Growing up in the '50s, the biggest joy of my life was throwing a ball. True, Easter was bountiful in candy; Christmas was full of toys; birthday parties were fun; and the tooth fairy always paid off, but that perfect pink rubber ball symbolized heavenly slices of childhood, and both of my parents knew it
Our front door looked dented and battle worn from hard rubber projectiles pounding its surface. My father’s ritual nap after work was constantly interrupted by mortar fire. Our ball playing broke windows, tore up the lawn, cheated serious injuies, and created lasting memories.
A month ago, while riding my bike for exercise, I had an unusual daydream that reminded me of how important a rubber ball could be. As I slowly drove through a plaza, my eyes caught an old brick wall with a perfectly drawn stickball batter’s box. Suddenly I imagined the batter’s box screaming at me, “Stop! Get off your bike! Play here! Practice! Fire your best pitch!”
I yelled, “I don’t have a ball!”
The box declared, “Your loss fella, not mine!”
The rest of that day I couldn’t think about anything else, except the most popular sport played during my childhood—baseball, in any form, including stooball and stickball.
As a younster, I had two choices as what to do with my time. I could go outside or I could go outside. Rain? Rainy days didn’t count. They were strange interludes in baseball limbo before we could take the field again. On rainy days, I played ball by seeing how close I could throw the ball up to the ceiling without hitting it until I exhausted my mother’s patience. In the bedroom I could play “All-Star Baseball” with players represented on cardboard disks. But I’d rather be playing ball outside because inside the house I felt like a baseball without a cork core, hallow and bounceless.
When I played stickball near my cousin John’s house, his ballpark was on the side of a factory building. If you blasted the ball on the roof of a distant factory, that was a Mickey Mantle home run. As soon as it was hit, the batter automatically yelled, “Going! Going! Gone!”
A Mickey Mantle home run was a joy to hit, but a small nightmare to retrieve Now we had to climb on the roof to retrieve our rubber Spalding. A collection of galvanized pipes, running from one building to the other, formed a makeshift “ladder.”
It was like climbing a fire escape with half the steps missing. Fortunately, workers never caught us. They were too busy working, and they always missed our death-defying aerobatics. We used every limb to reclaim our twenty-nine cent investment in fun.
There was that one time we used the back of the house as a backstop and my Aunt Frances warned us, “You’re going to break a window!”
We assured her that the ball never goes near the windows. Of course, we were
absolutely right about that. Wanting to hit a home run with my first at-bat, I slashed at the first pitched ball with all my might, and the wooden-broom-handle bat sailed through the kitchen window.
In disbelief Aunt Frances stuck her head through the shattered window and said, “I thought you couldn’t break a window!”
It was obvious that we had to focus on playing ball at my house for a long while.
Fortunately, I did have special parents.
To play stoopball properly, you needed parents who were enlightened enough to realize that it was “okay” in the long run, if their child periodically broke the amber bug light above the door, bent the scallops on it with erratic foul balls, and riddled the bottom of the door like a car crusher. It was “okay” if John and I wouldn’t allow cars to park near the house or across the street in front of the home run trees, while a game was in progress. It was “okay” to redirect traffic and parking on the block. Playing ball ruled.
We needed access to those trees because that’s where the home run balls were headed. The fielder, standing in the middle of the street, he had one chance to make a miracle catch by swiveling around, racing to the trees, and snatching the ball out of mid-air. These miracles occurred with the frequency of Brooklyn Dodger World Series victories; but when they happened, it felt as if we just had won the Golden Glove Award for fielding.
We knew that we were good at something: catching a little pink missile as it scrambled down through the maple leaves or hitting majestic home runs. And we never had any trouble with self-esteem. We didn’t need brown certificates of merit, blue ribbons of achievement or towering silver plated-trophies. We just needed a special moment in the sun and parents who understood the joys of youth.
That pink ball had magic. We just had to unleash it.
Our front door looked dented and battle worn from hard rubber projectiles pounding its surface. My father’s ritual nap after work was constantly interrupted by mortar fire. Our ball playing broke windows, tore up the lawn, cheated serious injuies, and created lasting memories.
A month ago, while riding my bike for exercise, I had an unusual daydream that reminded me of how important a rubber ball could be. As I slowly drove through a plaza, my eyes caught an old brick wall with a perfectly drawn stickball batter’s box. Suddenly I imagined the batter’s box screaming at me, “Stop! Get off your bike! Play here! Practice! Fire your best pitch!”
I yelled, “I don’t have a ball!”
The box declared, “Your loss fella, not mine!”
The rest of that day I couldn’t think about anything else, except the most popular sport played during my childhood—baseball, in any form, including stooball and stickball.
As a younster, I had two choices as what to do with my time. I could go outside or I could go outside. Rain? Rainy days didn’t count. They were strange interludes in baseball limbo before we could take the field again. On rainy days, I played ball by seeing how close I could throw the ball up to the ceiling without hitting it until I exhausted my mother’s patience. In the bedroom I could play “All-Star Baseball” with players represented on cardboard disks. But I’d rather be playing ball outside because inside the house I felt like a baseball without a cork core, hallow and bounceless.
When I played stickball near my cousin John’s house, his ballpark was on the side of a factory building. If you blasted the ball on the roof of a distant factory, that was a Mickey Mantle home run. As soon as it was hit, the batter automatically yelled, “Going! Going! Gone!”
A Mickey Mantle home run was a joy to hit, but a small nightmare to retrieve Now we had to climb on the roof to retrieve our rubber Spalding. A collection of galvanized pipes, running from one building to the other, formed a makeshift “ladder.”
It was like climbing a fire escape with half the steps missing. Fortunately, workers never caught us. They were too busy working, and they always missed our death-defying aerobatics. We used every limb to reclaim our twenty-nine cent investment in fun.
There was that one time we used the back of the house as a backstop and my Aunt Frances warned us, “You’re going to break a window!”
We assured her that the ball never goes near the windows. Of course, we were
absolutely right about that. Wanting to hit a home run with my first at-bat, I slashed at the first pitched ball with all my might, and the wooden-broom-handle bat sailed through the kitchen window.
In disbelief Aunt Frances stuck her head through the shattered window and said, “I thought you couldn’t break a window!”
It was obvious that we had to focus on playing ball at my house for a long while.
Fortunately, I did have special parents.
To play stoopball properly, you needed parents who were enlightened enough to realize that it was “okay” in the long run, if their child periodically broke the amber bug light above the door, bent the scallops on it with erratic foul balls, and riddled the bottom of the door like a car crusher. It was “okay” if John and I wouldn’t allow cars to park near the house or across the street in front of the home run trees, while a game was in progress. It was “okay” to redirect traffic and parking on the block. Playing ball ruled.
We needed access to those trees because that’s where the home run balls were headed. The fielder, standing in the middle of the street, he had one chance to make a miracle catch by swiveling around, racing to the trees, and snatching the ball out of mid-air. These miracles occurred with the frequency of Brooklyn Dodger World Series victories; but when they happened, it felt as if we just had won the Golden Glove Award for fielding.
We knew that we were good at something: catching a little pink missile as it scrambled down through the maple leaves or hitting majestic home runs. And we never had any trouble with self-esteem. We didn’t need brown certificates of merit, blue ribbons of achievement or towering silver plated-trophies. We just needed a special moment in the sun and parents who understood the joys of youth.
That pink ball had magic. We just had to unleash it.
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