LITTLE LEAGUE
I told son Tom last Saturday at granddaughter Anna’s volleyball game that, triggered by seeing a rolling cart used for ferrying volleyballs around, I thought that I would write about the bat box we used to tote around our bats the first year I played Little League baseball at age 11 for Amity Presbyterian Church’s inaugural team, coached by its new pastor, Rev. Colon (I kid you not). During this past week, as I tried to reconstruct the timeline, I couldn’t remember whether I was in the 5th grade at Oakhurst or the 6th at Idlewild when I began playing, so I called brother Bill (4 years older) for help but he couldn’t even remember where he went to 8th grade. Some help he was. I called Bill rather than brother Harry (2 years younger) because I figured he was “too little in the britch(es)” (one of my older Kiser cousins’ favorite expressions in explaining why I shouldn’t be allowed to do certain things or receive answers to certain questions, a phrase that still sticks in my craw, but which only stimulated my interest in the subject I was asking about or the activity I was begging to participate in, thus causing me to barrage them with more questions or pester them to let me participate, and which, on reflection, I should probably be grateful for as I’m sure it helped spur my intellectual curiosity, such as it is, and feed my competitiveness, which traits, I suppose, have been more blessings than curses over the many years) in those days to be of much help. All of which reminds me, and I hope you, that time, “like an ever rolling stream, bares all its sons (but first their memories) away” so we should say and write those things we’d like others to know about us and what we think while memory and health still permit.
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