1969

Flipping baseball cards on a summer day. The boys in my neighborhood did this when we were kids. Us girls ju… | Childhood toys, Childhood memories, Baseball cards

A million years ago I flipped baseball cards with friends on the sidewalk outside our home in Massapequa Park. I’d sit on the cement in my dungarees and Wildcats little league t-shirt with a stack of Topps cards in my left hand, ready with one in my right hand between thumb and index finger, hoping to take the stack on the ground between us. The older cards were limp and ripped in places, but the new ones were stiff, still dusty from the hard stick of gum that came with them.

I’d turn over a rookie Tom Seaver or a Cleon Jones, not knowing then that I held several thousand dollars in my left hand, and since at some point the following year I had the entire 1969 New York Mets squad, at some point I held tens of thousands of dollars. I only knew I wanted to kick some baseball card-flipping butt before I had to head back inside for dinner. We were about to move further out on the Island, to a new house out near the Great South Bay, and who knew when I’d have another chance to do this.

Life was about flipping cards. Ask anyone who was nine back then—they’ll back me up on this.

Everything was easy. For me, anyway. On the other side of the planet the Vietnam War was in full swing, my uncle on his way over, a friend’s brother on the next street was not coming back. And just upstate, music fans would gather in a month at Max Yeager’s farm, while just fifty miles away in the city, the Mets were in last place for the last time, heading in a matter of months to a miraculous championship. Hippies walked down Main Street, the Beatles were together and going strong, Nixon was reelected, and Steve Bezos just turned five.

Just about the time I lost the Seaver card, somewhere above us Apollo Ten was orbiting the moon, doing surveillance for their successors, Apollo Eleven, a few months later. Funny, now it occurs to me that up until that point I lived in a world where we still had never walked on the moon. I wonder what we compared tasks to before we could say, “We can land a man on the moon, but we can’t…”

In any case, I followed the Apollo mission, didn’t care about Tricky Dick, preferred the Birds to the Beatles , and baseball was the universe. I was eight, for God’s sake. My voice hadn’t yet changed.

Yeah, seriously; a million years ago.

That was back when my friends had no last names. They were simply Charlie and David and Chris and Tommy, and Kathleen, the Little Read Haired Girl Kathleen. We had a pool and block parties and barbeques, and sometimes there were blackouts and everyone came out into the twilight evening, my friends and I chasing each other, the adults standing around in the cooling summer air, talking about how, “Over in Amityville they still have lights, and a few houses on Euclid, but they’re out down on Park Lane, and all the way down East Lake.”

Lights. No Lights. Whatever. I was eight.

My cousins lived too far away to ever think about visiting on a whim—a good thirty or forty miles, and the ice cream man would come, and the television was a big black and white console on which my sister would watch Gunsmoke and Bonanza and my brother would watch Star Trek and the Olympics from Mexico City and I’d watch cartoons or Andy Griffith. And I’d watch baseball when it wasn’t blacked out to local viewers because the game over in Shea Stadium hadn’t sold out.

And at night after the Late Shows ended, if I was still awake in bed and one of my parents had fallen asleep on the couch, I could hear a man’s voice declare, “That is the end of our broadcast day,” and the screen would get fuzzy with a low buzzing noise all night. Didn’t matter which of the five available channels was on, they went off the air.

The friends I have now were from all over the place back then. Rick was probably about to leave high school and hitchhike across the country, Tim was playing high school football in Philadelphia; the other Tim was a lieutenant humping his way through the marshes of Vietnam, and Sean was learning from his father upstate the value of giving, of volunteering. And when I think of my friends back then, well, who knows where they are now? I think about them when I pass through Kennedy Airport or the rare times I’m on the Island and stop in a store, wondering if I just walked by or stood in line behind someone that at one time a million years ago was my absolute best friend; the one I’d know forever. It was so easy then. When you’re eight you’re simply always going to be eight—no discussion. Your parents will always be there, your siblings will always wake up early with you on Christmas morning to exchange gifts before you head down to the living room to see what is under the tree, and baseball card-flipping is more important than school.

Sometimes I have to try hard to make myself realize that that eight-year-old was me. That it wasn’t some kid I saw in a movie or read about, or a child someone told me about. That was me, legs crossed on the cracked cement sidewalk on East Lake Avenue, the same me that sits now near the river and listens to the approaching flock of geese, watches the descending sun, feels the faint brush of something familiar, like a song I once knew or a memory of someone that was kind to me. The same me that barreled across Siberia with my own son, who is now more than twenty years older than I was back then.

I’m at the other end of this game now. It’s late, and I’m tired. I have some writing to finish for readings next week, and a few deadlines looming, and I walked out on the porch and listened to the cold night, the clear, star-filled night, mid-winter night that is colder than it should be here on the bay. A friend of mine believes in reincarnation, believes we come back as, well, some other living form, whether another human like the Dalai Lama does, or as an orangutan, but as something. I’d be okay with reincarnation, but I want to come back as me. I want to do this again, make those mistakes again, fall in love again, have my heart broken by the same girl again, play golf with my father and brother, receive care packages from my sister when I was at school, move into those dorms again, play tennis again. Hurt and give and cry again.

If we agree eighty years is about a life, anything more than that is a bonus—overtime, if you will, then I’m now entering the fourth quarter. Games have been won or lost in the fourth quarter. Some of the greatest plays in history were made in this part of the game.

Back in 1969, the Mets turned a losing season into a winning streak now universally called miraculous more than halfway through the season. But as Mets catcher Jerry Grote pointed out, “It’s not a miracle, it is persistence, it is determination, it is faith in yourself and each other.”

It’s not over yet. And it just might be that the best resource I have so I can face whatever comes next on this pilgrimage is that eight year old boy somewhere inside who could flip baseball cards with the best of them.

Ya Gotta Believe. By Jay Horwitz | by New York Mets | Mets Insider Blog

Great River

We had a dog. Sheba. Briefly. She and my mother were terrified of each other.

And a pool in the back on the edge of the woods where honeysuckle grew, and where we built a small fort out of scrap lumber repurposed from building sites down our road. Before the pool went up, my siblings and I had to pick the stones out of the dirt so they wouldn’t rip the liner. In summer we barbecued in the stone fireplace on the patio and swam with visiting cousins. When I smell honeysuckle, I remember that pool. I remember working on the fort with my friend Eddie who told me one night before heading home when the streetlights came on to watch out for lunatics. I said I didn’t know what a lunatic was, but he left. A few minutes later when I walked past the pool, he jumped out and screamed and scared me to death. We laughed and I called him crazy, and he said, “that’s a lunatic.” When I smell honeysuckle, I think of Ed.

We were protected by our parents’ forcefield, and secure in our innocence. But it wasn’t innocence, was it? Everyone was in tune then; the music did that. It kept us informed about what was going
on in the world; in Ohio, in Vietnam, in Watts; indeed, for what it’s worth, the music was a constant reminder that there was something happening somewhere, even if what it was wasn’t exactly clear. We knew all the words, and the words were ours to build with in the woods, or hike with along the Bay, through Timber Point Golf Course, and along the river to the reeds where an old duck blind was our morning refuge.

Geez, we were twelve. When you’re twelve everything is brand new and it’s all yours, and nothing, absolutely nothing isn’t feasible. That was how life was in Great River in the late sixties and early seventies. An idealistic village surrounded on three sides by an arboretum, a state park, and the Great South Bay. The fourth side was the main road, Montauk Highway, but it was so far removed from us we could wander the woods and streets for hours and never consider heading that way. Only at six pm when Walter Cronkite arrived did news like Vietnam sneak into our consciousness.
At home, Watergate remained a presence because my sister was a history major focusing on politics, and she constantly quizzed me about the players. “Who is John Mitchell?” “Who is G. Gordon Liddy?” This wasn’t history though; it was current events during my junior high years. I had no way of knowing that a half dozen years later I’d sit with Liddy alone in an office at college. When I hear about him now, though, I don’t think of our conversation. I think of our kitchen table in Great River and my sister.

Mitchell was the Attorney General.

Dad grilled Italian sausage when family from the city or friends from the old neighborhood came over, like Joe and Rose Fontana. Or when cousins came. They didn’t come too often though, other than those who lived four miles up the road. No one back then would make the drive from Nassau County ALL. THE. WAY. OUT. to the South Shore of Suffolk County. Forget about it. Recently I looked it up. The distance from the inconceivably far reaches of my old neighborhood to the new house in Great River was a pilgrimage of twenty-two miles. Seriously, that’s how far it is now from my house here at Aerie to the first stop light. Back then it might as well have been in Kansas. We weren’t going back.

We never do go back though, do we?

Every Thanksgiving my aunt and grandmother would visit. My dad’s mom would play some piano, and Mom would be in the kitchen making everything you’d imagine she would make on Thanksgiving, while Dad and my brother watched football. Sometimes, especially in the early years in the house, my brother and I would toss the football, or tackle each other, or play whiffle ball. We built the first fort together; an outhouse looking thing. And we played Risk and some sports card/dice game about baseball I can’t remember anymore, but I can picture perfectly. We knew everything—absolutely everything—about baseball. We moved in the same year the Mets moved to first place, and everything in life was working. The Jets were winning; the Rangers and the Knicks were winning. Armstrong walked on the moon. And I learned about the music being played just upstate at the village of Woodstock.

We were one of the first homes on this road, and very quickly other twelve-year-old’s moved in. We’d walk to the deli and the post office. We’d walk to the docks at the Connetquot River. Everything was improving.

That’s just the way it seemed back then.

The way friends came and went, and I don’t remember—I mean I have no recollection at all—of ever being inside unless it rained, and even then. We simply stayed outside. Steve and Todd and I played baseball, and Eddie and I marked every trail of Heckscher State Park. For years we stayed outside, even in winter, bundled to the bay breeze. I loved how we were then. Early in the mornings in spring and fall I could lay in bad and hear the fog horns of the fishing vessels headed out toward Montauk or across to Fire Island.

But it was baseball that dominated my summers. The way we always played in Steve’s backyard, and the fence to the Campbell’s yard was a homer. The way I couldn’t hit to save my life in little league, but there on the property I slammed so many balls over that damn fence I felt like Ed Kranepool or Tommie Agee. The way we never tired and we’d quit mid-day and pick it up at twilight. The way even then I’d walk back up Church Road and through the side door to the kitchen where we always, always, had dinner together when Dad got home. The way Cathy would quiz me. The way Fred would talk about what interested him at school and about his trip to Mexico, or to the camp out past the Hamptons that one summer.

When we prepared to move south, my friends all signed a baseball. Steve Delicati, Todd Long, Craig Long, Camille Villano, Lisa Villano, Frank and Richie and Tom and Paul. And Eddie, who never liked baseball.

When people ask where I’m from, I never know how to answer. New York? Virginia? Deltaville? When they ask where I grew up, though, I say Great River. Because we moved there when I had just
turned nine and we moved out; well, I suppose part of me never did. I can picture every square foot of that house, can name every road in the village, remember the trail that ran along the back of the town to the creek, and remember where the soft spot in the fence was at the arboretum that allowed Eddie and I to explore the old Bayard estate.

Sometimes when I think of that town I imagine if I were to drive the four hundred miles north to the end of the Southern State Parkway, and head down Timber Point Road, make a left on Leeside Drive, and another left onto Church Road, I’d see us all, young, laughing riding monkey-bar bicycles with banana seats, and chasing time like it was never going to end.

That town is in my blood, and just a couple of years ago, Eddie and I made plans to return there to eat at the old Great River Inn, which had become an Italian Restaurant. That was the plan, anyway. Maybe someday I will. I’ll park outside the old house and walk, wonder what happened to the old folks, what happened to my old friends, and I’ll get a table in the back and raise a glass to my childhood, to growing up, to innocence and coming of age. And to Eddie’s memory.

We will always be twelve-years old, Eddie and me.