Present time and space become transparent when I unexpectedly visit, in my mind, a certain special childhood place, happy and comfortable and unchanging. My visits are irregular and unscheduled, infrequent and unpredictable. They are prompted by a random thought or an otherwise insignificant stimulus. Always I am happy for the visit and linger there.
I visit a place atop a hill in an ordinary neighborhood, landlocked so that my friends and I have to pass through neighbors’ yards to reach it. One needs to be shown it, to be taken there to know of it at all. The location, hidden as it is, is passed on from big brothers or older friends.
The Field is a crude baseball diamond; none of us know who carved it out, or how long it has been there. The pitcher’s mound is no mound at all, simply a flat spot where untold years of play has killed any grass and compacted the soil. The basepaths are worn down and narrow. The outfield is small and shallow; a low stone wall sits immediately in front of a line of pine trees that parallels the wall and marks The Field’s deepest boundary. Crabgrass, clover, dandelions, plantain, and the like cover the playing surface. Tall grass, thick brush, saplings, and then woods surround it all.
A tall white birch at one end of the stone wall is considered the left field foul pole. There is no right field foul pole but none of us bat left-handed so it hardly matters. An old and rusted bedspring, carried there by who knows who in some past time serves as a makeshift backstop. There are no bases beyond doffed shirts or pieces of cardboard or whatever we can improvise.
The ground rules are simple; a ball hit over the stone wall is a double, one hit over the pines is a home run. The equipment is limited, often just a single baseball, sometimes with the horsehide cover gone and wrapped in white adhesive tape; a foul ball hit into the brush demands a search for the ball until it is found. There may be one or two bats. Most kids bring a glove but sometimes we share.
We play baseball there, nine or ten or eleven years old, from spring through summer and into the autumn. I play with friends like Tush and Tortoise, Shishk and Herbie, Griff and Rome and Phil and Stoney.
* * *
I toss Phil the bat which he catches with one hand halfway up the handle. My hand goes further along the handle above his, and he places his other hand above mine and still closer to the knob at the end. There is not sufficient room left for my other hand to grasp the handle.
Phil gets the first pick. “I’ll take Tush.”
“Okay,” I say, “Griff.”
We choose sides for the game. Enough kids have shown up that we have four guys to a team. Rome is, as almost always, the last person chosen.
While most of us are wearing black hightop BF Goodrich sneakers I have a newer pair of white US Keds. I was disappointed to find that they do not, in fact, allow me to run faster. My baseball hat, a dark blue, has its visor carefully curved. Phil has been able to exaggerate his visor’s curve even more while Tortoise has not shaped his at all. There are, of course, no uniforms. It is 1956 and dungarees and a tee shirt are uniform enough.
The teams determined, Phil and I buck up to see whose team bats first. And then we play baseball. We don’t call balls and strikes beyond foul balls and swings and misses. No fast balls. It is just baseball, childhood baseball for the fun of it, and just us.
When my mind brings me there, I relax in the company of good and honest friends, all of us with futures without limits. There is boyish banter, mild arguments about safe or out, silly jokes that seem so hilarious, mild and sometimes forced vulgarities. But most of all, it is a game where winning or losing matters, but most important is playing the game.
* * *
More than forty years later Rome and I decide to travel and meet up in our old home town. Of course The Field is a place we want to -- have to -- visit again. We drive to the top of the hill, park, and get out of the car. As kids we simply walked through the yards without hesitation or a second thought. Now, middle aged men, we stop.
“Go ring the bell and tell them we were kids here a long time ago and would it be okay to go through the yard to see our old ball field.”
“You do it.”
“Don’t be a wimp. Just do it.”
“No, you.”
It is as if we were ten years old again. We argue back and forth, question each other’s manhood, and finally choose to go around a much longer way. At last there, unexpectedly we discover that The Field is gone, grown back into woods like the land that bordered it, still identified by that stand of tall pines that reach high above the surrounding growth. We say little, a silent sense of loss expressed with knowing glances and shrugged shoulders.
It is not our “lost youth” that we experience; we have already driven by our old grammar school and the houses in which we grew up. What we have lost with The Field’s disappearance is a place that was ours and ours alone where we enjoyed a carefree sense of childhood independence; on our own playing unadorned baseball just for the fun of the game.
Years after that final visit, contemplating The Field one day, I wonder for the first time who kept The Field open, the brush and saplings cut back, the grass controlled. I imagine an older man sitting at an open window in one of the neighboring houses, his face obscured by a wooden-framed window screen painted green, who himself played on The Field long before and now enjoyed nothing more than sitting there on a summer afternoon listening to the sound of boys playing baseball.
Originally appeared in Evening Street Review.
04/19/2023
01:26:58 PM