I’m not sure that I should be telling you this. I am a tactile person. I somehow need to touch everything and sense it through my fingers. I’ve known this for a long time but never had the idea to just rip myself open and expose myself like this! That might perhaps be a bit dramatic. Maybe it’s not so sensational but I love theatrics.

Maybe I am dental too as I have determined substances by tapping them on my teeth since I was very young, or as long as I can remember anyway. I pick up an object and brush the dirt off of it, wonder what it might be and determine its largest number of components by tapping it on my front tooth (I only have one). If it is glass or ceramic I know it from the sound; if it is metal or ore I can sense that as well despite the difficulty in actually saying those two words out loud. I can feel the difference between leather and vinyl. If it is fecal matter I can….I’m just kidding.

It is the tactile rather than the dentine that I want to discuss here. I am like Captain Queeg. He had to have his steel marbles to roll around and I have to have my anything to fondle. It’s how I am.

A month ago as I left my car at 5:30am in order to catch a train to work, I discovered a lone baseball floating in the parking lot. It was undoubtedly a lost relic from the Orioles game the night before. A sad child with a lost batting practice relic? I don’t know but that seems to be a logical conclusion (amongst other possibilities). I picked the ball up and put it in my car where it remains. It remains for me to stroke. I do it often.

Long ago I gave up my avid interest in baseball. I still read the morning paper and know who the big stars are but no longer am able to endure a televised version and the local Orioles radio depiction is utterly unpalatable. I just check out the scores on the internet and that satisfies me.

Baseball intrigues me though. Not the game, the object. The ball that floated around the parking lot is a permanent fixture in my car. I caress it at every light. I feel its seams and imagine how to grip it to throw a certain pitch (I actually know how to grip a curve ball or a slider though I have no to utilize this knowledge).

What I do is grab the ball when I am at a red light and I cajole it, I fondle it and I flip it. Sometimes I grip it as if I was going to pitch and I toss it to my free hand inches away. Maybe my three inch pitch would have been a strike were it 66 ½ feet away and the batter unwitting to my feint; but probably not.

It is the tactile nature of holding the ball and its raised seams that intrigue me. There are no orbs that I will ever throw. Yet I get great satisfaction out of knowing that while waiting at a traffic light, I can roll my thumb over the seam or my index finger on the leather.

I’m a tactile person, I need to hold things in my hand and roll them or flip them or maneuver them any which way so that I can discern them. It is not just baseballs; it is any object that won’t get me into trouble. I just have to touch it or caress it.; I’m a tactile person, it’s that simple.