The Average White Guy

Well, I woke up this morning to the cool air for the first time since the weather broke for the summer here in Pittsburgh. We’ve had some chilly mornings this summer, but this morning had that feel to it. The leaves are slowly starting to turn, which reminds me: I really need to take some pictures this season, perhaps up north of Pittsburgh. Even now in the early afternoon, there’s a hint of autumn. I love it. This time of year always brings back some of my fondest memories…

Any baseball fan should get jitters when the weather starts to cool down. When the weather cools off, it means that the playoffs are just around the corner. This year is (of course) no exception. The playoff race is really tight all over the league, and it’s gonna be a great postseason. Being the Yankee fan I am, I’m lovin’ it. If you had to ask me to draw a picture of what the MLB postseason looks like, I would draw a sketch of Mariano Rivera blowing into his pitching hand, while taking the signs from Jorge Posada, with the game on the line. That’s playoff baseball to me. Joe Buck has the call, and the network microphones around the stadium pick up the fanfare from the bleachers at Yankee Stadium. Then, with an 0-2 count, Rivera throws his hall-of-fame worthy cut-fastball to a righty, only to have him swing and shatter his bat, as the ball is grounded weakly to Derek Jeter at short. This is the third out of the nineth, and the Yankees go on to win the ALCS. I’m jumping around my living room, wondering who the World Series opponent will be, because the NLCS game 7 is tomorrow night. These are memories folks; not pipe dreams!

It’s also the real start of football season. I supposed that’s almost treasonous in Pittsburgh. Here, it’s supposed to be football season 365 days out of the year (and 366 in leap years). But I just can’t get into football when the AC is still pumping the cold air into my house; I need the real cool autumn air. Once it does finally get here, I get the football bug. Some of my best memories in life happened in the late evenings this time of year. We would play football until it was too dark to see the neon-colored Nerf ball. I’m thinking back 16 years now. WOW! 16 years ago?! When I think about it, my brain sorta goes into that “I can’t wait until I get home tonight to play football” mode, as if I were still that same skinny little short kid. I miss those days so much. Everything was simpler then.

Someone would inveritably get hurt, but not bad. We were extremely resillient. (I’m going to get punched for this next one - right, Natalie?) I remember “Court”ing the first girl I would ever date. She and her sister played with us too. They had the best backyard for it. Their yard didn’t have fences, and their neighbors on either side never minded us playing our games back there. Penn Hills (my childhood neighborhood) is extremely hilly, (as the name indicates). But Heather and Courtney’s yard was a little more flat than most, so it was good for football. We would play around back there until everything started to look blue, and finally black. As the evening was turning to night, we’d go from playing football to sitting and bullshittin’. The girls ware inside by now, but us guys…we liked to talk.

Have you ever noticed that each season sounds different? For instance: the spring is all about the birds. No matter what you do outside, the sound is predominantly birds. In the summer, it turns to lawnmowers, weed-eaters, wood chippers, and there’s always a jackhammer going somewhere. In the winter, it’s typically pretty quiet, with the exception of church bells. But autumn…this is the best of all. My neighborhood growing up was a big valley. I lived towards the top of one of the hills, on the top of the other hill about two miles away was a four-lane highway. In those late evenings, sitting with my brother and friends in the wet, dewy grass, as the light is fading, you could hear the cars on that highway. No one in particular stood out from the others, and there was never a truck that dominated the soundscape. It didn’t sound like an interstate; that’s an altogehter different sound. It was more like listening to a conch shell. Every now and then there would be a lull, but not too much. The sound was very soft, but was always there.

When the leaves fell off the trees, you could see it from my neighborhood. By then it was getting downright cold outside most nights, and most us would have bailed for home by then. God it was awesome. Without sidetracking too much, I wonder how kids today can’t appreciate these little nuances. I wonder why they would rather sit inside and play football on a 3″ screen than go outside and get some dirt under their fingernails. I hated coming home at the end of the night. It was traditionally after everyone else went home that I would get bored enough to go too. I would wander through all the neighborhood shortcuts to get home.

You could go from one end of the neighborhood to the other without so much as seeing the paved road or a car. The paths overgrown with briar are beginning to widen again, and the remaining jagger bushes are dry enough now that you can snap them with your hand to clear your path. It’s dark, but you don’t need the light; you know where every exposed tree root , rock, and every turn is on these wooded paths. There was no fear because these were YOUR paths. Of course we didn’t build them.

These paths were here for years. We more or less inherited them from the older kids who got to high school and realized that backyard ball, and neighborhood shortcuts are beneath them. I would eventually feel that way too; we all did, but by then, the youngest of us were ready to take over the reigns as guardians of the forts, hideouts, and paths. There where no rituals for the handoff; everyone just seemed to know what to do. We didn’t need politics. We knew everything worked, so there was no need to question or change it.

My brother Bill is about three years younger than me. I used to hate to drag him around with me, but I did it anyhow. Sometimes I made him wish I didn’t though. I was rough on him then, but I grew out of that too. I guess at some point I realized that everyone in the neighborhood would have to go home sometime, but he’d be the only one left at the end of the night.

I also supposed that Bill was an easy target being my brother. I think I might have used him to show my dominance over our small group. I could be wrong, but I think back on myself as the leader. I don’t mean the “boss” of everyone, but I asserted influence on the group. I didn’t try to be the boss; I’m just a natural leader type. My sister Mary was too young to hang out with us then, but maybe Bill can chime in here (if he reads my blog) and tell me what he saw.

I was thirteen when all of this happened. I had just started the seventh grade - my first year of Junior High School at Linton. That is September & October of 1990, and yet it might as well have been last week. The tension in the Persian Gulf was heating up, but we didn’t know what that meant. We heard about it on the news, and we talked about “war” with each other, but to us war meant guerrillas fighting it out in the jungle or woods. At least that’s how we emulated it. We had no concept of dictatorships or international law, the UN, or OPEC. None of us knew what “war” really meant. Now I know what it means, and I wish I didn’t.

I want to sit back behind Courtney’s house and listen to the cars on the highway again. I want to play ball with my brother and our friends. I want to look forward to tomorrow night’s game, because all my friends are gonna be there. I don’t want to think about bills, taxes, jobs, and bosses. I just want to be thirteen again.

Ok, so this sounds a little “The Wonder Years”-ish, but I don’t give a shit. I’m very nostalgic, and I love getting lost in good memories. I hope you enjoy reading it, and may your best childhood memories come back to you if they’ve been missing.