[Elspode]

The Backstop

I've reached an age where the word "perspective" has taken on a whole new meaning. When I
look back in my life, spanning periods of time that not so very long ago would have seemed
unimaginable, I become severely contemplative. "Nostalgia" has also achieved new stature in my
vocabulary, by dint of the same aging process that redefined perspective.

With a few years of exception, I now live in the same house in which I grew up, at least, for my
junior high and high school years. Therefore, it follows logically that my glory days played out
against the backdrop of this same neighborhood, the site of the family home which I inherited
when my mother passed some 14 years ago. Being in the same place for 33 years makes for some
interesting memories, and some rather startling comparisons when I hold up those memories
against the views I see day to day in my familiar old stomping grounds.

Of late, I have taken to walking the dog past what was the nexus of my mannish youth, the local
neighborhood ball diamond. No bat has met horsehide there for at least 15 years, and even then
it was a shadow of its former self. But in my youth...oh my. In my youth, it was hallowed
ground, the place where boyhood fantasies and conflicts were played out, the place where we spat
on our hands, rubbed them in the dirt, and got down to seeing who was who and what was what.
Ask any mature male, and he's probably got a similar site in his past. Our local pickup ballyard
was the first piece of ground for which I learned to care on a personal level; more than the family
yard, more than any other hunk of real estate I had ever known. This was no planned, contracted,
constructed recreational site. This was a carved-from-the-land,
we're-gonna-play-ball-here-or-else baseball field. I have mowed its grass, filled its holes, carried
its rocks away. I have sat atop railroad ties with spikes embedded in them as they were towed
around and around, a sheet of chain link fabric bringing up the rear, grinding the dirt into smooth
perfection. I have mended the backstop itself, weaving muffler wire back and forth, patching the
damage lest an errant foul tip pass through. I kissed my first girlfriend on the benches, and
dreamed of hitting a long one over the distant fence demarcating the backyards of the nearby
houses. I have known this place...I have loved this place.

For those who are unfamiliar with my neck of the woods, the scene is set thus: My house backs
up on a large vacant field. Our neighborhood is surrounded on two sides by large parks, and so
the field is rife with nocturnal deer, flocks of birds, opportunistic squirrels, timid rabbits, tiny voles
and all manner of creeping, flying beasties. In the early days of Grandview suburbia, signs stood
in this modest expanse, proudly proclaiming "New Shopping Center Coming Soon!" In fact, the
signs stood so long that they rotted, were replaced, and rotted again. Alas, the only thing that
ever got built there was a Quik Trip. That operation long ago pulled up stakes for more
prosperous highway siting, leaving the building to be reopened as a generic convenience store
operated by an Iranian family. Convenience shopping excepted, the field has stood blessedly
empty, 30 or so acres of blessed rolling pasture, dotted by a few trees, some piles of dumped dirt,
a couple of kid-dug trenches...and the backstop.

It is the only easily visible vestige of our former field of dreams. The backstop rises some nine
feet above the mud hole that was once home plate, a three-faced, overgrown, cheesy fence fabric
construct, standing as rusting testament to better days. If you stand and look very closely, you
can still see the depressions in the ground that were the base paths, although they are now faint
indeed. Behind the backstop are hunks of old telephone pole still buried deep in the earth, across
which boards were once placed; one row on each side - home team side, and visitor's side, of
course. I remember when those poles were sunk, courtesy of the neighborhood middle-aged
health freak who determined that he was going to organize our ragtag pickup games, and install
himself as shortstop, despite the fact that he was fully 20 years older than the rest of us. It was he
who refurbished the dragging equipment which had lain there in the high grass for longer than any
of us kids could remember; it was his old Dodge sedan which towed it in dirt-churning circles
with three of us punks atop it for weight.

I have lately found myself standing at the backstop, leaning up against its oxidizing upright, falling
back in my mind across the years, and watching the images of another day play out against the
screen of brown, dormant grasses. There are erstwhile, shirtless youths driving metal fence post
foul-poles into the ground in preparation for the mounting of our homemade distance signs;
distances which are hopelessly optimistic, meant to indicate the distance required for a home run.
My aged yellow German shepherd trots carelessly across the game in progress to lie at my feet at
second base, eliciting catcalls and complaints from the other competitors. There's Ronnie
Aldridge, standing on the pitching board, catching a smartly-struck comebacker with his testicles,
freezing in a hunched-over, grimacing posture, then falling, sideways, stiff as a board to the
ground. He clutches his groin, unable to speak, making only tiny wheezing noises. We carry him
home, and his mom makes us help him hold the ice pack on his crotch, all the while lecturing us
on how someone was going to get really hurt up there some day. I see clearly the time I turned
the perfect double play, taking the feed from the shortstop and pegging to the first baseman. I
hear the 'thwap' of the ball hit his gloved palm, and watch him shaking his reddening hand as he
trots back in to take his next ups.

There were countless games, endless hours; a litany so full that it exceeds the capacity of my
memory. The guys from the neighborhood across the way coming in, challenging us...and
whipping our asses. A few weeks later, we had skimmed off the best of their number, becoming
supreme amongst the other ragtags that drifted in during the long summer, and got assigned to team
up with the loser kids. They played the Generals to our Globetrotters, and victory was no less
sweet for all the shady team assignments. No day was too hot, no wind was too gusty, no sunset
too dark for a game to be completed. We would play until our faces were burned, our fingers
blistered, our bodies sore.

It was a temple of ritual; rites of passage from boy to youth; a stopover on the way to manhood.
Some of us drank our first beers there under cover of darkness. Rumor even had it that, if you
found yourself there of a dark evening with Sally Jean, you might even get more than you'd
bargained for. It was meeting place and social hall, grapevine and joke resource, all wrapped
up in a comforting blanket of baseball. Through it all, there was, and is, the backstop,
unintentional monument, silent sentinel, guardian of my youth.

Instead of stopping baseballs, it now keeps my cherished memories from rolling too far away.