When I say roots, I mean the one that rhymes with boots, not puts. And my roots were firmly established sometime around 1955 give or take a few years. Like all children of the 50s, I played outdoors all afternoon and all-day Saturday without a care in the world. Apparently my mother and father were not worried either, because they never asked where I was or what I was doing. I can only surmise that nothing bad seemed to ever happen, so why would they worry? The children of today will never know how idyllic that world was.
Most of the time I was playing with other kids in the neighborhood, either in our backyards or down the street where there were acres of open land and even a small pond. Playtime nirvana it was.
But back then you had to root for a baseball team and I chose the Brooklyn Dodgers. Or they chose me. I think the appearance of Jackie Robinson sewed it up for me. Black athletes and white athletes playing sports together. Something told me this was right thing to do and this was the way it should be. Then much later along came a Brooklyn born Jewish pitcher by the name of Sandy Koufax and he was a rising star. To top it off, in one of most important playoff games, he sat out because it fell on one of high holy days (Yom Kippur to be exact). That was only a month after he had pitched a perfect game, so I think his talent was unassailable at that point.
Plenty of school mates were New York Yankee fans, but I just knew the Brooklyn Bums were my kind of team. I wasn’t too disappointed when they moved to Los Angeles. After all, they had palm trees there so it couldn’t be all bad.
I continued to be a Dodger fan right up to and through puberty, and then as one would expect, baseball took a backseat to girls and cars, the twin obsession of many adolescents. However, to this day I believe that my fascination with and support for my Dodger team taught me some valuable lessons about what it meant to be a righteous human being. And here’s a note to warm a Dodger fan’s heart: an original Topps Sandy Koufax baseball card goes for over $1,200 now!
Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.
When you were a kid did you ever do the thing, “I think I hear my mother calling”? It was a useful gambit when some bullies were threatening or a neighbor asked for help weeding her garden or a girl gave me the fish-eye after a perfectly good joke.
When I retired, I went back to school to get an MFA. I was thrilled to be accepted and part of a cohort with people the age of my children and grandchildren. The program went well, until one evening, when it was my turn to have my non-fiction story about my twenty-eight years as a visiting nurse critiqued by the class. I wrote about the first sisters of Providence, who served the mountain men and native peoples of the Rockies. I was shocked when several twenty somethings insulted my character. “How,” one said with furrowed brow, could I use the word “served” in relation to indigenous peoples?
That’s the big boomer dilemma. Should you stay or should you go. (Apologies to The Clash, 1982) Age in place or head for the hills. Not hills really; more like swanky assisted living (swanky…there’s a word nobody uses anymore, especially not when referring to average assisted living digs).
My old buddy’s heart attack—he swam laps alone in a pool—left him floating face down like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, only without the bullet holes and sleaze. He’d been self-made, was now self-finished, and would have liked that symmetry. The living map of my world shrank. We’d run out of shared laughter. I stood on a road somewhere, waiting.
I asked my grandson to help me sort out some computer frazzles. I had to admit to myself that we can’t all be technological super stars forever. Just think if Olympic athletes could push speed, endurance and flexibility into old age. Still, it was embarrassing to realize that the digital train had just left the station and I was stuck at the gate. I wanted to tell him that a lot of my fix-it knowledge had passed an expiration date—that I had had my day, in my day.
