Wooden Sculpture

Wooden Sculpture, a photo by Michael 1952 on Flickr.

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Did you ever want to start over?  I mean really begin your life over again? Did you ever want to return to the gentle person you were when you were a child? If you were given that chance would you go back with or without the knowledge of the world that you have now?

Sometimes I think back to my childhood and the "tough" times I had back then.  It's funny but for the most part I look back at those days and smile.  I was different then, innocent, living constantly in the "now."  I lived when summers were forever as was the tediousness of the school year. I had a good family and good friends and these led to good times.  I want to share a story from my biography, "Glimpses of God"
Clicking on the title will bring you to my website so you can learn more about the book and yes, where to purchase it.

On the first day of summer vacation I awoke to a feeling of real freedom.  I got out of and made my bed and went into the kitchen where my mother was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee.  She smiled and asked if I wanted breakfast. I told her that I did and she brought out the Kix cereal, poured a bowl of it for me added a bit of sugar and milk (whole milk of course.)  She then got a glass from the cabinet and filled it with cold tap water and opened the Super Size Economy jar of Tang Breakfast Drink that could always be found in our kitchen. She carefully measured a spoonful of the orange colored and flavored powder and put it into the glass and stirred it up.  The result of this careful measuring and stirring was a tepid glass of water with a faint artificial orange flavor. This was a miserable excuse for orange juice but that is what we had so I drank it.  I think that a few years later she felt justified in serving it when Tang was advertised as what the astronauts drank.  She also put down a red One-A –Day vitamin. There was no such thing as a chewable Flintstone Vitamin back then. We kids had to take adult vitamins. As a matter of fact the only flavored vitamins were made in liquid form for babies.   In our house we almost never had any of the popular sweetened cereals such as Sugar Pops or Frosted Flakes (They’re Great). Mom always bought the ones that had no frosting on them. I did not mind the Kix too much it was kind of like eating round cornflakes. Sometimes she would buy Wheaties or Quaker Puffed Wheat.  Other times she would get Quaker Puffed Rice which had the habit of floating on top of the milk so that you would eat the cereal which tasted of nothing, and end up with a bowl full of milk.  I dreaded when Cheerios were on the breakfast menu because I thought then and still think now that they taste like the box.  In spite of their advertised health protecting qualities I still refuse to eat them today.  Anyway, after breakfast was finished we were expected to leave the house and to not come back until lunch time.  That was okay by me.   More often than not Dennis would come to the front of my house and because back then doorbells were not used by children so much, he would yell “Yo Mick, Yo Mick, Yo Mickey” and continue the call until I either came out or came to the door and told him I couldn’t go out.  By the way, if we ever meet, you need special permission to call me Mickey. My family has this irrevocable right, it is withheld from most other people, sorry, that is just how it is! 

There was only one reason a boy existed back then, it was for baseball. We ate and drank baseball for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  If baseball did not exist, well, then boys would have ceased to exist too. The solar system revolves around the sun and our neighborhood revolved around Winslow’s lot.  Winslow’s was a “fancy” restaurant in the neighborhood. It served fancy meals with fancy prices.  When we first moved in, Winslow’s Restaurant was a pale green building in the middle of the lot on Archer Avenue with parking around the building and auxiliary parking in “Winslow’s Lot” which was directly across the street from our house. One day, perhaps business was falling off, the restaurant burned down, I remember watching it burn, it was an impressive fire and when all was all over and the exhausted firemen drove away nothing was left but smoldering ash.  Winslow’s rebuilt his restaurant as a cinder block building with a carport and paved parking was provided where their old building used to be.  Now, Winslow’s restaurant had plenty of paved parking so his gravel auxiliary lot was never had to be used for parking. It lot formed a right triangle. This was our ball field. Right field was terminated by the wall of the restaurant.  Center field ended at Mrs. Hebbel’s garage, to be exact, the field to the right of the garage door handle was right field while to the left of the handle was center and left field. Since we played “Right field out” many arguments hinged on the observation on where the ball hit the garage, was it left or right of the handle. 

Oddly enough, one team would claim it hit to the right the other would swear that it hit to the right.  While we lacked instant replay, we did not lack voices so the argument was loud and very colorful in the number of cuss words used.  Eventually the argument would be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction and the game would continue.  The next play might generate yet another controversy as we played “pitchers hands out.”  Instead of using a first baseman, on a ground ball the fielder would throw it to the pitcher and the runner would be out if the pitcher got the ball before the runner touched first base.  I forgot to mention that we did not play “league” as hardball was called, in Winslow’s lot, the lot was just too small to allow for that and there were too many windows that would be put at risk so we played 16 inch Clincher softball slow pitch. 

Now don’t get too caught up in the “soft” part of the word softball. A brand new Clincher was as hard as a rock and more than one pitcher had his arm broken while trying to fend off a line drive coming directly at his head with his arm. That actually happened to my sister Janice at a school game and she ended up wearing a cast for awhile.  We did not use a fielder’s glove as many softball players do today so early in the season you had to train your body to properly respond to the round rocket approaching at mach one that was aiming to take your head off.  The training regimen was simple as it consisted of accidentally catching the ball with just the tip of your fingers and feeling them bend back to touch your knuckles. (OUCH)  One or two of these knuckle busters would serve to remind you to put your body in front of the ball and knock it down if you could not catch it cleanly.  When your bat hit a new Clincher it made a sound like a cannon firing a round at an unseen enemy and in our field the boom echoed off the walls of Winslow’s Restaurant and Mrs. Hebbel’s apartment building sometimes causing the old lady to come out and wag her finger at us. Imagine her being cross at us for playing ball at eight in the morning – why it was the middle of the day!  Actually any hour of the day was the hour where she might come out and complain. We never were disrespectful to her, but then again we did not stop playing either. One game bled into another and the baseball day ended when you could not see the ball anymore, generally when the street lights were about to come on.  Our field was modern in that it had a warning track, which was the paved alley, and it had a home run fence.  If you hit the ball and it went into Falco’s lot it was a home run.  Every year there was a home run derby in play. Unfortunately I was seldom able to power the sphere over the fence.  My friends Dennis and Big Jim did it on a regular basis.  By the end of the season it would not be unusual for these powerhouses of the softball diamond to have a couple of hundred home runs each; Ruth and Gehrig eat your hearts out! 

Those were the days from my youth.  Sunny days in June, July, where we played baseball, went to the park, and sometimes we would lay on our backs and make pictures out the clouds.  I did not know too much about the world when I lived in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood.  What I did know about it centered around placed like St. Joseph and St. Anne School, where the good Sisters of St. Joseph held sway and where I became rooted in faith.  They could not teach me the New Math, but they got through to this sad sack that God loved him and for that I have to thank them from the bottom of my heart.  I remember things like Brighton Park Theater and the Sunday's where we paid our quarter to get in to see two movies and a cartoon.  I remember the feel of new shoes and the texture of new paper and a new binder to keep it in.  I remember discussions with my best friend, Big Jim Boinski, where he and I solved all of the problems of the world.  Jim went on to work in movies and stared in a movie called "Legit" where he turns in a great performance as a bad guy wanting to turn over and go legit.  You can get more information by clicking on the link. 

"If I knew then what I know now, it would have messed it up somehow."