Pete Rose Cardboard Belly Grass-Sliding

Charlie Hustle

 

As I’m writing this week’s story, we’re down south at our Phoenix home.  Our house sits on a corner lot within a baseball’s throw of a small town civic center.  The cross street that our house parallels must be directly on the route to all of the local schools because the buses all stop at the corner, just outside our front door.  Through my kitchen window, I have a direct view of all of the kids and their morning antics.

The high schoolers are boring.  They arrive, they try to act cool and nonchalant, they don’t interact much with each other.  They’d rather be anywhere than where they are and if they didn’t, they certainly aren’t going to show it to their peers.  The elementary kids aren’t much better.  They all act like a bunch of kids (the nerve of them).

The junior high kids; now there’s where the action is. 

Season of Youth – the Magic of the Baseball

Charlie Hustle

In Getting the Boys Snipped, I wrote a brief introduction to some of the more famous baseball characters in the Prytania neighborhood.  Today I thought I might try to condense 3-4 years of neighborhood baseball games into one short story.  As I just wrote that last sentence, I had to stop to feel the impact from this statement.  It really was only just a few years of park baseball because we moved into the neighborhood when I was in 5th grade.  My baseball playing group would have become too big for the park when I hit 8th or 9th grade as it was a small park.  It feels like it was so much longer than just a few short years; everything is larger when you’re young, even time itself.