Bob and Weave

Home Run

48 Home Run When I was a kid, there was a big field behind my grandmother’s house next door. A canopy of chinaberry trees hung over the corner of fenceline farthest from my house. In the summer when it was hot this was the shadiest, coolest place I knew, and the remotest too, without leaving family territory. I was completely alone there, and I could see into neighboring backyards from the cover of sparse underbrush. In the other direction I could look out on the wide and deep vista of the field. It would have been difficult for anyone to see me. I would sit there sometimes for hours and invent games, mostly this home run derby thing where I’d hit little wads of tin foil with a brand new unsharpened pencil. The little wads would fly all the way out into the sunlight sometimes, and that was a homerun. As the afternoon sun sank lower, the shadows would grow longer and it became harder and harder to hit homeruns. I knew all of the names of the great players—Babe Ruth, of course, and Mantle and Mays and Mel Ott and Harmon Killibrew and Ted Kluszewski and Lou Gehrig etcetera —from many different eras—Musial and Williams and DiMaggio, and Hank Aaron who was still playing—and they would all have their turns at bat. But the main thing was the flight of the little wad of foil—the esthetics of it I guess—the way it would take off when I hit it just right,this shiny speck rising up in the shade almost touching the canopy of leaves and then breaking out into the light and sailing and sailing and finally falling into the cut grass. The crowd roared in my throat, roared for Mantle or Ruth or somebody—but roared too for me,my own private crowd who had paid their hard-earned money and here they were on their feet cheering for me as I broke all the records. Then, if it was a good wad of foil, I’d save it for re-use in my pocket, and if the pencil had been a good bat, I would store it away in another pocket, and I’d walk up the fenceline back home and go in the back and let the screen door slam. Mother would say where have you been and I’d say in the yard. She’d ask what were you doing, and I’d say nothing. Then I’d go into my room to wait for supper, which was almost ready. I felt great—no other way to say this—just felt like I was worth something. My father would come home from work and keep his tie on at the table because he was going back out again. All evening I would keep remembering that cool corner and the way I could lean my 49 back against the metal post, the way the chain links closed into a solid wall when I looked down the length of the fence and squinted just right. The way the ball flew when I hit it, the way it landed so lightly and so far away out in the grass and the sunlight. ...