Baseball
There are many memories from my childhood that I value; the delicious smell that permeated from the kitchen when my mom made chex mix, the tree house in my back yard my dad built that set the scene for countless hours of pretend, my bright red bunk bed the filled my room, and too many others to list.
But one that is particularly meaningful to me now for whatever reason is the hours spend playing baseball with my buddy Eric. Why this memory is meaningful at this time I’m not exactly sure. It might be the changing leaves, the carefree nature that floats lazily around on the cool autumn breeze, or it might just be one of those things.
Eric was my best friend. His dad was in the air force and was conveniently stationed at Barksdale my third grade year. So his family moved in with his grandparents who lived two houses down from me. I can still remember driving home from school past his house and my mom telling me I should go make friends with Eric and his brother.
Unfortunately for me I was too shy to go play with them so it took a couple of weeks before fate brought us together. After that it would have taken a lot more to separate us. We spent every afternoon playing together, whether it was soccer, football, baseball, or DZ, a game we made up that is a story in its own.
So baseball…I don’t know how we got away with it. My neighborhood was far from spacious. Houses lined the sides of the street and driveways separated the front yards. Eric and I, his big brother Brian would occasionally accompany us, would get two gloves, a regular baseball, and my little aluminum bat and would go to the big pecan tree in my front yard. Then one would take batter and the other would run to the big oak tree in my neighbors yard.
This is where things got interesting. The selected batter would throw the ball up and attempt to hit the baseball to Saturn, completely disregarding any house windows or cars that lined the street. Usually the ball would fall fairly short of Saturn, and travel the 50 yards or so to the big oak tree where the chosen outfielder would be waiting.
Sometimes the ball would bounce off the tree, sometimes it would land with a loud thud on the roof of either my house or my neighbor’s, sometimes it would soar through the tree into the next neighbor’s yard, and sometimes it would just somehow avoid the bat and land on the ground.
We never once broke a window. Looking back I have trouble believing this. According to Murphy and his laws, two kids hitting a baseball around glass of any type should mean broken glass ten times out of ten. On the rare occasion that we would play while my neighbor’s car was parked in the front yard, we would sometimes send a screamer right into the side of the car, but would always miss the windows.
I can still remember some catches worthy of ESPN’s top ten, one in particular was a diving catch made by Eric right into a trash can full of leaves I had spent the morning raking up. Due to incredibleness of the catch, I didn’t mid picking up the leaves again after it fell over. Thinking back I should have written a letter to the trash can company complaining that their trash can couldn’t withstand a kid landing in it.
It might have just been us two, and it might have been dangerous, but it sure was fun. And the memories I have from it are priceless.
