I grew up way Up North in Michigan, and snow was a major feature of my entire childhood. In a typical year, the first snow came around the beginning of November, and it was usually right around Thanksgiving that the snow stayed on the ground, and didn't melt away in the next day's sunlight. By Christmas, we typically had a foot or more on the ground, and all through January and February, the snow cover averaged around one-and-a-half to two feet. The sidewalks were little miniature canyons, and the piles of snow left after the streets were plowed often rendered the street invisible from the sidewalk, and vice-versa. One year (I think it was January of '71), we had a pair of freak lake-effect blizzards in the same week that dumped 42 inches on us, which, because of drifting, etc, necessitated digging tunnels to the entrances of the high school.
So, yeah. . . snow. Which meant that snow-fun, such as sledding, was a main staple of wintertime recreation (we also enjoyed skating; our town was a hotbed of speedskating in my childhood, in the aftermath of Terry McDermott's Olympic medals; nowadays, they're more into hockey).
When our family first moved Up North, in the fall of '63, I went to a 'rural' school, since we lived on the lakeshore, 7-8 miles out of town. The school grounds were expansive. There was a small, blacktopped 'playground' close to the school building, with the requisite four-square and hop-scotch courts painted onto the blacktop, the standard swingsets and monkey-bars. And there was a large, open field, surrounded by woods. The woods were actually on school property; somewhere 50 yards or so into the woods, there was a wire fence marking the limit of the school grounds. At the boundary between the large open field and the woods, there was a five-or-six-foot rise. So we would cross the field, climb a little ridge, and be in the woods. It's hard to convey how incredibly cool recess was at that school. . .
When the snow fell, the six-foot ridge was laboriously converted into a long row of ice-slides. At the first recess after a big snow, dozens of kids would run out across the field to the ridge, form little teams of 5-10 kids, and begin stomping up and down the ridge, packing the snow down, and ultimately polishing it into an icy glare. By the end of the day, there would be 10 or 15 icy chutes distributed along the ridge, and for the rest of the winter, we'd spend recess sliding down the ice-slides in every configuration we could think of - face-up, face-down, standing (surfing, if you will), two of us one-on-top-of-the-other, etc, etc, etc. It was pure wonderfulness.
Even on the blacktopped playground, kids would stomp back and forth, creating a 30-foot-long frozen slip-n-slide. So when recess came, we'd line up, get a running start, and slide on our bellies across the ice. Or, some of the baseball players would practice sliding into second base. We weren't supposed to slide standing up, but we always did, when we thought the playground-teacher wasn't looking. And every once in a while, somebody would slip and whack their head on the ice-covered blacktop, and win a trip to the school nurse, and a few punitive lost recesses. But, to my knowledge, no-one ever died, or suffered permanent brain damage (but hey, this was the early 60s; we still rode in the backs of pickup trucks, and seatbelts were just appearing for the first time).
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The best, most excellent sledding action to be found in our area was at a place called Manning Hill, which was maybe 15-20 miles west of town. I'm sure that Manning Hill has grown in my memory over the years, to where it is, by now, on a par with Pike's Peak. But I've been by Manning Hill in the last 10 years, and it's still a pretty impressive bump; maybe a couple hundred vertical feet from base to top. We'd pull off the main highway into a parking lot, grab our sleds and commence the long uphill trek to the top of the hill. On a good sledding day (a sunny day in the 20s, so the snow wouldn't get soft and slushy), there would be a hundred or more kids on Manning Hill. Roughly half of their parents would just bring a newspaper and sit in the car; the hardier half would accompany their kids up the hill, and occasionally grab a seat on a down-bound toboggan. My folks were generally of the climb-the-hill-with-the-kids persuasion, although they didn't slide downhill much.
In linear terms, the sledding run down the front of the hill was somewhere between a quarter-mile and a half-mile. If the snow was soft and fluffy, you might go most of the way down the run before you came to a stop. If it was hard and slick, you might make it all the way down to the parking lot; there was a steep upturn at the bottom of the hill, so no-one would ever end up sliding into the parking lot ('cuz, you know, that just wouldn't be good. . .) When your downhill run finally slid to a halt, you'd get up off your sled and begin the long trudge back to the top of the hill. You might spend 3-4 hours at Manning Hill, and make 10 or 12 downhill runs. Each run would last a minute or so; if you really managed to milk it, you might get two minutes of adrenaline rush. Then it would take 10 or 15 minutes to climb back to the top of the hill (it only seemed like two days).
There were toboggans, which were cool, because you could get four or five people on the same ride, and you were (generally) sitting upright. There were a few saucers (aluminum ones, not the plastic ones you see today). Some kids just brought an old cardboard box with 'em, and I was always impressed at how much fun there was to be had from a simple cardboard box sliding downhill.
But by far, the preferred sleds were the vaunted old Radio Flyers - the steel runners with a wooden-slat surface on which to ride, and the wooden cross-bar to steer with. The preferred configuration was to lie on your belly and steer with your hands, but some kids would sit upright and steer with their feet. And of course, tandem pairs of kids would lie one-on-top-of-the-other. The added weight meant you could go faster, but every bump and divot in the sliding surface meant that the kid on the bottom got the wind knocked out of him as the kid on top slammed down on him.
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One year, I think when I was in junior-high or high school, we had an absolutely perfect sledding day - it was bright and sunny, with temperatures in the upper 20s. So, as long as we stayed active, we weren't going to get frozen, and the snow would be hard, but the bright sun would make for a slick crust on the top of the snow surface. Oh, the sledding was fast that day. The first time I went down the hill, I flew. I felt like I was an airplane coming in for a landing as I zipped down the hill at half the speed of sound; I could feel the pressure waves building up in front of me, I was going so fast. I had to look far down the hill ahead of myself to plan my steering moves, and hope that no kids at the bottom of the hill decided to wander across the main sledding lane. I didn't come to rest until I rocked up onto the incline at the edge of the parking lot. It was incredible!
Our whole family was there, and my brother and I were quickly engaged in various contests and races. It was the greatest day of sledding in my whole life. I don't know how many hours were actually spent there, but I'd have been willing to keep going by starlight, if they'd let me.
At one point, in the later afternoon, my brother and I were standing on the top of the hill, catching our breath after our most-recent uphill trek, and preparing for our next high-speed descent. As we huffed and puffed, we looked around, taking in the scenery from the top of the hill, from whence we could see a surprising distance over the surrounding countryside. At one point, we were facing away from the front of the hill, where everybody was sledding, when we noticed, for the first time, the back side of the hill. It was steep at the top, just like the front, but about halfway down, the slope became more gradual, and it continued on for a long way - MUCH farther than we could go on the normal run on the front side. There were even a few sled-tracks running down the back side, so it wasn't like you couldn't sled back there.
My brother and I looked at each other, an unspoken 'You wanna?' passing between us. We didn't say a word, just set our sleds on the brow of the hill, pointing down the back run. This was gonna be cool. . .
We pushed off, and instantly, we were flying! My brother would pull ahead of me by a foot or so, then I'd catch back up and nudge ahead, and we just kept going. It was the most incredible run either of us had ever had. At some point, I was aware that, if we'd been on the front side of the hill, our run would be over, but we were still flying, the wind peeling our cheeks back, adrenaline still pumping through our veins.
Our speed dropped off, just a bit, as we continued onto the more gradual slope halfway down, but at that point, it became a contest just to see who could keep going the longest, and run the farthest down the hill, more than simply who could go the fastest. Even so, my brother and I were eyeing each other, one of us, and then the other, nudging ahead by a few inches as we continued downward.
After a certain point, I looked ahead, and saw a fence. When we were at the top of the hill, the fence had seemed ridiculously far away, that we could never go that far. But now, it seemed quite possible that the fence would come into play before our run was over. I looked along the fence, and saw a gap, maybe ten feet wide, with two large maple trees marking the edges of the gap. The fence went up to the maple tree on either side, and whoever had built the fence had decided not to fill in the gap with an extra ten feet of fencing. So I began to steer myself toward the gap in the fence, just in case I still had some speed left when I got there.
My brother saw what I was doing, and quickly ascertained that he should steer toward the gap, as well. And we continued sliding down the hill. We were still going fast enough, though, that our 'steering margin of error' was still pretty comparable to the width of the gap, and I began to get nervous as to whether I would be able to actually hit the gap or not. My brother's sled moved closer to mine, and we began to bump each other sideways with the realization that it was gonna be a pretty close thing for both of us to shoot the gap together.
Finally, we were in the last few yards, still moving at a rapid clip, and I smiled to myself as I realized that, yes, by golly, I was indeed going to hit the center of the gap. I sailed on through, between the two huge trees, and found myself cruising across virgin snow at the back of some farmer's field, and I only made it 20 or 30 yards into the field before I slid to a halt.
But where was my brother? I looked around, and then I saw him, lying face-up in the gap between the trees, but I couldn't see his sled. I grabbed the lanyard on my own sled, and trudged back to where he was laying. As I approached, he looked up at me.
"Are you OK?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"What happened?"
"I had to bail."
"Where's your sled?"
He rolled over, looking toward the tree that had been on the left side of the gap as we approached. There was his sled, a small dimple in the metal framework at the front of his sled.
"I was gonna hit the tree," he said, "so I had to bail. The sled hit the tree. I hope it still works."
We picked it up and gave it a quick inspection. It looked like it might be slightly bent, so we torqued on it, to try and un-bend it. Then we set it back upright. It seemed to sit flat on the surface, so we pronounced it OK.
Then, we turned and looked back toward the hill, which was much farther away than we'd ever seen it, having never been down the back side before. It was gonna be at least a half-hour trudge back to the top.
So, we adjusted our mittens and our stocking-hats, grabbed the lanyards to our sleds and began our wintry trek back up the hill.
"Coolest. . . run. . . ever. . ." my brother smiled.
"Yeah," I said, "and I won. . ."
Showing posts with label growing up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growing up. Show all posts
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
You Can't Go Home Again. . .
Okay, my friend Suldog has done it again (this is becoming quite a habit with him. . .); with his recent post (which was really a fairly old re-post), recalling the house he grew up in, he has provoked a whole set of reminiscences to bubble up from the back corners of my brain, and into his comment-space. Which, in its turn, has provoked me to write a more complete account for your enjoyment. Or, you know, whatever. . .
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When I was a young child, our family moved around quite a bit. Just sitting here keying this in, I can think of eight different houses that I lived in before I went away to college, six of them before I was ten years old. The house I was adopted into, in suburban Detroit; our first house Up North, which we only lived in for about a year, when I was four; then back to the Detroit 'burbs to start school, and yet another house in the same 'burb; then back Up North, to the house on the shore of Lake Huron. We lived there for about two years, and I can still conjure up a tear when I think about moving out of that house when my parents divorced. We moved to a house 'in town' for about a year, and then, when my dad remarried, we moved to another house closer to the edge of town, where we actually lived for seven years, virtually until I graduated high school. Then my parents moved to suburban Chicago virtually simultaneously with my graduation, so after that summer, I went back to Michigan for college, and my family commenced morphing into Chicago-ites (or whatever they're called); rooting for the Bears, the White Sox (ugh!), and (please God, no) the Bulls. It's funny - my family lived in that house in suburban Chicago for 35 years, but I never really 'lived there'. It's the last house Up North, where we only lived for about 7 years, that holds most of my memories. . .
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As I said, we moved there after my folks got married, just before I turned ten. That's where all the 'new-blended-family' drama played out, and where my two youngest brothers were born (okay, they were born in the hospital; we didn't live that far north; but that was the house they came home to). I was in 5th grade when we moved there, and we moved out less than two months before I graduated (I only consented to move to Chicago if my credits could be transferred back, and I could get an Up North High diploma) (I'm sure that my folks were really worried by my little ultimatum; at any rate, they found my terms acceptable). . .
Sometime when I was in junior high (I want to say it was '68, since my memories are intermingled with the Tigers' world championship, and twelve seems about right for how old I was), in order to leverage the available space in the house, Dad decided to turn a third of the basement into a deluxe, three-boy 'boy-cave' bedroom. Each of us had our own little 'niche', with a bed, a closet and a built-in desk-and-shelves all our own, so it was almost like we each had our own room, even though it was all contiguous open floor-space; it was quite cool.
The construction of the bedroom was also the occasion for a goodly bit of training for my brothers and me. We helped Dad frame in the walls, run the wiring, and hang the drywall, so by the time it was finished, those things weren't so daunting anymore. To this day, I don't mind doing a bit of electrical work, and I always think of constructing that bedroom whenever I have to do some.
Our yard was something like a quarter-acre, on the wooded dead-end of our street, a block from our closest neighbors. On a snowy day, the walk down our street was like something out of Currier & Ives. The house itself sat on the top of a little mound, with the basement open on one end to a walk-out. The back yard was pretty open, and we would often have our friends over for backyard whiffle-ball (in the summer) or football (in the fall) games.
In the corner of the yard, there was a mountain-ash tree, which produced delightfully-colorful orange berries in the fall, which the birds loved to eat (my brother and I, though, tended to fixate on what a pain those berries were to rake off the lawn, and the way they gave the birds the runs, which also involved more work for us). In the late fall, the berries, whether still on the tree, or fallen to the ground, would ferment. Which gave rise to the annual ritual of The Day of the Drunken Birds - the birds would gorge themselves on the fermented berries, and for that day (and maybe a day or two after), we'd have birds staggering and falling in the back yard, struggling to take flight, but not quite getting their wings to work properly. Or, if they did manage to take flight, they'd fly into the windows, or perform bizarre drunken aerobatics. Good, good times, those. . .
Truth to tell, though, 'wooded' is a little bit of a misleading adjective for the end of our street. Our yard was bounded on two sides by what could only be justly called a swamp (although, to be sure, there were plenty of trees). Many a baseball of ours became water-logged and useless for having been errantly thrown into the swamp, and found/retrieved only several days later (of course, we never really knew for sure that the baseball we pulled from the swamp was the one we'd most recently lost, or the one we'd lost six months ago). When I was in high school, Dad assigned my brother and me to drain the swamp. For a couple weeks that summer, we were out in the swamp with shovels, knee-deep in, um, swamp-goo, dredging a channel down to the main drainage ditch that ran along the street (okay, it was a dirt road, but it was inside the city limits, and for postal purposes, was designated as a 'street', so I'm going with that). It was nasty, smelly work, but once we'd met Dad's specifications, the swamp sho-nuff drained, and our errant baseballs landed on a floor of damp leaves, instead of eight inches of standing fetid water (and, you know, whatever else).
The standing water accounts for the mound that the house sat atop. Actually, the basement floor was maybe about a foot above the local water table, so the house was built basically as low as it could have been, and then the mound was back-filled around the foundation wall to leave it looking like the ranch house it was supposed to be. Not long after we moved there, we had a massive rain storm that left our basement filled with about a foot of water, destroying several boxes of 'important' papers (including my adoption order). Which was remedied, in large part, by opening the walk-out at the far end of the basement, and letting the water run out into the yard (and ultimately, the swamp).
That mound also made for some, uh, unique challenges for young drivers-in-training, as it required a subtle touch on the accelerator pedal to balance having enough power to climb the hill, but still go slow enough to safely guide the car into the garage, whose opening was roughly three inches wider than the land-yacht 9-passenger station wagon that was necessitated by the size of our family. The first time I drove the family vehicle, I left it so squirrelly-sideways inside the garage that my mom couldn't get it back out without peeling the trim-strip off the side of the car. Yeah, Dad was real pleased with me that day. . .
I've written elsewhere about some of our snow-bound winter adventures, living on a dead-end street, and what that meant for snow-shoveling duties. Especially the time we got 42 inches of snow in a week, and it became an open question as to whether we were strong enough (especially after a few hours' shoveling) to throw the snow to the top of the existing piles. . .
So it was with a degree of wistfulness that we left that house, with all its memories, and moved to metropolitan Chicago. Which could hardly have been a bigger cultural shock to us north-woods bumpkins. But that's another story, to be told (if at all) at another time. . .
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When our family moved to Chicago, my grandma continued to live Up North, so for a few years, I had a place to stay when the urge struck me to renew contact with my roots, and I stayed with her a few times for short visits. But not long after my ten-year high-school reunion, Grandma died, and it was a bit more of a chore to 'go back home'; and for several years, I didn't go back.
But when I got the invitation to my 20-year reunion, I was eager to go back and see the old hometown again. I booked a room at a motel by the shore, that had once-upon-a-time been one of my customers on my paper route; right next door was the local miniature-golf establishment, where I'd spent many happy summer hours in my youth (especially since it, too, was a paper-route customer, and when I'd go collecting, I'd have a big wad of cash in my pocket, which just seemed to call out to me that I should play a round or two of miniature golf). I went to the reunion and got reacquainted with several of my old friends (although there were twinges of sadness, to find that the football captain and the cheerleader, who had both been friends of mine, were in the midst of an acrimonious divorce, and seemed bent on using the reunion as a contest to see 'who-has-more-friends'; nice).
The day after the reunion, I decided to do some retrospective sight-seeing around my old hometown. The schools I'd gone to were still there. Well, except for two of them, which had been torn down, and there were green, grassy parks where they had once stood. One of the old ball fields I'd played on was overgrown, although the old chain-link fence marking its boundaries was still there, leaning askew, and rusting.
The downtown, which in my day had been a typically bustling commercial district (well, as 'bustling' as a town of 15,000 souls can conjure up), was almost completely given over to little shops catering to the tourist trade, selling T-shirts and baseball caps and coffee mugs emblazoned with the name of the town and maybe a deer, or a fish, or a lighthouse. All the 'real' stores had moved to the mall that had gone up at the edge of town a few years previously.
Then I drove over to the other edge of town, where our house had been, to see what it looked like.
For starters, it wasn't a dead-end street anymore, and it had neighbors. The swamp was gone, with new houses standing where it had been. There were houses next door, and behind it; and the woods to the side of our yard were thinned to the point where other houses were visible between what trees were left.
The mound our house had stood on had been removed, the foundation-wall standing exposed to the air. A new garage had been built, on the level of the basement, and what had been our garage had been converted into living space on the main floor. The back yard was fenced in, which it had never been in our day (what would have been the point?)
I got out of the car and stood, leaning against the car, surveying the house that I'd grown up in, and yet, so very different, both in itself, and in its surroundings, from the one I'd grown up in. As I stood there, the owner of the house came out onto the porch and asked if he could help me with anything. I explained that I'd grown up in his house, and was just recalling having lived there, once-upon-a-time, and I'd be moving along soon, if he didn't mind. It turned out that he was still the same guy who'd bought the house from my dad, and he asked if I'd like to come in and look around. I thanked him and told him that, if he didn't mind, I'd like that very much.
So I went in and had a look around. The main floor was still pretty much the way I'd remembered it, except for the new family room where the garage had been. I was especially eager to have a look in the basement, and the bedroom that my dad and my brothers and I had put so many hours into building. But when we went downstairs, there was no bedroom to be found; just a regular old basement, mostly used for storage and laundry, and 'utility-type' stuff like that.
I thanked him most graciously for affording me the opportunity to come in and have a look at my old house. Then I left and proceeded on my way back home, having been confronted most directly with the truth of what Thomas Wolfe had once said, that You Can't Go Home Again. . .
(*sigh*)
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When I was a young child, our family moved around quite a bit. Just sitting here keying this in, I can think of eight different houses that I lived in before I went away to college, six of them before I was ten years old. The house I was adopted into, in suburban Detroit; our first house Up North, which we only lived in for about a year, when I was four; then back to the Detroit 'burbs to start school, and yet another house in the same 'burb; then back Up North, to the house on the shore of Lake Huron. We lived there for about two years, and I can still conjure up a tear when I think about moving out of that house when my parents divorced. We moved to a house 'in town' for about a year, and then, when my dad remarried, we moved to another house closer to the edge of town, where we actually lived for seven years, virtually until I graduated high school. Then my parents moved to suburban Chicago virtually simultaneously with my graduation, so after that summer, I went back to Michigan for college, and my family commenced morphing into Chicago-ites (or whatever they're called); rooting for the Bears, the White Sox (ugh!), and (please God, no) the Bulls. It's funny - my family lived in that house in suburban Chicago for 35 years, but I never really 'lived there'. It's the last house Up North, where we only lived for about 7 years, that holds most of my memories. . .
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As I said, we moved there after my folks got married, just before I turned ten. That's where all the 'new-blended-family' drama played out, and where my two youngest brothers were born (okay, they were born in the hospital; we didn't live that far north; but that was the house they came home to). I was in 5th grade when we moved there, and we moved out less than two months before I graduated (I only consented to move to Chicago if my credits could be transferred back, and I could get an Up North High diploma) (I'm sure that my folks were really worried by my little ultimatum; at any rate, they found my terms acceptable). . .
Sometime when I was in junior high (I want to say it was '68, since my memories are intermingled with the Tigers' world championship, and twelve seems about right for how old I was), in order to leverage the available space in the house, Dad decided to turn a third of the basement into a deluxe, three-boy 'boy-cave' bedroom. Each of us had our own little 'niche', with a bed, a closet and a built-in desk-and-shelves all our own, so it was almost like we each had our own room, even though it was all contiguous open floor-space; it was quite cool.
The construction of the bedroom was also the occasion for a goodly bit of training for my brothers and me. We helped Dad frame in the walls, run the wiring, and hang the drywall, so by the time it was finished, those things weren't so daunting anymore. To this day, I don't mind doing a bit of electrical work, and I always think of constructing that bedroom whenever I have to do some.
Our yard was something like a quarter-acre, on the wooded dead-end of our street, a block from our closest neighbors. On a snowy day, the walk down our street was like something out of Currier & Ives. The house itself sat on the top of a little mound, with the basement open on one end to a walk-out. The back yard was pretty open, and we would often have our friends over for backyard whiffle-ball (in the summer) or football (in the fall) games.
In the corner of the yard, there was a mountain-ash tree, which produced delightfully-colorful orange berries in the fall, which the birds loved to eat (my brother and I, though, tended to fixate on what a pain those berries were to rake off the lawn, and the way they gave the birds the runs, which also involved more work for us). In the late fall, the berries, whether still on the tree, or fallen to the ground, would ferment. Which gave rise to the annual ritual of The Day of the Drunken Birds - the birds would gorge themselves on the fermented berries, and for that day (and maybe a day or two after), we'd have birds staggering and falling in the back yard, struggling to take flight, but not quite getting their wings to work properly. Or, if they did manage to take flight, they'd fly into the windows, or perform bizarre drunken aerobatics. Good, good times, those. . .
Truth to tell, though, 'wooded' is a little bit of a misleading adjective for the end of our street. Our yard was bounded on two sides by what could only be justly called a swamp (although, to be sure, there were plenty of trees). Many a baseball of ours became water-logged and useless for having been errantly thrown into the swamp, and found/retrieved only several days later (of course, we never really knew for sure that the baseball we pulled from the swamp was the one we'd most recently lost, or the one we'd lost six months ago). When I was in high school, Dad assigned my brother and me to drain the swamp. For a couple weeks that summer, we were out in the swamp with shovels, knee-deep in, um, swamp-goo, dredging a channel down to the main drainage ditch that ran along the street (okay, it was a dirt road, but it was inside the city limits, and for postal purposes, was designated as a 'street', so I'm going with that). It was nasty, smelly work, but once we'd met Dad's specifications, the swamp sho-nuff drained, and our errant baseballs landed on a floor of damp leaves, instead of eight inches of standing fetid water (and, you know, whatever else).
The standing water accounts for the mound that the house sat atop. Actually, the basement floor was maybe about a foot above the local water table, so the house was built basically as low as it could have been, and then the mound was back-filled around the foundation wall to leave it looking like the ranch house it was supposed to be. Not long after we moved there, we had a massive rain storm that left our basement filled with about a foot of water, destroying several boxes of 'important' papers (including my adoption order). Which was remedied, in large part, by opening the walk-out at the far end of the basement, and letting the water run out into the yard (and ultimately, the swamp).
That mound also made for some, uh, unique challenges for young drivers-in-training, as it required a subtle touch on the accelerator pedal to balance having enough power to climb the hill, but still go slow enough to safely guide the car into the garage, whose opening was roughly three inches wider than the land-yacht 9-passenger station wagon that was necessitated by the size of our family. The first time I drove the family vehicle, I left it so squirrelly-sideways inside the garage that my mom couldn't get it back out without peeling the trim-strip off the side of the car. Yeah, Dad was real pleased with me that day. . .
I've written elsewhere about some of our snow-bound winter adventures, living on a dead-end street, and what that meant for snow-shoveling duties. Especially the time we got 42 inches of snow in a week, and it became an open question as to whether we were strong enough (especially after a few hours' shoveling) to throw the snow to the top of the existing piles. . .
So it was with a degree of wistfulness that we left that house, with all its memories, and moved to metropolitan Chicago. Which could hardly have been a bigger cultural shock to us north-woods bumpkins. But that's another story, to be told (if at all) at another time. . .
-------------------------
When our family moved to Chicago, my grandma continued to live Up North, so for a few years, I had a place to stay when the urge struck me to renew contact with my roots, and I stayed with her a few times for short visits. But not long after my ten-year high-school reunion, Grandma died, and it was a bit more of a chore to 'go back home'; and for several years, I didn't go back.
But when I got the invitation to my 20-year reunion, I was eager to go back and see the old hometown again. I booked a room at a motel by the shore, that had once-upon-a-time been one of my customers on my paper route; right next door was the local miniature-golf establishment, where I'd spent many happy summer hours in my youth (especially since it, too, was a paper-route customer, and when I'd go collecting, I'd have a big wad of cash in my pocket, which just seemed to call out to me that I should play a round or two of miniature golf). I went to the reunion and got reacquainted with several of my old friends (although there were twinges of sadness, to find that the football captain and the cheerleader, who had both been friends of mine, were in the midst of an acrimonious divorce, and seemed bent on using the reunion as a contest to see 'who-has-more-friends'; nice).
The day after the reunion, I decided to do some retrospective sight-seeing around my old hometown. The schools I'd gone to were still there. Well, except for two of them, which had been torn down, and there were green, grassy parks where they had once stood. One of the old ball fields I'd played on was overgrown, although the old chain-link fence marking its boundaries was still there, leaning askew, and rusting.
The downtown, which in my day had been a typically bustling commercial district (well, as 'bustling' as a town of 15,000 souls can conjure up), was almost completely given over to little shops catering to the tourist trade, selling T-shirts and baseball caps and coffee mugs emblazoned with the name of the town and maybe a deer, or a fish, or a lighthouse. All the 'real' stores had moved to the mall that had gone up at the edge of town a few years previously.
Then I drove over to the other edge of town, where our house had been, to see what it looked like.
For starters, it wasn't a dead-end street anymore, and it had neighbors. The swamp was gone, with new houses standing where it had been. There were houses next door, and behind it; and the woods to the side of our yard were thinned to the point where other houses were visible between what trees were left.
The mound our house had stood on had been removed, the foundation-wall standing exposed to the air. A new garage had been built, on the level of the basement, and what had been our garage had been converted into living space on the main floor. The back yard was fenced in, which it had never been in our day (what would have been the point?)
I got out of the car and stood, leaning against the car, surveying the house that I'd grown up in, and yet, so very different, both in itself, and in its surroundings, from the one I'd grown up in. As I stood there, the owner of the house came out onto the porch and asked if he could help me with anything. I explained that I'd grown up in his house, and was just recalling having lived there, once-upon-a-time, and I'd be moving along soon, if he didn't mind. It turned out that he was still the same guy who'd bought the house from my dad, and he asked if I'd like to come in and look around. I thanked him and told him that, if he didn't mind, I'd like that very much.
So I went in and had a look around. The main floor was still pretty much the way I'd remembered it, except for the new family room where the garage had been. I was especially eager to have a look in the basement, and the bedroom that my dad and my brothers and I had put so many hours into building. But when we went downstairs, there was no bedroom to be found; just a regular old basement, mostly used for storage and laundry, and 'utility-type' stuff like that.
I thanked him most graciously for affording me the opportunity to come in and have a look at my old house. Then I left and proceeded on my way back home, having been confronted most directly with the truth of what Thomas Wolfe had once said, that You Can't Go Home Again. . .
(*sigh*)
Monday, July 19, 2010
Big Water
"By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the shining big sea water. . ." (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha)
I have lived virtually my whole life in the state of Michigan. And the dominant geographic feature of the state of Michigan is the Great Lakes. Michigan has shorelines on four of the five Great Lakes, and save only for Alaska, has more shoreline than any other state. In fact, there is no place in Michigan that's more than a two-hour drive from one of the Great Lakes (alas, I think these days I live pretty close to the point that is the farthest one can get from one of the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan. . .)
The lakes have featured large in my own young life. When my family moved Up North 'for good' in 1963, our house was about seven miles south of the city of Alpena, on the shores of Thunder Bay, which is part of Lake Huron. Which is to say that Lake Huron was our back yard. Which, for an 8-9-year-old boy, was a pretty good working model of heaven. Every day of the year, I could look out the back window, and see the big lake stretching to the horizon.
My favorite days were the breezy summer days with a clear blue sky, or maybe some puffy cotton-candy clouds, when the whitecaps stretched off to the blue horizon, and the onshore breeze blew in our faces. On other days, the sunlight and the clouds played on the water, turning it from deep blue to a softer blue-gray to a blue-green, or green color, the colors moving and shifting almost magically. On other days, we'd watch rain clouds out over the lake, their wispy fingers stretching down toward the water. Some days, especially in the spring and fall, when it was too cold to swim, we'd just stand on the shore and watch the freighters slowly travelling back and forth along the horizon.
All summer long, we could walk out our back door and be playing in the waves in minutes. Some days, we'd just wander up and down the shore in the shallow water, looking for interesting stones or dead crayfish. Others, we'd wade out to where the water was about chest-deep. Depending on the wind and water currents, we might ascend and descend multiple sandbars on the way out; it always seemed like magic when the water, which had been belly-button deep, was suddenly only knee-deep, even though you were further from the shore. Chest-deep was about where the waves would start to break. We'd just jump and float in the waves, letting them crash over us, or body-surf them, for hours on end. Prune-skin on our fingertips came to seem like the most natural state for us.
Even in the winter, it was fascinating to watch the ice formations as the lake slowly, progressively froze over. My brother and I liked to walk out on the ice (which was a good bit more dangerous than we realized at the time), playing games around the ice hills that formed as the ice buckled and shifted. One time, we just kept going out on the ice until we encountered a huge ridge in the ice. Climbing up to see what was on the other side of the ridge, we saw open water stretching to the horizon. Very cold open water, which made the ice even more slippery than usual, and for which we were ill-prepared. Turning for the first time to look back to the shore, we realized how very far from shore we were, and for the first time, understood how dangerous our situation was, and how very afraid it was appropriate for us to be. We stayed closer to shore after that.
We lived in that house for two years. When my parents divorced, Dad and us two boys moved to a house in town, and we no longer had the lake for our back yard. Even so, for the rest of the time that we lived in Alpena (virtually until I graduated high school), I could hop on my bike and be on the beach in five minutes. Needless to say, I spent many carefree summer hours on the beach, while we lived in Alpena. When I was in junior-high, I had a paper route that required me to be out delivering papers at 5AM; part of my route was along the shore, so during the summer months, I saw many a spectacular sunrise over the lake. . .
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So much of life in Michigan involves the Great Lakes, eventually. So much natural beauty here has the Lakes as its backdrop, be it Sleeping Bear Dunes in the northwest Lower Peninsula, the Pictured Rocks along the Lake Superior shore in the Upper Peninsula, Mackinac Island overlooking the strait (crossed by a majestic bridge) where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet, and on and on, from Grand Traverse Bay wine country (and yes, Michigan does have 'wine country') to the Keweenaw Peninsula at the far western end of the UP, spectacular lakeshore vistas are in almost embarrassing surplus here. Heck, even Niagara Falls has nothing but Great Lakes water flowing over it.
I once attended Mass at a church in Oscoda (on Lake Huron, about 45 miles south of Alpena), where the entire back wall of the church was glass, overlooking the lake. When I got in line to receive Communion, I realized that I'd hardly paid attention to any of the Mass, having been mentally lost among the whitecaps. When I had my 'conversion experience' in my high school years, it was at a summer camp on the Lake Michigan shore, near South Haven, which included a prayer service on the top of a 200-foot dune, watching the sun set into the lake. At the end of the week, I was baptized in Lake Michigan.
When I was in college, there was a guy in my dorm from Florida, and he took great delight in extolling the greatness of the ocean, and pooh-poohing our beloved Lakes. So one warm spring Saturday, a group of us 'kidnapped' him, tied him up with a pillowcase over his head, threw him into a car, and drove him over to a state park on Lake Michigan. Walking him down to the beach, we removed the pillowcase from his head, and showed him Lake Michigan, and the blue water stretching to the horizon. He acknowledged that indeed, standing on the beach, it looked just like the ocean (except for the lack of dead jellyfish, and the fact that you don't have to take a shower after you swim in it). Which was really the point we were trying to make in the first place. So we had a little beach party to celebrate his 'enlightenment'.
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Jen also grew up about five miles from Lake Huron (not quite as close as I did, but she could still get to the 'big water' with a not-terribly-rigorous bike ride), in Michigan's 'Thumb', north of Port Huron (here is where I mention my favorite tease of my mother-in-law, who doesn't pronounce 'Huron' as 'hyer-ahn', like most Michiganians, but homophonically with 'urine'; I have not been above asking her if the water at the southern end of the lake has a more yellowish hue). The first time Jen took me to meet her parents, we went down to the lakeshore, and I was struck that we were a couple hundred miles from where I grew up, but it was the same lake I'd grown up looking at. . .
My mom's (I'm talking about my 'stepmother' here) father had spent some time before he married, working on the lake boats, and he grew to love the Lakes. He bought a five-volume set of books on the history of the Great Lakes (one for each lake, dontchaknow; and those of us who live in these parts use the acronym HOMES as a mnemonic to help us remember the five Great Lakes). When he died, my mom inherited the Great Lakes set. Sometime in my 30s or so, I asked her (with a degree of fear and trembling) if I could have them; she looked at me long and hard before saying I could (so long as I kept them in the family, and never sold them), and to this day, they sit on my bookshelf, both reminding me of my grandfather, and teaching me more about the beautiful Big Water that has bounded my life. . .
I have lived virtually my whole life in the state of Michigan. And the dominant geographic feature of the state of Michigan is the Great Lakes. Michigan has shorelines on four of the five Great Lakes, and save only for Alaska, has more shoreline than any other state. In fact, there is no place in Michigan that's more than a two-hour drive from one of the Great Lakes (alas, I think these days I live pretty close to the point that is the farthest one can get from one of the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan. . .)
The lakes have featured large in my own young life. When my family moved Up North 'for good' in 1963, our house was about seven miles south of the city of Alpena, on the shores of Thunder Bay, which is part of Lake Huron. Which is to say that Lake Huron was our back yard. Which, for an 8-9-year-old boy, was a pretty good working model of heaven. Every day of the year, I could look out the back window, and see the big lake stretching to the horizon.
My favorite days were the breezy summer days with a clear blue sky, or maybe some puffy cotton-candy clouds, when the whitecaps stretched off to the blue horizon, and the onshore breeze blew in our faces. On other days, the sunlight and the clouds played on the water, turning it from deep blue to a softer blue-gray to a blue-green, or green color, the colors moving and shifting almost magically. On other days, we'd watch rain clouds out over the lake, their wispy fingers stretching down toward the water. Some days, especially in the spring and fall, when it was too cold to swim, we'd just stand on the shore and watch the freighters slowly travelling back and forth along the horizon.
All summer long, we could walk out our back door and be playing in the waves in minutes. Some days, we'd just wander up and down the shore in the shallow water, looking for interesting stones or dead crayfish. Others, we'd wade out to where the water was about chest-deep. Depending on the wind and water currents, we might ascend and descend multiple sandbars on the way out; it always seemed like magic when the water, which had been belly-button deep, was suddenly only knee-deep, even though you were further from the shore. Chest-deep was about where the waves would start to break. We'd just jump and float in the waves, letting them crash over us, or body-surf them, for hours on end. Prune-skin on our fingertips came to seem like the most natural state for us.
Even in the winter, it was fascinating to watch the ice formations as the lake slowly, progressively froze over. My brother and I liked to walk out on the ice (which was a good bit more dangerous than we realized at the time), playing games around the ice hills that formed as the ice buckled and shifted. One time, we just kept going out on the ice until we encountered a huge ridge in the ice. Climbing up to see what was on the other side of the ridge, we saw open water stretching to the horizon. Very cold open water, which made the ice even more slippery than usual, and for which we were ill-prepared. Turning for the first time to look back to the shore, we realized how very far from shore we were, and for the first time, understood how dangerous our situation was, and how very afraid it was appropriate for us to be. We stayed closer to shore after that.
We lived in that house for two years. When my parents divorced, Dad and us two boys moved to a house in town, and we no longer had the lake for our back yard. Even so, for the rest of the time that we lived in Alpena (virtually until I graduated high school), I could hop on my bike and be on the beach in five minutes. Needless to say, I spent many carefree summer hours on the beach, while we lived in Alpena. When I was in junior-high, I had a paper route that required me to be out delivering papers at 5AM; part of my route was along the shore, so during the summer months, I saw many a spectacular sunrise over the lake. . .
-------------------------
So much of life in Michigan involves the Great Lakes, eventually. So much natural beauty here has the Lakes as its backdrop, be it Sleeping Bear Dunes in the northwest Lower Peninsula, the Pictured Rocks along the Lake Superior shore in the Upper Peninsula, Mackinac Island overlooking the strait (crossed by a majestic bridge) where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet, and on and on, from Grand Traverse Bay wine country (and yes, Michigan does have 'wine country') to the Keweenaw Peninsula at the far western end of the UP, spectacular lakeshore vistas are in almost embarrassing surplus here. Heck, even Niagara Falls has nothing but Great Lakes water flowing over it.
I once attended Mass at a church in Oscoda (on Lake Huron, about 45 miles south of Alpena), where the entire back wall of the church was glass, overlooking the lake. When I got in line to receive Communion, I realized that I'd hardly paid attention to any of the Mass, having been mentally lost among the whitecaps. When I had my 'conversion experience' in my high school years, it was at a summer camp on the Lake Michigan shore, near South Haven, which included a prayer service on the top of a 200-foot dune, watching the sun set into the lake. At the end of the week, I was baptized in Lake Michigan.
When I was in college, there was a guy in my dorm from Florida, and he took great delight in extolling the greatness of the ocean, and pooh-poohing our beloved Lakes. So one warm spring Saturday, a group of us 'kidnapped' him, tied him up with a pillowcase over his head, threw him into a car, and drove him over to a state park on Lake Michigan. Walking him down to the beach, we removed the pillowcase from his head, and showed him Lake Michigan, and the blue water stretching to the horizon. He acknowledged that indeed, standing on the beach, it looked just like the ocean (except for the lack of dead jellyfish, and the fact that you don't have to take a shower after you swim in it). Which was really the point we were trying to make in the first place. So we had a little beach party to celebrate his 'enlightenment'.
-------------------------
Jen also grew up about five miles from Lake Huron (not quite as close as I did, but she could still get to the 'big water' with a not-terribly-rigorous bike ride), in Michigan's 'Thumb', north of Port Huron (here is where I mention my favorite tease of my mother-in-law, who doesn't pronounce 'Huron' as 'hyer-ahn', like most Michiganians, but homophonically with 'urine'; I have not been above asking her if the water at the southern end of the lake has a more yellowish hue). The first time Jen took me to meet her parents, we went down to the lakeshore, and I was struck that we were a couple hundred miles from where I grew up, but it was the same lake I'd grown up looking at. . .
My mom's (I'm talking about my 'stepmother' here) father had spent some time before he married, working on the lake boats, and he grew to love the Lakes. He bought a five-volume set of books on the history of the Great Lakes (one for each lake, dontchaknow; and those of us who live in these parts use the acronym HOMES as a mnemonic to help us remember the five Great Lakes). When he died, my mom inherited the Great Lakes set. Sometime in my 30s or so, I asked her (with a degree of fear and trembling) if I could have them; she looked at me long and hard before saying I could (so long as I kept them in the family, and never sold them), and to this day, they sit on my bookshelf, both reminding me of my grandfather, and teaching me more about the beautiful Big Water that has bounded my life. . .
Sunrise over Georgian Bay, in Ontario; taken from the back porch of our vacation cottage in 1985Thursday, July 1, 2010
My Life With Baseball
In recent months, I've made the acquaintance of one Mr. Suldog, a blogger of sterling reputation, who shares with me a love for baseball/softball (something that none of my other blog-friends have particularly shared with me before now). Often, when I read his posts, I am reminded of my own experiences on the diamond, of which I have not written before. Then, a little while ago, my dear friend Lime posted about her own baseball experiences, and I knew the time had come. . .
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My family first moved to Alpena in 1960, when I was four years old. We only stayed about a year, before moving back to the 'downriver' suburbs of Detroit. In 1963 - in fact, the weekend following President Kennedy's death - we moved back Up North, and this time, we stayed almost ten years, just shy of my high school graduation. I loved living in Alpena. Most especially because it sits on the shore of Lake Huron, and every summer, for as long as we lived there, I could be in the Big Water for the price of a five-minute bike ride (there was a period of a couple years, before my parents were divorced, when Lake Huron was our back yard; and that was a pretty good working model of Heaven).
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Alpena was also a baseball town. I'm not sure exactly what-all goes into making a town a Baseball Town, but Alpena was one. Our Little League team challenged every year for the state championship, which is a pretty good feat for a town of 15,000 or so souls (including all of Alpena County, the population is something like 30,000), and one year, when a kid named Lowell (he'll appear again later) was a 12-year-old, they came within a single game of playing in the Little League World Series. I went to high school with a guy who went to college on a baseball scholarship (his college team would play against the team from my school, and I'd always go down to the field to say Hi), and eventually made it to the major leagues, playing three seasons with the Cubs and Indians.
Besides the lake, summers in Alpena were marked by roving bands of boys gathering at various vacant lots around town for pickup baseball games. We'd call each other up, or just knock on each other's doors, and meet at whichever field we decided to play at that day. If we had 16 or 18 kids, we'd just choose up two full teams and play. If we didn't have a full complement of players, we had various ways of covering the shortage. Maybe the hitting team would provide the catcher, but we didn't prefer that, because it seemed to compromise the integrity of a possible close play at home. Sometimes, we'd play without a right-fielder, and if the batter hit the ball to right, it just counted as a foul ball. If we only had twelve kids or so, we'd play a game we called 'Work-Up' - nine kids would take positions in the field, and the rest would hit. When the hitter made an out, he had to go play in the field, and the other fielders would 'work their way up' - the outfielders would rotate counter-clockwise (right-center-left); the left-fielder would move to third, and the infielders would rotate clockwise (3rd-short-2nd-1st); the first-baseman went to pitch, the pitcher went in to catch, and the catcher became one of the hitters. It was a great way to play, especially for kids, since you got to play a new position every few minutes, getting progressively closer to the action; and once you got in to hit, you could stay there as long as you didn't make outs.
Summer evenings (a couple of 'em every week, at any rate) were for 'organized' games. In the early spring, there would be try-outs, and hundreds of kids would gather at the fair grounds to throw and catch and hit, under the watchful eyes of the various and sundry coaches, who would take notes on what they saw, and then hold a draft to assign players to teams.
The Little League played in two divisions, designated 'minor' and 'major', analogously to the professional leagues - the 'minors' were mostly 8-10 year-olds, although if a kid hadn't made the 'majors' by the time he was ten, he might not get selected by a 'major' team when he was 11 or 12, since the coaches preferred to develop younger players. That was the fate that befell me. As a young kid, I was pretty much a sedentary nerd. I didn't even play when I was eight; when I was nine, my dad basically told me I was gonna play, whether I wanted to or not. That year, I was pretty much like the kid in the Peter, Paul & Mary song 'Right Field', "watching the dandelions grow", except the ball never accidentally landed in my glove. I don't remember if I ever got a hit that year, or not.
When I was ten, my dad remarried after his divorce, and I acquired a step-brother who was pretty much a complete jock. So I got more into baseball, and sports in general. And that summer, my skill level increased pretty dramatically. By the time I was eleven, I was That Kid - the Oversized Hormone Case that made the other kids' moms cry, and their dads demand to see my birth certificate. I probably should have been on a 'major' team, but none of the coaches knew who I was, and besides, they preferred for their 'rookies' to be younger, so I stayed in the 'minors' to terrorize young, un-coordinated kids. And the same when I was twelve. I hit a bunch of home runs on balls I didn't even hit that well.
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There was one coach in the 'minors' who seemed to take particular delight in agitating me, perhaps because I was the biggest kid in the league, and his was one of the better teams in the league, and we ended up competing for the 'minor division' championship. He always demanded to see my birth certificate, and even half-heartedly accused my dad of doctoring it once (although why my dad would doctor my birth certificate for me to play in the 'minors' never quite made sense). And whenever I came to bat, he would have a few needling remarks, to try and get under my skin, I guess. I tried to ignore it, and just play the games, but after a while, it kinda pissed me off.
He had a pitcher who was probably the best pitcher in our league, another 12-year-old who probably should have been in the 'majors', but had gotten good too late. The kid could throw hard, especially for a 'minor-league' pitcher, and most of the kids in our league had a hard time getting around on him. So, we were playing this team, and he was pitching. The first time I came to bat, the coach was up to his usual games, making little needling remarks almost under his breath, but loud enough that I could hear him. The pitcher was extra cranked-up, trying to get me out, and he was throwing even harder than usual. His first pitch, I was really late getting around on, but I hit it square, sending a screaming line drive into their dugout. The poor coach never saw it coming; it hit him square on the nose, breaking it, and splattering blood all over his face. He ended up having to leave the game, which we ended up winning, when I got around for a home run off their ace pitcher.
The next time we played their team, the coach actually accused me of having broken his nose on purpose. I wish I was that good, but not many twelve-year-olds are quite adept enough with a baseball bat to put a line drive on somebody's nose when they feel like it. Which isn't to say that I didn't feel like it. . .
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When I turned 13, I moved up to the Babe Ruth League, for 13-15-year-olds. There were no 'divisions', so I was playing with and against kids who had been in the 'major' division (mostly those kids, since fewer of the 'minor' players were motivated to move up to the next level). As a 13-year-old, I was a 'rookie' again, playing against kids my own age and older. But I was still 'Big for My Age', so some of the disadvantage of being young was mitigated by also being big.
One of my first games in the Babe Ruth League, the pitcher for our opponents was Lowell, the kid I mentioned above who had led his Little League team to within a game of the World Series. At 15, he was still something of a local legend for the speed with which he could throw a baseball. Had someone put a radar gun on one of his pitches, I have no idea what it would have said; as far as I was concerned, it was just 'Faster Than Hell'. Lowell was fast, but he was almost as wild as he was fast (rather like a young Nolan Ryan, maybe). In fact, the first time I stepped in to face him, he drilled me right square in my left ass-cheek. Which didn't hurt as bad as it might have, had another part of my body received the blow, but it still hurt plenty. And it also planted in my brain the idea that Lowell was not a guy you could really dig in against (the self-preservation instinct being what it is).
So the next time I stepped in against Lowell, I was considerably lighter on my toes (and readier to get the hell out of there, if need be) than I had been previously. He threw me five pitches, each of which was past me before I could hope to swing at it. Two of his pitches were strikes, and three were balls, and I couldn't muster up a swing at any of them. The outfielders, sensing the extent of my out-classed-ness, all moved in by several steps, until they were only a few steps beyond the infield dirt. As I awaited the full-count pitch, my butt was reminding me of how my previous turn at bat had ended. Lowell went into his windup, and he threw the fateful pitch, as I tensed up.
Then suddenly, I saw it. For some reason known only to God and Lowell, his full-count pitch was a change-up, right down the middle of the plate. Perhaps he was just being overly cautious, not wanting to risk walking a fat 13-year-old who couldn't hope to hit him anyway; I don't know. But I do know that my eyes got real big, and the thought flashed through my mind, "Hey! I can hit this!" So I swung, as hard as I could. And I crushed it.
Those of you who have ever played baseball, if you've ever really crushed a ball, you know that that sweet, smooth feeling that passes from the bat into your hands when you hit the ball really, really well is just one of the coolest things you ever experience in a baseball game. And right along with it, is to see the outfielder freeze in his tracks as the ball takes off like a rocket over his head, and then to see him turn his back to the infield and just run like a bat out of hell after the ball you've just hit. Yeah, that's just what it was like. Alas, I was still a slow 13-year-old, so even though the ball bounced off the center-field fence, I could only manage a double out of it. But I had crushed a ball off the mighty Lowell!
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Another feature of life in the Babe Ruth League was night games. There were fewer available full-size fields, and so there would be two games each night, the second one being played under the lights.
Now, the lights on our field had an interesting feature, in that all of the lights were aimed down, toward the field. Which is to say, none of them were pointed upward, to even the smallest degree. So that, when the batter hit a fly ball, the ball itself was in the lights for the first 50 or so vertical feet of its flight, and then again, when it came back down. So, being an outfielder, I got pretty adept at judging the flight of the ball from the first, visible part of its trajectory; I would run to where my visual/mental calculations told me the ball was headed, then look up into the black sky for a gray dot descending out of the darkness. Then, when the ball descended back into the lights, I could catch it, and proceed normally.
I got better as I went along in Babe Ruth League play. I was never one of the league's all-stars, but I didn't embarrass myself. Except once. I usually played one of the corner outfield positions - right or left field, most often right. Twice, I threw out a batter at first from right field. The first was a guy who was one of the league's better players; he could hit the heck out of the ball, but was pathetically slow. He smoked the ball straight at me; I fielded it on one hop, and seeing that he wasn't even halfway to first yet, I threw the ball in and got the force-out at first. Pretty cool.
The other one was the last game of my 15-year-old season. A pudgy little 13-year-old came up to bat; we pulled all our fielders way in. The kid swung late on the pitch, and it cleared the drawn-in infielders. It rolled to me, and without even thinking, since I was practically an infielder where I was playing, I picked it up and threw the kid out. I didn't think much about it until after the game, when we were in the handshake line, their coach took me aside and said, "I know you didn't mean anything by it, but that would've been his only hit this year." Which made me feel like the world's biggest jerk.
When I was 15, I got one of my first looks at a curve-ball. Fortunately for me, it was another 13-year-old, who didn't throw particularly hard, but he could throw this big bender that got a lot of the hitters off-balance. I recall facing him for the first time, and he threw this big roundhouse curve to me that came in big and slow, with a big neon-flashing "Hit Me" sign. As I saw it coming, I remember thinking to myself, "this must be what a hung curve-ball looks like; I can see why people talk about crushing them." So I did. By then, I was 15, and pretty close to my full adult dimensions. The field we were playing on that day didn't have a fence. There was a drainage ditch that ran along the side of the road beyond the outfield, maybe 150 yards or so from home plate; the ball cratered itself into the mud by the edge of the ditch.
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When I was 16, I went out for the high school team, and I made the JV squad. But I didn't play very much. By now, I was playing against guys who were also in their full adult bodies, so the advantage I'd had when I was younger was gone. I was regularly hitting against guys who could throw harder than I could get around on. Which was bad enough, but most of the pitchers also had real curve-balls, too; not the big round-houses that I'd seen before. I vividly remember stepping in against one of the better pitchers we'd face all year, and he threw me two fastballs that I heard more than saw. And then, ahead of me two strikes in the count, his next pitch came blazing right straight for the ear-hole of my helmet. I couldn't get myself out of the batter's box fast enough, and as I fell backwards, I saw the ball break sharply, crossing right across the heart of the plate. The umpire bellowed and punched me out, and I walked back to the dugout with the sure knowledge that I'd gone as far as I was gonna go as a baseball player. . .
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My family first moved to Alpena in 1960, when I was four years old. We only stayed about a year, before moving back to the 'downriver' suburbs of Detroit. In 1963 - in fact, the weekend following President Kennedy's death - we moved back Up North, and this time, we stayed almost ten years, just shy of my high school graduation. I loved living in Alpena. Most especially because it sits on the shore of Lake Huron, and every summer, for as long as we lived there, I could be in the Big Water for the price of a five-minute bike ride (there was a period of a couple years, before my parents were divorced, when Lake Huron was our back yard; and that was a pretty good working model of Heaven).
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Alpena was also a baseball town. I'm not sure exactly what-all goes into making a town a Baseball Town, but Alpena was one. Our Little League team challenged every year for the state championship, which is a pretty good feat for a town of 15,000 or so souls (including all of Alpena County, the population is something like 30,000), and one year, when a kid named Lowell (he'll appear again later) was a 12-year-old, they came within a single game of playing in the Little League World Series. I went to high school with a guy who went to college on a baseball scholarship (his college team would play against the team from my school, and I'd always go down to the field to say Hi), and eventually made it to the major leagues, playing three seasons with the Cubs and Indians.
Besides the lake, summers in Alpena were marked by roving bands of boys gathering at various vacant lots around town for pickup baseball games. We'd call each other up, or just knock on each other's doors, and meet at whichever field we decided to play at that day. If we had 16 or 18 kids, we'd just choose up two full teams and play. If we didn't have a full complement of players, we had various ways of covering the shortage. Maybe the hitting team would provide the catcher, but we didn't prefer that, because it seemed to compromise the integrity of a possible close play at home. Sometimes, we'd play without a right-fielder, and if the batter hit the ball to right, it just counted as a foul ball. If we only had twelve kids or so, we'd play a game we called 'Work-Up' - nine kids would take positions in the field, and the rest would hit. When the hitter made an out, he had to go play in the field, and the other fielders would 'work their way up' - the outfielders would rotate counter-clockwise (right-center-left); the left-fielder would move to third, and the infielders would rotate clockwise (3rd-short-2nd-1st); the first-baseman went to pitch, the pitcher went in to catch, and the catcher became one of the hitters. It was a great way to play, especially for kids, since you got to play a new position every few minutes, getting progressively closer to the action; and once you got in to hit, you could stay there as long as you didn't make outs.
Summer evenings (a couple of 'em every week, at any rate) were for 'organized' games. In the early spring, there would be try-outs, and hundreds of kids would gather at the fair grounds to throw and catch and hit, under the watchful eyes of the various and sundry coaches, who would take notes on what they saw, and then hold a draft to assign players to teams.
The Little League played in two divisions, designated 'minor' and 'major', analogously to the professional leagues - the 'minors' were mostly 8-10 year-olds, although if a kid hadn't made the 'majors' by the time he was ten, he might not get selected by a 'major' team when he was 11 or 12, since the coaches preferred to develop younger players. That was the fate that befell me. As a young kid, I was pretty much a sedentary nerd. I didn't even play when I was eight; when I was nine, my dad basically told me I was gonna play, whether I wanted to or not. That year, I was pretty much like the kid in the Peter, Paul & Mary song 'Right Field', "watching the dandelions grow", except the ball never accidentally landed in my glove. I don't remember if I ever got a hit that year, or not.
When I was ten, my dad remarried after his divorce, and I acquired a step-brother who was pretty much a complete jock. So I got more into baseball, and sports in general. And that summer, my skill level increased pretty dramatically. By the time I was eleven, I was That Kid - the Oversized Hormone Case that made the other kids' moms cry, and their dads demand to see my birth certificate. I probably should have been on a 'major' team, but none of the coaches knew who I was, and besides, they preferred for their 'rookies' to be younger, so I stayed in the 'minors' to terrorize young, un-coordinated kids. And the same when I was twelve. I hit a bunch of home runs on balls I didn't even hit that well.
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There was one coach in the 'minors' who seemed to take particular delight in agitating me, perhaps because I was the biggest kid in the league, and his was one of the better teams in the league, and we ended up competing for the 'minor division' championship. He always demanded to see my birth certificate, and even half-heartedly accused my dad of doctoring it once (although why my dad would doctor my birth certificate for me to play in the 'minors' never quite made sense). And whenever I came to bat, he would have a few needling remarks, to try and get under my skin, I guess. I tried to ignore it, and just play the games, but after a while, it kinda pissed me off.
He had a pitcher who was probably the best pitcher in our league, another 12-year-old who probably should have been in the 'majors', but had gotten good too late. The kid could throw hard, especially for a 'minor-league' pitcher, and most of the kids in our league had a hard time getting around on him. So, we were playing this team, and he was pitching. The first time I came to bat, the coach was up to his usual games, making little needling remarks almost under his breath, but loud enough that I could hear him. The pitcher was extra cranked-up, trying to get me out, and he was throwing even harder than usual. His first pitch, I was really late getting around on, but I hit it square, sending a screaming line drive into their dugout. The poor coach never saw it coming; it hit him square on the nose, breaking it, and splattering blood all over his face. He ended up having to leave the game, which we ended up winning, when I got around for a home run off their ace pitcher.
The next time we played their team, the coach actually accused me of having broken his nose on purpose. I wish I was that good, but not many twelve-year-olds are quite adept enough with a baseball bat to put a line drive on somebody's nose when they feel like it. Which isn't to say that I didn't feel like it. . .
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When I turned 13, I moved up to the Babe Ruth League, for 13-15-year-olds. There were no 'divisions', so I was playing with and against kids who had been in the 'major' division (mostly those kids, since fewer of the 'minor' players were motivated to move up to the next level). As a 13-year-old, I was a 'rookie' again, playing against kids my own age and older. But I was still 'Big for My Age', so some of the disadvantage of being young was mitigated by also being big.
One of my first games in the Babe Ruth League, the pitcher for our opponents was Lowell, the kid I mentioned above who had led his Little League team to within a game of the World Series. At 15, he was still something of a local legend for the speed with which he could throw a baseball. Had someone put a radar gun on one of his pitches, I have no idea what it would have said; as far as I was concerned, it was just 'Faster Than Hell'. Lowell was fast, but he was almost as wild as he was fast (rather like a young Nolan Ryan, maybe). In fact, the first time I stepped in to face him, he drilled me right square in my left ass-cheek. Which didn't hurt as bad as it might have, had another part of my body received the blow, but it still hurt plenty. And it also planted in my brain the idea that Lowell was not a guy you could really dig in against (the self-preservation instinct being what it is).
So the next time I stepped in against Lowell, I was considerably lighter on my toes (and readier to get the hell out of there, if need be) than I had been previously. He threw me five pitches, each of which was past me before I could hope to swing at it. Two of his pitches were strikes, and three were balls, and I couldn't muster up a swing at any of them. The outfielders, sensing the extent of my out-classed-ness, all moved in by several steps, until they were only a few steps beyond the infield dirt. As I awaited the full-count pitch, my butt was reminding me of how my previous turn at bat had ended. Lowell went into his windup, and he threw the fateful pitch, as I tensed up.
Then suddenly, I saw it. For some reason known only to God and Lowell, his full-count pitch was a change-up, right down the middle of the plate. Perhaps he was just being overly cautious, not wanting to risk walking a fat 13-year-old who couldn't hope to hit him anyway; I don't know. But I do know that my eyes got real big, and the thought flashed through my mind, "Hey! I can hit this!" So I swung, as hard as I could. And I crushed it.
Those of you who have ever played baseball, if you've ever really crushed a ball, you know that that sweet, smooth feeling that passes from the bat into your hands when you hit the ball really, really well is just one of the coolest things you ever experience in a baseball game. And right along with it, is to see the outfielder freeze in his tracks as the ball takes off like a rocket over his head, and then to see him turn his back to the infield and just run like a bat out of hell after the ball you've just hit. Yeah, that's just what it was like. Alas, I was still a slow 13-year-old, so even though the ball bounced off the center-field fence, I could only manage a double out of it. But I had crushed a ball off the mighty Lowell!
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Another feature of life in the Babe Ruth League was night games. There were fewer available full-size fields, and so there would be two games each night, the second one being played under the lights.
Now, the lights on our field had an interesting feature, in that all of the lights were aimed down, toward the field. Which is to say, none of them were pointed upward, to even the smallest degree. So that, when the batter hit a fly ball, the ball itself was in the lights for the first 50 or so vertical feet of its flight, and then again, when it came back down. So, being an outfielder, I got pretty adept at judging the flight of the ball from the first, visible part of its trajectory; I would run to where my visual/mental calculations told me the ball was headed, then look up into the black sky for a gray dot descending out of the darkness. Then, when the ball descended back into the lights, I could catch it, and proceed normally.
I got better as I went along in Babe Ruth League play. I was never one of the league's all-stars, but I didn't embarrass myself. Except once. I usually played one of the corner outfield positions - right or left field, most often right. Twice, I threw out a batter at first from right field. The first was a guy who was one of the league's better players; he could hit the heck out of the ball, but was pathetically slow. He smoked the ball straight at me; I fielded it on one hop, and seeing that he wasn't even halfway to first yet, I threw the ball in and got the force-out at first. Pretty cool.
The other one was the last game of my 15-year-old season. A pudgy little 13-year-old came up to bat; we pulled all our fielders way in. The kid swung late on the pitch, and it cleared the drawn-in infielders. It rolled to me, and without even thinking, since I was practically an infielder where I was playing, I picked it up and threw the kid out. I didn't think much about it until after the game, when we were in the handshake line, their coach took me aside and said, "I know you didn't mean anything by it, but that would've been his only hit this year." Which made me feel like the world's biggest jerk.
When I was 15, I got one of my first looks at a curve-ball. Fortunately for me, it was another 13-year-old, who didn't throw particularly hard, but he could throw this big bender that got a lot of the hitters off-balance. I recall facing him for the first time, and he threw this big roundhouse curve to me that came in big and slow, with a big neon-flashing "Hit Me" sign. As I saw it coming, I remember thinking to myself, "this must be what a hung curve-ball looks like; I can see why people talk about crushing them." So I did. By then, I was 15, and pretty close to my full adult dimensions. The field we were playing on that day didn't have a fence. There was a drainage ditch that ran along the side of the road beyond the outfield, maybe 150 yards or so from home plate; the ball cratered itself into the mud by the edge of the ditch.
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When I was 16, I went out for the high school team, and I made the JV squad. But I didn't play very much. By now, I was playing against guys who were also in their full adult bodies, so the advantage I'd had when I was younger was gone. I was regularly hitting against guys who could throw harder than I could get around on. Which was bad enough, but most of the pitchers also had real curve-balls, too; not the big round-houses that I'd seen before. I vividly remember stepping in against one of the better pitchers we'd face all year, and he threw me two fastballs that I heard more than saw. And then, ahead of me two strikes in the count, his next pitch came blazing right straight for the ear-hole of my helmet. I couldn't get myself out of the batter's box fast enough, and as I fell backwards, I saw the ball break sharply, crossing right across the heart of the plate. The umpire bellowed and punched me out, and I walked back to the dugout with the sure knowledge that I'd gone as far as I was gonna go as a baseball player. . .
Monday, January 25, 2010
I've Got to Admit, It's Getting Better
Over the three-and-a-half years I've been (intermittently) spewing my thoughts into blog-space, I've had a few things to say about our trials with a few of our kids, most especially 3M and 1F, who had us right at the end of ourselves a few years ago (and it has been, mercifully, getting to be not so few as we've gone along). I've also mentioned that, in recent months, things with both of them have been going better.
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1F has been back in school for a few (three or four?) years now, taking one class each semester, with a long-range goal of a degree in Speech Pathology (she's good at languages, and that's a field where she actually stands a chance of getting paid to do 'language stuff'; it doesn't hurt that a couple of colleges relatively close at hand, including my alma mater, have good programs in Speech Path., either). She's done well enough, and her grades have been good enough that, in the Fall semester just past, she bumped her load up to two classes (while still working somewhere between half- and full-time, so it's not as though she's whiling her days away chasing butterflies in the park), and still got good grades, so things are looking up on the educational front for 1F, and I couldn't be prouder of her.
Also, this past fall, she took on the job of Music Director for our parish. Which isn't quite so high-falutin as it might sound. She's been playing piano/organ, and cantoring for Mass since she was in high school; the old Music Director is in her 70s now (although, if I may be so bold, she is a very youthful and energetic 70-something), and there has been something of a push to 'get the young folks involved' in our parish, and so they asked 1F to take the job, which mostly entails picking music for Mass, and making sure all the masses are covered, in terms of having organists and cantors scheduled. It's mostly a pretty basic-level administrative job, but it does have some more far-reaching tone-setting aspects. The old director was very fond (I'm tempted to say inordinately fond, but she is a good friend) of the 60s-vintage 'folk tunes' which have plagued been a more-or-less regular feature of American masses (at least in some parishes) since Vatican II, and I've had to stifle an urge to puke in my mouth periodically, when we would sing 'Let There Be Peace On Earth' or one of its smarmy cousins (and, since I am also a sometime cantor, I've had to stand at the microphone and smile while doing so) One of the songs we used to sing with some regularity included the lyric, "Come dance in the forest, come play in the field"; I once leaned over and asked Jen if we weren't supposed to be naked while singing it. Anyway, the good news is, 1F agreed with me; and now she's in charge of picking the worship music. So I might just be done with 'Let There Be Peace On Earth' (I hasten to add that I have nothing against world peace itself; it's just the song that I can't stand).
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Last fall, 3M broke up with his girlfriend, with whom he'd been sharing living arrangements for the previous year-or-so. Around the same time, the crappy economy left its mark on his life, and he lost the job he'd had for a couple years. So, he came to us, and asked if he could move back home for a while. Which we agreed to, with a certain degree of trepidation - once a young adult has been living on his own for a while (and, to be bluntly candid, 3M was more-or-less 'living on his own', even before he moved out in the first place), it isn't always a simple matter for him to move back in with Mom and Dad, and re-adjust to the daily rhythms of family life, and young children, etc.
But, as the old saying goes, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." And 3M had done quite a bit of growing-up since the last time he lived under our roof. It's actually been beneficial to Jen and me, in some very practical ways, to have him back home; he's been something of a live-in handyman for us, and in the months he's been living with us, our list of Little Nagging Projects has been beaten down significantly. Over the Christmas break, he even helped me install a new toilet (maybe the third or fourth time I've executed that particular bit of home-repair; but it was much nicer, I promise you, to have my eldest son to help with some of the 'grunt work', and also to enjoy the satisfaction he derived from learning a new 'man skill').
His job search has mostly been frustrating - the economy is still pretty crappy - but as I write this, he is closing in on a job cooking for one of the local sports bars, which would suit him very nicely. I'd solicit your prayers on his behalf; the difference between 'no money' and 'not very much money' is huge. And taking him at his word, he views his stay with us as being at least as 'temporary' as we do; a job would be one of the key parameters of that temporary-ness.
But, for my money, one of the biggest deals of 3M's young life happened last week.
He went back to school.
Recalling that this is the young man who, the capacity of his intellect notwithstanding, only graduated from high school at the last minute, and 'through the back door'. Even as he was in the process of washing out of high school (or nearly so), he would still tell me about his very definite plans to go to college. And I knew that, at the time, he was mostly just trying to say what he knew I wanted to hear. I would often respond by saying, "You understand, don't you, that college is just more of what you didn't like in high school? Only you have to pay for it?" But I never had any doubt that, if he ever came to a place where he wanted to be in school, for the sake of his own life, and his own goals, that he would do it, and probably do it very well, once he got acclimated to actually doing the 'school thing', for the first time since he was in fifth grade.
And he's been getting involved with the 'college group' in our Christian community, mending most all of the relationships that had been damaged during his years 'in the wilderness'. Which has also been very gratifying to see.
He showed us his first math test the other day - he got 104/100 (extra credit, dontchaknow) - and it was all I could do to keep from tearing up. Maybe - just maybe - the kids are gonna be alright. . .
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