February 25, 1994
Dear Everyone:
Remember the baseballs we used to make out of aluminum foil?
If you didn't grow up in my backyard, you probably don't remember it;
but, believe me, there are plenty who did.
We played a lot of baseball in
that backyard. The house was
built in the late ‘50’s, so naturally, it came with a big yard.
The biggest rock in the retaining
wall on the right was First Base. Second
Base was the top of the Rock That Wouldn't Budge.
When we first moved into the house in 1959, the backyard was filled with
(as I recall) enormous weeds. When
we cut the weeds down, we discovered that the yard was littered with
rocks, some big enough to rank as boulders, probably dredged up when the
foundation was dug. We used most
of the rocks to build a retaining wall on the right side of the yard, to
hold back the side of a hill. The
boulders were another matter. We
had to hire a Caterpillar tractor to move them all to the back of the
yard, where they made a fetchingly artful display of, well, rocks.
The largest of these sported a single vertical crack, the souvenir of a
certain Fourth of July when the parents weren't home; when a certain
sibling (who shall remain nameless) showed his younger siblings (who
shall remain equally nameless), plus assorted neighborhood kids, the
fine art of making a Molotov Cocktail out of an empty soft drink bottle
and some gasoline siphoned from the lawn mower.
The biggest boulder, in the center of the yard, just wouldn't move.
It broke a couple of teeth off
the Caterpillar before we decided that it was probably part of the
bedrock and just covered it up with dirt.
The top of it still showed through, like the tip of an iceberg,
and that became Second Base.
Third Base was a hydrangea bush that grew against the back of the house.
This led to one of our Very
Special Baseball Rules. The Very Special Rule for Third Base was:
"No Sliding Allowed on Third!"
Mother, you see, objected to kids careening feet first into her
hydrangea bush, which seems reasonable enough.
So if you were lucky enough to
actually get to Third, you ran straight at the bush, full tilt until the
last possible second, then slammed on the brakes and just sort of
grabbed a leaf. But very gently,
because if the leaf broke off, you weren’t "on" Third anymore.
Another Very Special Rule.
If stealing Home look like a possibility, you sort of pulled the bush
with you, stretching as far as possible, before making a break for it.
The number of hydrangea blossoms
floating around the foot of the bush attested to the number of attempts
to steal Home.
Home Plate was easy: Grass never
grew on Home Plate. In the
thirteen years that we lived in that house, grass never grew on that one
spot, regardless of the time of year or how long it had been since
anyone had played ball there.
Another Very Special Rule involved the back fence.
Some of the neighbors had
complained about kids tramping through their garden, looking for stray
balls, so our parents told us, if the ball goes over the fence, it's
gone. Thus the Very Special Rule:
"Over the Fence is an Automatic Out!"
You could hit the ball right up
to the fence, but if it went over, you were out of the game, since,
without a ball, we couldn't play anymore.
But, of course, there would always be some knuckle-head who
would want to prove just how far he could hit.
So there were times when we
didn't have a baseball to play baseball with.
If we couldn't convince (or
bribe) some other kid to play with us and, incidentally, supply the
all-important ball, we would simply manufacture one out of aluminum
foil.
Remember the industrial role of aluminum foil that Dad got for us?
It was about 3 feet high, a metal
spool with about a half-foot of foil wrapped around it.
It sat in the garage, near the
back door. Whenever Mother needed
some foil for cooking, she'd send one of us out to the garage for a
piece "about this size". Remember
the time “Richard” dropped the spool on his foot?
I'll bet “Richard” remembers it.
When we needed a new ball, we’d peel a few yards of foil off the spool
and start scrunching it down to something near baseball size.
Once the ball was made, the game
could begin. Of course, it was a
little different, playing with an aluminum ball.
For one thing, it wasn't too
smooth. In fact, it was filled
with little air pockets that rendered it not what you might call
aerodynamically sound. Face it,
if you hit that little sucker with the bat just right, it would soar a
good two...maybe three feet...before fluttering back down to earth.
But what did you care? You were
already on your way to First. The
Catcher (assuming there was a Catcher) would lunge for the ball and fire
it off towards First (assuming that there was a First Baseman) or the
Pitcher. Of course, being
aluminum, and now having a large, bat-shaped dent in one side (looking
rather like a 3-dimensional "C" from Sesame Street), the ball wouldn’t
go more then another two feet. So
the Catcher would run forward and tried to throw it again, assuming that
he hadn’t bumped heads with the Pitcher by this time.
We were enthusiastic, if not terribly adept, players.
And very inventive, as you can
see. Each time somebody succeeded
in whacking the ball, it would assume a new and totally different shape
from before. And it would get
smaller. When it got small enough
to matter, assuming it hadn't already been lost in the grass, we'd use
it as the core for a new ball.
The "Over the Fence is an
Automatic Out!” Rule never applied to the aluminum balls.
For one thing, there was no way
you could hit or throw it that far. You
probably couldn't get it over the fence if you were standing next to it.
For another thing, why go hunting
for it? You just went back to the
spool in the garage and started another ball.
There was also no need to protect
these balls from the weather, the way you did with a "real" baseball.
If you left one of these out in
the rain, nothing would happen to it until Dad found it with the
lawnmower. (Whirrrr,
kachunk, THUD.
"Oh, hell!")
Love, as always,
Pete
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