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Authors: Wallace Rogers
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door. But he reappeared three steps before I got there, filling the threshold with his broad-shouldered frame. Seconds later he was sitting across the table from me, pushing another bottle of Rolling Rock in my direction.
“Name an experience you had while we were growing up in Maplewood that affected the rest of your life,” I said. “There must have been at least a few. ”
Adams looked up at me quizzically. His smile told me that he liked the question. I was surprised how quickly he responded. It was as if he’d been sneaked a copy of one of Mrs. Porter’s dreaded essay tests in tenth-grade world history class, and the question I had just posed was the only one printed on the test sheet she had just dropped on his desk. The fragrant whiff of a freshly mimeographed piece of paper swept through me.
The sound of the telephone ringing inside his house interrupted us. Adams braced the sides of his chair, then changed his mind and decreed, “Let the machine get it.” After the ringing stopped, he pressed forward, his arms resting on the end of the table. He slid to the edge of his chair. His brown eyes danced; he was busy building his answer.
“Remember that first spring we lived in Maplewood, when we had Little League tryouts? It was late March, a cold day—full of drizzle, like the second half of March always seemed to be in Ohio. Too wet to play on the baseball fields. Remember? My parents dropped us off at the edge of the shopping center parking lot.”
I closed my eyes as Adams spoke and felt the chill he described, heard the anxious, hushed voices of two hundred boys whispering to each other, the sharp commands of two dozen men, the crack of wooden bats hitting balls, the sound balls make when they’re speared by leather baseball gloves on cold days. I wondered why the people who owned the shopping center built that parking lot so big. It was never more than half filled, even during Christmas season. The outer edge of the lake of black patched asphalt was so distant from the lights of the stores that it became a destination point for loitering kids who Maplewood’s vigilant adults and small police force were sure were up to no good.
The memory Adams had recreated caused me to break into a sweat. “I remember. Somebody’s father called your number. It was written in black Magic Marker on a piece of white paper attached with safety pins to the back of your sweatshirt. He hit two ground balls to you.”
The balls were rubber-coated, because Maplewood
Little League’s Founding Fathers didn’t want to scuff the leather-covered baseballs on the parking lot asphalt. The rubber-coated hardball came at you quickly, like a golf ball thrown against a brick wall. It bounced almost as wildly. After you caught the ball or knocked it down, you threw it to somebody’s father who pretended he was playing first base.
Adams took up the story again: “Then you were pushed to another line and hit a couple of fly balls. You threw five pitches to a catcher from a makeshift pitcher’s mound on the grass next to the parking lot. Finally, you got three swings at pitches from some adult who couldn’t throw the ball over a plastic home plate. God help you if you didn’t swing at every one of his pitches.”
I closed my eyes and recalled the groans from the grown-ups and how louder they got with every bad pitch you didn’t swing at. Men with clipboards were constantly evaluating us. They stood in clumps of two and three watching us, talking to each other in hushed tones after every ball was caught, missed, tossed, or hit. They took notes about our performance that none of us ever saw, with the exception of James Roan, a provisional member of our clique who lived on Keats Drive. Roan somehow had access to everything we were never supposed to see: everyone’s permanent record at school, everybody’s IQ and SAT scores, Playboy magazines, and boxes full of paperback crime novels that featured buxom women in provocative
“Name an experience you had while we were growing up in Maplewood that affected the rest of your life,” I said. “There must have been at least a few. ”
Adams looked up at me quizzically. His smile told me that he liked the question. I was surprised how quickly he responded. It was as if he’d been sneaked a copy of one of Mrs. Porter’s dreaded essay tests in tenth-grade world history class, and the question I had just posed was the only one printed on the test sheet she had just dropped on his desk. The fragrant whiff of a freshly mimeographed piece of paper swept through me.
The sound of the telephone ringing inside his house interrupted us. Adams braced the sides of his chair, then changed his mind and decreed, “Let the machine get it.” After the ringing stopped, he pressed forward, his arms resting on the end of the table. He slid to the edge of his chair. His brown eyes danced; he was busy building his answer.
“Remember that first spring we lived in Maplewood, when we had Little League tryouts? It was late March, a cold day—full of drizzle, like the second half of March always seemed to be in Ohio. Too wet to play on the baseball fields. Remember? My parents dropped us off at the edge of the shopping center parking lot.”
I closed my eyes as Adams spoke and felt the chill he described, heard the anxious, hushed voices of two hundred boys whispering to each other, the sharp commands of two dozen men, the crack of wooden bats hitting balls, the sound balls make when they’re speared by leather baseball gloves on cold days. I wondered why the people who owned the shopping center built that parking lot so big. It was never more than half filled, even during Christmas season. The outer edge of the lake of black patched asphalt was so distant from the lights of the stores that it became a destination point for loitering kids who Maplewood’s vigilant adults and small police force were sure were up to no good.
The memory Adams had recreated caused me to break into a sweat. “I remember. Somebody’s father called your number. It was written in black Magic Marker on a piece of white paper attached with safety pins to the back of your sweatshirt. He hit two ground balls to you.”
The balls were rubber-coated, because Maplewood
Little League’s Founding Fathers didn’t want to scuff the leather-covered baseballs on the parking lot asphalt. The rubber-coated hardball came at you quickly, like a golf ball thrown against a brick wall. It bounced almost as wildly. After you caught the ball or knocked it down, you threw it to somebody’s father who pretended he was playing first base.
Adams took up the story again: “Then you were pushed to another line and hit a couple of fly balls. You threw five pitches to a catcher from a makeshift pitcher’s mound on the grass next to the parking lot. Finally, you got three swings at pitches from some adult who couldn’t throw the ball over a plastic home plate. God help you if you didn’t swing at every one of his pitches.”
I closed my eyes and recalled the groans from the grown-ups and how louder they got with every bad pitch you didn’t swing at. Men with clipboards were constantly evaluating us. They stood in clumps of two and three watching us, talking to each other in hushed tones after every ball was caught, missed, tossed, or hit. They took notes about our performance that none of us ever saw, with the exception of James Roan, a provisional member of our clique who lived on Keats Drive. Roan somehow had access to everything we were never supposed to see: everyone’s permanent record at school, everybody’s IQ and SAT scores, Playboy magazines, and boxes full of paperback crime novels that featured buxom women in provocative
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