Whenever I hear the term “natural athlete,” I think of Cindy Adroushan. Cindy was the first natural athlete that I encountered as a boy, and she was as gifted as any I’ve seen since, so she’ll probably always be my mental image of a “natural.” She was amazing on the monkey bars. She had the timing and the strength to make it look easy. She’d often draw a crowd at recess. She took the notoriety in stride, but she didn’t always follow through and form or join a clique, so she was marginalized, naturally. She took that in stride as well.
Cindy’s brother Armen had been dodging bullies since first grade, but Cindy rarely had any such problem. She usually left straight for home at the bell, but her big brother was often the last to leave, fearing the persecutors that frequented the gates after school. Both Armen and Cindy were outsiders, but Cindy generally warded off trouble with her displays of strength and dexterity, and Cindy could be downright scary if the occasion called for it. Of course most girls prefer to hurt with words, the widely lauded virtues of sticks and stones notwithstanding, but Cindy didn’t seem to be easily hurt by words. Rumors did get out about her fear of fire, and kids would tease her about it, but Cindy wasn’t afraid of teasing; she was afraid of fire, and that fear could make her desperate enough to be dangerous; so most kids gave her plenty of room. She could be scary enough under normal circumstances.
One day at school, an aspiring queen bee named Christine, frustrated by Cindy’s apparent aloofness to humiliation, took to shoving Cindy when the opportunity arose. Cindy was not quick to push back, which is not to say that she would fail to strike. Later that day, Christine took to watching Cindy spin fortunes to herself with a cootie catcher. Christine watched Cindy obsessively from a distance, like a cat preparing to strike. After a short while, Christine and one of her minions approached Cindy and demanded the cootie catcher.
Cindy kept her face down to the cootie catcher and answered, “Sure, and I have a fortune for you too.”
Christine paused, and then she glanced at her minion and then back at Cindy. “It better be good!”
“It is!” Cindy answered with a smile, and opened the device to reveal a fat, black spider. She declared “cootie!,” and thrust the fortune forward, sending the spider hurtling toward Christine, who, frozen with fear, failed to move out of harm’s way. The spider landed on her sweater while she waved her hands frantically but impotently.
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Cindy stepped forward with a glowing expression of mock sympathy, brushed the spider off the girl, and advised her “you better go home and have your mommy check your panties.”
Word got around the schoolyard that it had been a black widow spider. Cindy never confirmed or denied the rumor. When she was asked about it, she would offer only a naive smile.
But fire was never very far away. It was everywhere; even in the light of the sun. Cindy learned this one day as she passed a pair of boys squatting over something. One of them had a magnifying glass. He held the lens inches above a spot on the ground where it produced a bright point of light on a small pile of dry grass. Cindy stopped to look at the light, and as soon as she had given her attention to it, a wisp of smoke wafted from the grass. She recognized it instantly, and she realized what it meant. The boys only had to concentrate the light of the sun with a hand-held lens to start a fire. The light of the sun wasn’t intense enough to catch the world on fire, but it was close. Just a little more daylight and the world would ignite.