I read a book years ago about a man who becomes so obsessed with his table baseball game that it comes to dominate his whole life, The Universal Baseball Associationby by Robert Coover.
Really liked your previous comment, Wolf Man: "Everything is tinged with gray now." That struck me as a spot-on definition of my life at 71. I'm still in reasonably good health (for this specific moment, that is) but am always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Spend more time in doctor's offices than I ever dreamed I would, but so do most people my age. Mostly, though, I'm waiting for the BIG shoe to drop or should I say, the HAMMER. Can't help thinking about it. Got maybe a dozen years left, if I'm very lucky, and these years getting more and more shadowy, flying like speedy phantoms through the air.
I think back on my youthful summers. Unlike today's boys, we kids were always outside. In the morning we'd play baseball on a vacant lot nearby. As our Alabama afternoon temps climbed, we'd come inside and play APBA and trade baseball cards. If no one was around I'd play APBA alone, recording stats in a notebook. Then, as the sun reached the horizon, I'd go back outside and ride my bike in the cooled-down streets as twilight began to fall. I'd ride with a couple of friends under the street lights and then go to a friend's yard where ghost stories were being told within a tight circle of three or four, all speaking in spooky whispers, soon jumping at the sound of the wind in the trees above us. When fall came, we'd play tackle football after school in the large yard of a neighbor nearby, with often 10 or 12 kids showing up on those cool autumnal afternoons. When Halloween night blew in, a close friend and I would eagerly hit the pavement. We were always the last ones back from trick or treating, roaming all over our neighborhood and then into the next, begging candy and making an adventure out of it until adults who opened doors would finally yell us out and tell us it was time to go home. Then we'd trek back through the dark, lonely streets, moonlit shadows falling across the lawns, last of the porch lights snapping out. Hard to believe life was ever that good!
I read
The Universal Baseball Association, a brilliantly imaginative book, when I was in my 30s and couldn't help deeply missing the great APBA games of my childhood. Coover had obviously played either Strat or APBA at one time (book first published in 1968), or he really had created the kind of dice rules exhibited in the book. The opening chapters really thrilled me, taking me right back to my folks' kitchen table at 12 and 13 years old, but then the story deteriorated and became tragic, something I never associated with my happy APBA childhood. I remember how magic APBA had felt to me! I'd roll the dice and,
quick-as-the-crack-of-the-bat, results would flash before my eyes. "Musial doubles off the wall!" or "Koufax breezed him!"
Wish I could go back and do it all again: Buy a wax pack of baseball cards and feverishly tear them open hoping to find a Stan Musial, Al Kaline, Mickey Mantle, or Warren Spahn, whereupon I'd stick the card in my Dad's face yelling, "Dad, look who I got!" Of course he'd yell, "Get that thing out of my face!" but later he'd come around quietly and say, "Let's see what you've got there," and then comment, "This guy's good, keep this one," etc. Greatly miss playing backyard football at 11-and-12-years old; racing a friend on my bike; telling chilling ghost stories on a darkened porch (we told some
good ones, some based on local Mobile history); watching the late-night monster movies - ("Frankenstein"; Bela Lugosi's "Dracula"; "Cry of the Wolf," etc.); and playing burnout with my friends (OW! I can still remember catching a couple of young fireballers).
I can tell you feel much the same about those bygone days, Werewolf. I suppose most of us do. I keep a small notebook into which I enter quotations or written lines that I find particularly striking or compelling, and I've just entered your line about everything being tinged with gray, word-for-word, just as you put it. Characterizes all too well where I am now, though my youthful memories are tinged in pure gold, as you see. I'd enjoy hearing such reminiscences if you have any to add. Always nice to hear how others experienced their own personal, magical childhoods.
