Sessions

Scene 5: Childhood Memory and Parallel Recognition

4,319 words, 23 minutes read time.

Author’s note: The following is far too many words to be a WordPress blog entry, I realize. To keep the continuity of the work in progress, I maintained the length here for initial serial publication. Sessions was written as a novella, and I made the mistake of posting it chapter by chapter as if everyone else’s reading habits are different from my own. I prefer reading books on a book reader, and I like my blog reading to be short pieces that let me consume multiple stories in half an hour, rather than one or two long pieces like this one. I suggest scanning, like a scholar reads. It is a way to consume in less than 60 seconds.

————————————————————————————-

“Tell me about the first time you saw Mickey Stanley play,” Dr. Limbini said during their fifth session. Their relationship had shifted since the musical conversation the previous week—less formal assessment, more collaborative exploration. She’d spent the weekend thinking about his insights into authentic versus performed engagement, how they applied to her own struggles with academic authenticity.

Lester was quiet for a long moment, hands resting on his knees, eyes focused somewhere past her shoulder. When he spoke, his voice had changed—become younger somehow, more tentative. Dr. Limbini found herself leaning forward, recognizing that she was approaching something essential about how he’d learned to navigate the world.

“I was seven. Living with my grandma in her trailer—the first time, before the evictions started. She had this old Zenith television, black and white, with rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil. At night once in a while I could pick up the Ontario station that carried the Expos. And for some reason the picture came in when they played on the west coast.”

His hands began moving slightly, mapping invisible spaces. “I was supposed to be asleep by ten, but Grandma let me keep the TV on as long as I didn’t have the volume on. I didn’t have my own bedroom. Grandma needed the other bedroom for a sewing room. So I slept on the couch. She said it didn’t matter if the TV was on when the sound was off, even if it was a baseball game. She was right. Most of the time I would fall asleep right off and drift awake once in a while to see what the score was and who was batting and who was pitching.”

Dr. Limbini noticed how his posture had shifted—shoulders slightly forward, head tilted as if still listening for those distant signals. She found herself thinking about her own childhood in Pittsburgh, how she’d learned to find meaning in spaces her parents considered peripheral—reading in closets, writing stories in the basement, having conversations with herself that her family would have found incomprehensible.

“Most nights it was just classic television, but sometimes—maybe once a week—I’d find a baseball game. West Coast games are three hours behind, so they wouldn’t start until 10 PM here. I was a big fan of the A’s, but they were never on. Mostly the Dodgers and Giants, when the Expos played them. I got to see Maury Wills and Willie Mays play before they retired. And Roberto Clemente. He played for Pittsburgh. Thanks to Grandma. I remember the vertical and horizontal would go haywire, and I would get mad. At the TV. I would personify the TV. Like it was doing it on purpose. I would yell at it as if someone somewhere was supposed to listen to me. I never realized how selfish that sounds.”

Dr. Limbini smiled slightly, remembering her own childhood frustrations with inanimate objects that seemed to conspire against her curiosity. “Seven-year-olds aren’t known for their patience with technology.”

“Everything was different on those late-night games. During the day, when I’d catch Tigers games on the local channels, the players looked… I don’t know how to explain it. Workmanlike. Professional. But these West Coast games, especially when the Giants played, the Black players moved like they were dancing instead of working.”

“Willie Montanez at first base—smooth as honey, he’d do the splits to get to a throw ahead of the runner, then smoothly flick the ball back over to the second baseman to go around the horn while he hopped out of his stretch. It seemed to me there was little difference between watching his body play baseball and watching a dancer on Soul Train. Bobby Bonds in the outfield, the way he’d glide under a fly ball like he and the ball had agreed on where to meet.”

“And that was different from the white players?”

“I don’t know.” Lester shook his head to and fro, his eyes darting across and back and across again, like a manual typewriter typing a line and then returning. His eyes reading an unformed text. “It just seemed like the white guys were following instructions. A lot of them, anyway. I mean, when fielding the ball and running the bases. But I just don’t know how much of that is biased thinking based on what is presented to me. Just because I see athletic men playing baseball doesn’t mean I am seeing a credible demographic representation of the population when I am watching a game of baseball. Of course, a black player is going to seem more athletic because he looks different. I mean, when I saw a black third baseman, I would immediately say to myself, there aren’t a lot of black third basemen. It would make no difference when comparing athleticism, but I would expect the black to be better than the average white third baseman because he is black and there aren’t many black third basemen. I think that reveals bias. I don’t know. Sorry. I got off topic.” He paused. “Anyway, I was seven years old, sitting three feet from that fuzzy TV screen, trying to understand why these players made me feel something I’d never felt watching the Tigers. It took me years to figure out what I was seeing.”

Dr. Limbini found herself appreciating Lester’s intellectual honesty, his willingness to examine his own perceptual biases even while describing childhood experiences. It reminded her of her own graduate training, learning to recognize how theoretical frameworks shaped what she could see in clinical encounters.

“What were you seeing?”

“Bodies that belonged to themselves. Bodies that moved with their own rhythm instead of trying to match someone else’s rhythm.” His voice grew quieter. “I wasn’t seeing that around me. Everyone around me—grandma, the neighbors, the adults at school—they all moved like they were apologizing for taking up space. But these players moved like they had every right to be exactly where they were.”

Dr. Limbini felt a sharp recognition. Growing up as the daughter of a Pittsburgh financier, she’d been surrounded by people who moved with social confidence, but emotional authenticity had been scarce. She’d learned early that intellectual curiosity was welcomed only when it supported rather than questioned family assumptions about success and social position.

“And Mickey Stanley?”

“Tigers games were on Channel 3, sometimes 9, which had better reception. I just liked watching baseball. I liked to pay attention to the box score and the statistics and would always compare the players. I think the Tigers’ uniforms made them look stiffer than other teams’ uniforms. I don’t know. But the good players did seem to be black for the most part. And they just looked different and fluent when they played. Mickey Stanley played like a white guy. Him and Al Kaline. Kaline was my dad’s favorite, I remember. That is why I liked them. Their body movements were angular and the black guys’ movements were circular kinda. You know, like how one kind of people does karate and one culture does kung fu? One has linear movements, the other is more circular? I think the way the body expresses itself depends on how it is supposed to look more than how it really is. And with baseball I get to see the body express itself the way it is. It wasn’t just watching Stanley run and catch the ball. It was what he was doing. He read the fly off the bat, determined where it was coming down and about how much time he had to get there. He knew all of that before his body made its first movement toward the ball. So no matter what job I did, I tried to read what had to be done before I was told to do it.”

“What did you see when you watched Mickey Stanley do what he did?”

Lester thought for a moment. “Confidence, maybe. Or trust. Like he trusted his body to know what to do without his mind having to control every movement. When a ball was hit to center field, he didn’t run toward where it was—he ran toward where it would be. And he got there with this… this ease. Like the game was inviting him to the right spot instead of him having to force his way there.”

“That must have been powerful for a seven-year-old to see.”

“It was like watching someone speak a language I wanted to learn but didn’t know existed. I’d sit in front of that TV, trying to memorize how Stanley positioned his body before the pitch, how he read the ball off the bat, how he moved through space without seeming to hurry.”

Dr. Limbini found herself thinking about her own childhood models of intellectual competence—professors on television, authors whose books she’d discovered in the library, teachers who seemed to navigate ideas with the same kind of effortless anticipation Lester was describing in Mickey Stanley’s fielding.

Lester’s hands were moving again, tracing flight paths and fielding positions. “I would act like I was going back to catch a fly ball when I would put the dishes away.” He mimicked a baseball announcer, “And there’s a long drive. Deep center field. Stanley is back. He’s to the wall. He leaps. He’s got it! Oh, baby, what a catch! Once I dropped a plate and broke it. Grandma wasn’t happy. It was one of the few times she was unhappy with me. I was just a kid trying to imitate something I’d seen on TV. But over time, yeah. I got better at reading spaces, at positioning myself where I needed to be instead of where I happened to be.”

Dr. Limbini realized she was witnessing the origin story of Lester’s spatial intelligence—a seven-year-old boy learning to inhabit dignity by studying how certain bodies moved with confidence and grace. But she was also recognizing something about her own development—how she’d learned to navigate intellectual spaces by studying how certain minds moved through complex ideas with clarity and purpose.

“Tell me about your grandma during this time.”

Lester’s expression grew more complex, sadness mixing with affection. As he spoke, his hands began moving again, this time mimicking the precise, economical movements he’d described—reaching, placing, positioning with the fluid efficiency of a center fielder. “She was trying her best with a situation she never asked for. My mom had dumped me there when I was six—just showed up one day with a garbage bag of my clothes and said she couldn’t handle me anymore. Grandma took me in because what else was she going to do? But she was already in her sixties, on Social Security, living in a trailer.”

“What was that like for you?”

“Confusing. I knew I was a burden, but I didn’t know why. Grandma never said I was unwanted, but she never said I was wanted either. I was just… there. This extra person using up resources, taking up space in a space that was already too small.”

His voice became even younger. “I’d try to make myself smaller, quieter, less trouble. But I was seven—I had energy, I had questions, I needed attention. And every time I needed something, I could see this look cross her face. Not angry, exactly, but tired. Like she was calculating how much it cost to have me there.”

Dr. Limbini felt an unexpected tightness in her chest. Her own childhood had been materially privileged, but she recognized the emotional dynamic—the sense of being tolerated rather than genuinely welcomed, of learning to modulate her authentic needs to avoid exhausting the adults around her.

“That must have been frightening.”

“It was. But the baseball games were different. When I was sitting in front of that TV at one in the morning, watching Willie Montanez move like he owned first base, I felt… I felt like I understood something important about how bodies could be in the world. Like there was another way to exist besides taking up too much space or apologizing for being alive.”

“So baseball became a refuge?”

“Baseball became a teacher. Those players showed me that competence could look like confidence instead of apology, that excellence could be embodied rather than just performed for approval.”

Dr. Limbini thought about her own refuge in books and ideas, how intellectual engagement had provided what family relationships couldn’t—a sense that her curiosity and complexity were assets rather than problems to be managed.

“How long did you live with your grandma that first time?”

“About a year. Then her landlord raised the rent, and she couldn’t afford it with me there eating her food, using her electricity. We had to move to a cheaper place—a mobile home park on the other side of town. But that didn’t work out either. After six months, she couldn’t manage the payments even there.”

“Where did you go?”

“To live with my great-grandma. She was in her 80s and could barely take care of herself, let alone her handicapped daughter who was supposed to be taking care of me. It was supposed to be temporary, just until grandma figured something else out.”

Lester’s hands had stopped moving now, resting motionless on his knees. “Great-grandma lasted about three months before she said we had to go. I remember packing my things again—the same garbage bag, most of the same clothes. Grandma crying but trying not to let me see. She knew what was coming.”

“What was coming?”

“The end of us living together. She’d run out of relatives willing to take us both, run out of places she could afford. So she called my aunt in Saginaw—my dad’s sister—and asked if she’d take me. Just me.”

The silence that followed felt heavy with the weight of abandonment, of a seven-year-old boy learning that his existence was a problem other people had to solve. Dr. Limbini found herself thinking about different forms of childhood rejection—not economic, in her case, but emotional. The way her parents had supported her achievements while remaining fundamentally uninterested in her inner life.

“That was the last time I saw her,” Lester said quietly. “Grandma. My aunt picked me up on a Tuesday. Grandma hugged me goodbye, told me to be good, said she’d write letters. But she never did. I found out she died in a homeless shelter of a heart attack. Nobody said anything. Just walked around her and picked through her things for a couple hours until staff realized she was dead.”

Dr. Limbini felt something break open in her chest—not just professional empathy, but genuine grief for the child Lester had been and the woman who’d tried to care for him despite impossible circumstances. She thought about her own grandmother, who’d lived in comfort but emotional isolation, surrounded by family who performed care while remaining essentially absent.

“I’m so sorry, Lester.”

“She did her best. I know that now. But at the time, all I knew was that I kept getting passed around because nobody really wanted me. The only thing that felt stable was those late-night baseball games. Mickey Stanley was still gliding to center field whether I was living with grandma or great-grandma or whoever was next.”

“The players became a kind of constant.”

“Yeah. I guess. The way they moved. The way a pro baseball player moves while playing. It’s different than when amateurs play. It isn’t just repetition. There’s dignity in their movement. When everything else in life seemed disrupted. Constant disruption. Baseball is constant. There is the same game each generation. Just with different players. I can still remember how Willie Montanez looked fielding a ground ball, how Bobby Bonds ran the bases, how Mickey Stanley read fly balls. It was like having a library of possibilities for how a body could exist in the world with confidence.”

Dr. Limbini understood now why Lester’s identifications with these figures weren’t delusional but essential—they were the only models of embodied dignity available to a child who was being systematically taught that his existence was problematic. She thought about her own intellectual models, the authors and thinkers who’d shown her that complex inner life could be valuable rather than burdensome.

“You were learning how to inhabit your own body by studying how they inhabited theirs.”

“I guess. Sure. I mean, we have to have fun using our body. I don’t have to dance to feel like I am dancing. I never became a baseball player, obviously. But I learned something about spatial intelligence, about reading situations, about moving through the world with purpose instead of apology.”

“That seven-year-old boy watching those late-night games—he was learning to survive.”

“Hah! Learning that I could be Mickey Stanley too. Learning to size up where the ball was going to land and being there when it does. That even when you’re unwanted, you don’t have to move like you’re unwanted. You can move like Willie Montanez, like Mickey Stanley, like you belong exactly where you are.”

Dr. Limbini felt the session settling into territory that was both deeply personal and professionally significant. “Can I share something with you, Lester?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve been thinking about my own childhood since our conversation about authentic versus performed engagement. I grew up with every material advantage—private schools, tutors, family wealth that eliminated financial stress. But I spent most of my childhood feeling like I was too much—too curious, too intense, too interested in questions my family considered impractical.”

Lester nodded, recognizing something familiar.

“My parents supported my achievements, but they were fundamentally uninterested in my inner life. When I’d get excited about ideas or want to discuss something I’d read, I could see this look cross their faces—not angry, but tired. Like my intellectual complexity was an expensive hobby they were obligated to fund but didn’t really understand the point of.”

“So you learned to make yourself smaller too. Intellectually smaller.”

“Exactly. I learned to express curiosity in ways that seemed practical rather than excessive, to ask questions that led toward recognizable achievements rather than open-ended exploration.”

“But you had models of people who moved through ideas the way Mickey Stanley moved through center field?”

Dr. Limbini smiled, appreciating how quickly he grasped the parallel. “Yes. Professors on educational television, authors whose books I discovered in the library, teachers who seemed to navigate complexity with confidence rather than apology. They showed me that intellectual engagement could be embodied as competence rather than performed as compliance.”

“So we both learned dignity from studying how other people embodied excellence.”

“We both learned that authentic engagement was possible by watching people who moved through their respective worlds—physical or intellectual—with purpose and confidence.”

“The difference is, your models were socially acceptable. Mine were stolen moments of late-night television.”

“But maybe that made your learning more authentic. You weren’t studying approved examples of success—you were finding wisdom wherever you could access it.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a moment. Dr. Limbini realized she was sharing more of her personal history than she’d ever shared with a patient, but the conversation felt less like therapy than like genuine mutual recognition.

“Lester, what happened when you went to live with your aunt?”

“That’s where things got harder. Aunt Carol and Uncle Frank weren’t mean, exactly, but they made it clear I was a temporary arrangement they were doing out of family obligation. I had to earn my keep—cleaning, yard work, helping with their own kids. When I turned sixteen and got a job at a grocery store, they started charging me rent.”

“At sixteen?”

“Fifty dollars a month, plus I had to buy my own clothes and school supplies. They said it would teach me responsibility, prepare me for the real world.” Lester’s voice carried no bitterness, just factual description. “Maybe it did. But it also taught me that family relationships could be transactional rather than caring.”

“Did you see your siblings during this time?”

“Occasionally. Family reunions, holiday gatherings. But I was always the odd one out—the one who’d been passed around, who didn’t quite belong anywhere. My brothers and sister had stayed with mom and her various boyfriends, learned to navigate that chaos. I’d learned to survive through observation and adaptation. We’d become different kinds of people.”

“Do you still see them?”

“Once in a while. Maybe every few years. But being around them feels like trying to fit into clothes that don’t belong to me. We share DNA but not much else.”

Dr. Limbini thought about her own family relationships, how holiday gatherings felt like performances of connection rather than genuine encounters.

“When did you start drinking?”

“Early twenties. Working dead-end jobs, living in cheap apartments, trying to figure out how to build a life when you’ve never really seen how normal families work.” Lester’s hands began moving again, tracing patterns she couldn’t identify. “Alcohol made social situations easier, made small talk feel less impossible, made the gap between who I was and who I thought I should be seem less important.”

“But it created other problems.”

“Yeah. Couldn’t keep jobs when I was drinking regularly. Couldn’t maintain relationships, couldn’t pay rent consistently. Eventually ended up on the streets.”

“How long were you homeless?”

“On and off for about eight years. Sometimes I’d get sober, find work, get an apartment for a while. But I’d never learned how to build stable social connections, how to ask for help when I needed it, how to navigate workplace politics. Something would go wrong, I’d start drinking again, and I’d be back on the streets.”

“What was it like, living rough?”

“Terrifying at first. I wasn’t built for it—too small to fight for territory, too honest to run good scams, too proud to beg effectively. Had to learn completely different survival skills.”

“What kind of skills?”

“Reading danger, finding safe places to sleep, staying invisible when necessary, forming temporary alliances without getting too dependent on unstable people.” Lester looked directly at her. “And staying sober, eventually. Realized alcohol was making me more vulnerable rather than helping me cope.”

“When did you get sober?”

“About two years before I met Officer Wong. Just got tired of waking up in situations I couldn’t remember getting into, tired of making survival harder than it already was.”

“But you were still homeless.”

“Still homeless, but not drinking. Which meant I could think clearly, make better decisions about where to sleep and how to stay safe. Wong noticed that—that I wasn’t like a lot of the people he dealt with who were actively using. Well, that and he could see I was getting old.”

Dr. Limbini realized she was hearing about resilience developed through extreme adversity—not just survival, but the maintenance of intelligence and dignity under circumstances that would have broken many people.

“What kept you going during those years?”

“Books, mostly. Library was warm during the day, and I could read for hours without anyone bothering me. Philosophy, fiction, poetry—anything that helped me understand why human experience was so complicated, why some people seemed to navigate life easily while others struggled with everything.”

“You were conducting your own research into human nature.”

“I was trying to figure out what I’d missed, what other people seemed to know about how to live that I’d never learned.”

“And what did you discover?”

“That most people who looked like they had it figured out were just better at performing competence than I was. That authentic engagement with ideas and experiences was rarer than I’d thought. That maybe being on the outside gave me a better view of how things actually worked than being on the inside would have.”

As the session ended, Dr. Limbini found herself thinking about childhood resilience and adult authenticity, about the mysterious ways people find what they need to survive and eventually thrive despite systematic rejection and institutional failure.

“Same time next week?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Lester said, standing with that same economical movement she’d noticed from their first encounter. “Dr. Limbini? Thanks for understanding that my childhood wasn’t just something to recover from. Some of those experiences—watching Mickey Stanley, learning to read spaces and situations—they were the beginning of everything valuable I’ve learned since.”

After he left, she sat quietly for several minutes, thinking about privilege and rejection, about different forms of childhood trauma and different strategies for developing resilience. Her own wealthy background had protected her from economic insecurity but hadn’t prepared her for the emotional challenges of maintaining intellectual authenticity within institutional constraints.

Lester’s childhood abandonment had been devastating, but it had also forced him to develop forms of intelligence and adaptability that her more protected upbringing had never required. Both of them had learned to find models of excellence outside their immediate family systems, but his learning had been more hard-won and perhaps more genuine.

Walking to her car, she found herself thinking about the different ways children learn to survive and eventually flourish. Her path had involved educational privilege gradually transformed into authentic intellectual engagement. His had involved systematic rejection gradually transformed into embodied wisdom and creative self-sufficiency.

Maybe what made their therapeutic relationship work wasn’t that she had answers he needed, but that they’d both found ways to maintain authenticity despite institutional and family pressures that preferred compliance to creativity, performance to genuine engagement.

Their next session would explore his adult development further, but she already understood something essential: Lester’s story wasn’t one of recovery from mental illness but of intelligence developed through adversity, dignity maintained through rejection, meaning created through careful attention to how competent people moved through their respective worlds with confidence and purpose.

About “Sessions”

Dr. Clemita Limbini encounters Lester on a park bench during her lunch walk—a moment that transforms both their understanding of intelligence, authenticity, and institutional belonging.

Lester, recently unemployed from a family grocery store, demonstrates sophisticated environmental awareness and aesthetic intelligence that previous therapists dismissed as symptoms rather than recognizing as adaptive wisdom. His precise observations of river ecology and urban development reveal forms of embodied knowledge worthy of university research collaboration.

Dr. Limbini, daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh financier, faces professional isolation as her phenomenological research methods encounter academic skepticism and gender-based dismissal. Her growing recognition of Lester’s authentic competence parallels her own struggle to maintain intellectual integrity within constraining institutional expectations.

Through eight scenes of deepening collaboration, “Sessions” explores how meaning emerges through embodied engagement rather than abstract analysis. Their relationship evolves from therapeutic distance to mutual recognition as both characters discover that institutional outsiderness can create unexpected possibilities for authentic understanding and professional validation.

A novella about finding genuine competence in unexpected places.

Next Scene: Sessions V posts Wednesday/October 8, 2025