The Musings of a Simple Country Man
By Hobie Morris
All that is requisite is that we should pause in living to enjoy life, and should lift up our hearts to things that are pure goods in themselves so that to have found and loved them…may remain a happiness that nothing can sully. –George Santayanna
(Brookfield, NY – April 2014) When a kid growing up on Milton Place in South Utica baseball’s Spring training takes place in our close knit neighborhood when the snow finally melts on our ”Field of Dreams.” Nicely serving this purpose is a vacant “V” shaped lot at the juncture of Milton Place and Sunnyside Drive.
Almost magically, on a cold and sunny April afternoon a bunch of neighborhood kids show up for our annual “rite of Spring.”
They are an odd assortment of friends but all share a common love for playing America’s “great national pastime.”
They arrive clutching a wide assortment of well used, hand-me-down equipment including cracked bats nailed and tire taped together; stiff and sometimes moldy leather gloves passed down from previous generations; tire taped baseballs with flayed seams and uniforms that were our everyday play clothes and spikes and our well worn canvas sneakers. As I recall, a few of us had caps and hard hats are far in the future.
Without any opening day hoopla, sides are picked and it’s time to play ball. The team taking the field pegs the ball around to warm up our cold hands and arms. The first batter takes several mighty swings and he is ready for the first pitch. Spring training is brief and over.
Bases are pieces of cardboard that tend to slide around in the spirited action that follows. Fair and foul lines are made with a sharp stick and the only fence is a neighbor’s house in center field. There are no umpires or instant replays, of course, so arguments over a fair or foul ball or being safe or out add to our excitement.
For children growing up in post World War II America life is incredibly simple compared to 2014. Kids write letters and do homework by hand. TV sets, if your parents could afford one, were in black and white and you changed the few channels by turning a knob on the set. Kids read more and listen to music and professional baseball on a radio. I telephone my pals with a device that had a cord and a round dial with numbers. We have no electric cords attached to our toys and there were 48 states and Cokes were 5 cents.
Playing baseball is what kids like myself like to do after a long winter. We have plenty of local professional baseball heroes to look up to such as Hal White, Em Rosser, Dave Cash, Ted Lepcio and many others from Central New York. An area known far and wide as a hot bed of baseball talent.
Despite being blessed with professional baseball genes (a great uncle was a great pitcher for Boston in the 1890’s) my career was being a very mediocre, vacant lot player. So mediocre, in fact, that I once misjudged the flight of a ball in a sunny sky and “caught” the baseball in my mouth (the scar is still there) instead of his frantically waving glove. In fact none of my pals made the Bigs. Our reward was simply the love of playing a game that excited our dreams and fulfilled our need to physically throw off the shackles of a seemingly endless, dreary winter.
When our game was “called” on account of cold or hunger, or maybe both, we all wearily went home. Some of us were painfully limping; others had raw hands from trying to stop hotly hit balls…all of us had a few aches and pains. But we all had fun.
We’ll be back to our field of dreams in a few days. I can still hear, years later, in the cold April air, one of my pals yelling out loud, “Batter up” as our game began and so did our lives. Such wonderful memories of a simpler, kinder and more enjoyable America. When boys and girls can grow up slowly and could savor this special time in their lives. I know. I was there.
Hobie Morris is a Brookfield resident and simple country man.