rome Vladiators, and the California Proposition 49ers, and the Hoosier Hotshots, and the Assisi Assaisians, and the Cotswald Cut-throats. [The league used Albanian spelling for team names.] So she has agreed to be the roller derby coach at Betsy's high school.

Betsy borrowed her grandfather's old kneepads, [He doesn't do that much praying anymore], and went to her first RD practice last night. She is a beautiful and ladylike girl, but she came home convinced that there is something especially gratifying about pushing a 9th grade boy over a railing and hearing him scream. She thinks this will be good preparation for marriage.