The Game

The autumn of 1962 gave birth to my love affair with baseball, while at the same time sealing it in dismay. I was eight years old, growing up as an American kid in the Philippines, far away from most things familiar, with the exception of a ball and glove.

I preferred baseball to air, daily devouring the box scores in the ‘Stars & Stripes’ armed forces newspaper – research for my ongoing schoolyard arguments about the true eternal concerns of life. Which team was going to win the pennant? Would there be a triple-crown winner this year? Would someone break the home run record set by Maris in 61?

On and on our deliberations went, until they became an endless life of their own.

1962 brought the World Series that launched my decent into a lifetime of Yankee purgatory, when Bobby Richardson snared a line drive that ended all hope for the San Francisco Giants winning their first World Series since their departure from New York after the 1957 season.

Later that tropical autumn, a bunch of my buddies from boarding school and I carved out a makeshift diamond behind the screened porch of our dorm. Left field was a wide patch of swampy brush and weeds taller than we were, extending some twenty feet to a concrete block wall at the back of the property. No matter how hard we tried to direct our swings toward right field, it was inevitable that one of us would get hold of a pitch and seemingly drive the ball into heaven, only to have it descend into the middle of this jungle. Rule number one was that ‘he who hit the ball had to retrieve it.’ Kipling might well have used our tales of slithering creatures as inspiration for a new series of jungle stories, and though none of us ever proved we saw these larger than life serpents with our own eyes, we’d emerge from the neck high grass, ball in hand, breathless, embellishing yet another close encounter with the end of our young lives.

And back to the plate we’d go; until darkness chased us inside.

Baseball.

(from 'Flight From the Land of God' by Zachary Jack Marcus)