In the green and sandy days of ago, when the clothes were hand-me-downs and no jeans had knees, we rode (yes, helmetless) with the wind in our hair, sometimes without working brakes, through the streets and alleys and vacant lots of the west side of LA, not knowing that it would end.
On the sandlot diamonds of Stoner Park, amid the eucalyptus forest at the VA, across the vast tarmac of Cloverfield and down the steepness of Navy St, hearts in throat, rebel-yelling, standing on the peddles, we left 1955 in our dust. Terry, Chuck, Bob, Ed, Tommy, Dennis, Mike, Richard, Bobby. The names come back like echoes of laughter spent on everything and nothing in particular. All together, circling under a high fly ball hit by someone’s father, rolling on the lawns and in the dirt, careening hills, ignoring fences, living as if we would all have skinned knees and elbows for the rest of our lives. How could we have known?
In a world of guardian angels and venial sins, of purgatory and penance, when short prayers where still ejaculations and there was an actual Holy Day called The Feast of the Circumcision, we learned to dress in cassocks and serve Mass, to genuflect, and to raise our voices in song to a God that always knew what we were doing, but was willing to forgive us anyway. And we would march from recess walking two-by-two and Terry Driskill and I would hold hands all the way up the stairs and down the halls and over any seated classmates until we arrived at our desks. And in the year when we all had to wear ties to school, we wore clip-ons and fired them out the classroom window at 3:00 to later retrieve them in the alley. And boys who got butches or crew cuts had to wear girl’s beanies until their hair grew out…so Tommy York kept getting buzzed and proudly wore the beanie to school as a badge of defiance. Brown corduroy pants, yellow school shirts, a single bell mounted on a wall that could summon all back inside and perhaps wake the dead in the process, now echoes still and calls me still, but this time I choose to play on.
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