the off season by catherine gilbert murdock

Instead, I was part of the art clique – taking extra art classes, spending my study halls and lunch periods working on my latest still life. Plus my high school didn’t even have a football team. I ran cross country and track, badly, but I have absolutely no skill whatsoever with ball or team sports. People sometimes ask if I played football in high school: no. (Read an New York Times article by Catherine and Liz.) Now, of course, she travels all over the world collecting stories and diseases, while I stay at home scowling over paint chips, and losing on purpose to my kids. My sister Liz, who is now a Very Famous Writer with a large stack of books, was my primary companion, even though she was extremely cautious – she wouldn’t even try to jump off the garage roof, which involved crouching right at the edge for ten minutes working up your nerve, and then checking each time you landed to see if you’d broken anything – and she learned early on that losing at games was easier in the long run than putting up with me losing.

Watching (or rather, “watching”) Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was quite the experience, because it’s hard to tell a flock of vicious crows from a field of very active static this might be why I still can’t stand horror movies, to this day. My sister claims we didn’t have a television, but we did, sometimes – only it was ancient, received exactly two channels, and had to be turned off after 45 minutes to cool down or else the screen would go all fuzzy. I grew up in small-town Connecticut, on a tiny farm with honeybees, two adventurous goats, and a mess of Christmas trees.

The off season by catherine gilbert murdock