When justice wears pig-tails.

My dad and I were sitting at his kitchen counter last year when he told me a story. When he was a boy, a group of neighborhood kids used to gather nearly every evening to play baseball in an empty church parking lot. Everybody brought what they had — a hand-me down glove, a dog-chewed baseball with the seams unravelling, a bat with a hairline crack — and the game often spilled over into the empty street in front of the church, where the occasional driver waited patiently until the play was finished before passing through.

In the group, there was a girl — let’s call her Patty — who was a powerful batter, but, in the words of my father, “couldn’t hit a ball in a straight line if her life depended on it.” If Patty had been a golfer, he said, 99% of her time would have been spent fishing her ball out of water hazards, so reliable was her slice. But, he said, “this girl was strong.”

One day, a newcomer arrived to join the game, bringing with him a brand-new baseball. Normally a new baseball (and a new kid) would be a welcome addition, but this kid immediately declared that only he could pitch with his new ball, and furthermore, that he would only pitch to the the batters he selected. And furthermore, to ward off the possibility that one of his new playmates might attempt to pocket his prized possession, he had written his name on the new ball.

“First and last names,” he announced, holding the ball up high for the other kids to see. “In case one of ya’ll has my same first name.”

This was such an egregious act, such an affront to the sensibilities of the group, that without discussing it, the other kids immediately and collectively vowed revenge.

With all the cunning of Don Corleone gathering the Five Families, one of the older boys got the comeuppance plot started. “Let Patty bat,” he said. “She’s just a girl and she’ll probably miss anyway. Let her have a turn and then we’ll use the old ball.”

“Aw, she’s just gonna strike out,” the other kids chimed in. “Patty misses every time.”

His tiny ego soothed by the recognition of his, and his ball’s, importance, the newcomer agreed that Patty could bat as long as he pitched.

“Sure,” Don Corleone said affably. “But you gotta move closer to her, ‘cause she’s just a girl. Patty,” he said, turning to point to a spot on the street in front of the church, “you stand right there.”

Meanwhile, the newcomer — determined to dazzle his new admirers with his pitching prowess — was warming up with a series of exuberant windmills. As the rest of the group watched, he pitched his shiny new baseball.

Patty didn’t hesitate.

Crack! The old bat with the hairline fracture met that shiny new baseball — complete with its owner’s name Magic Markered in big black letters — with all of Patty’s pig-tailed brute force behind it. Like an arrow released from Apollo’s quiver, the ball sailed along the exact trajectory it was expected to follow …. right through the stain-glassed windows of the church.

“We all scattered,” my dad said, laughing. “There was no doubt whose ball it was and who was going to get in trouble. He never played with us again. Hell, I don’t think we ever saw him again.”

Organized crime’s got nothing on a bunch of Florida scrappers.

There is something so satisfying about stories like that — the same satisfaction we get when the guy who’s avoiding the traffic jam by driving on the shoulder gets pulled over, or your jackass boss finally gets fired. Justice, hooray! There’s an innate human desire to see people get what we believe they deserve.

But life rarely works like that. Sometimes the bad guys win and the good guys suffer, and trying to understand why has confounded sentient beings since the dawn of time. We can blame God, we can scapegoat other people, we can conjure up the devil — but at the end of the day, here on Earth and in this life, “fair” is an ideal that doesn’t really exist.

“Even though we may long for vengeance and justice and people getting what we think they deserve,” David tells Beth in The Wisdom of the Olive Tree, “the Bible teaches us that those things are not ours to wish for. ‘An eye for an eye,’ after all, is a caution against seeking revenge, not a formula for how to do it. It’s a ceiling, not a floor—a reminder that justice is up to God, and our job is to forgive…. Remember what Desmond Tutu said, kiddo: without forgiveness, there is no tomorrow. And you deserve a tomorrow.”

Bishop Desmond Tutu certainly spoke from experience. Anger and resentment will eat us alive from the inside out and keep us from moving forward, and forgiveness doesn’t require that we excuse bad behavior in other people or in ourselves — it only requires acknowledging that the behavior hurt us, or others, and vowing to do what we can to create a better tomorrow. Then we have to let go.

Sounds easy, but forgiving and letting go can be incredibly difficult, especially when the behavior or hurt hasn’t been acknowledged. The trick is to realize that forgiveness doesn’t depend on an apology — they are two totally different things. So while you may never get the apology you deserve, forgiveness is available to you any time: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It’s also constantly renewable, which makes it perhaps the most important resource on Earth.

So while we may long for things to be fair, and justice to look the way we’d like, and smug little creeps with new baseballs to be brought down by pig-tailed Pattys, life generally doesn’t work that way. And Desmond Tutu was right: there’s no tomorrow without forgiveness. And we all deserve a tomorrow.

Pig-tailed and plotting revenge on my brother for pulling the head off my Barbie doll.