Ah, the idylls of boyhood
From the living room window you can see it coming: Mrs. McNeil’s leafless elms are rustling with optimism; street-side chunks of frozen slush are repulsive but receding; young Garvey’s aging Toyota is yawning with ambivalence over whether or not to grant its teenaged master a few more months of mobile respectability; the scarred compost barrel is struggling to escape incarceration in the sidewalk snow bank.
It’s spring on the edge, and it’s playing expectant peekaboo with the burghers of Brookfield, Bickerton and Brule; it’s tempting folks in Stanley, Stanhope and Stellarton.
Which reminds me, as it has for a lot of years, that clustering in the nether regions of Interstate 95, in places called Lakeland and Lauderdale, there are, as the moments fly, big boys not just burnishing their tans but toning their triceps, each determined to coax bigger boys into calling out their names, inviting them to cavort on the luxurious baseball lawns of the continent’s metropoles, and to be well paid for the privilege.
It’s the world of spring training and, from near and afar, those agile jocks of varying vintages are being watched, ogled and gawked at by a lot of others, also ageless juveniles, envious, wistful, reminiscent. I know, because for a very long time, I’ve been one of them.
Infatuation with the gallantry of major league baseball has, perforce, to begin each year about now with instructional and testing rituals, some mid-winter trade analyses, the monitoring of age and injury, all seeming to contribute to the strange obsession which, for me, goes back generations to when the game would take on its own enchantment, and the kid would meet the colossus who, Bill Mazeroski notwithstanding, would later win the 1960 World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates with a game-prolonging homerun.
Hal Smith is and was an unlikely hero, his was a roving professional career that unfolded in the ultra-minors of Ventura and Newark and worked its way to and through pauses in towns like Baltimore, Kansas City, Houston, Cincinnati… and for a couple of seasons in the midst of that whistle-stop tour, Pittsburgh. Yet, he and I have a history that predates all that, traceable to a backwater sandlot in southwestern Ontario and the humid Dominion Day (as it then was) when Joe Gentile’s Gentlemen, motley barnstormers, came from Detroit to entertain the denizens of Essex County.
My Pal Hal was 19 that day. I was 12 and sporting the kind of cheek required to wheedle a seat on Mr. Gentile’s bench to the immediate right of Mr. Smith who, it was announced shortly before the game time, would be leaving the next day to join a New York Yankee farm team. Did I have the best seat in the house? I thought so.
Like many relationships, this one was built on thirst, Hal’s and mine. I had a pocketful of dimes and nickels; he didn’t. I had easy access to the park’s pop shop; he didn’t.
“Cin I have a swig of yer pop?” asked my robust seat-mate.
“Sure,” I said, leaving him to drain my jug of soda.
“Got any more?” he queries an out or two later.
“No, but I’ll get some,” I promise, scampering off to the tent behind the backstop.
“How many’d ya get” my new friend inquires an inning later.
“Two, but I can get some more,” I submit, making yet another beeline to the nearby oasis.
“You might as well get about four,” advised Hal.
A six-pack later, the sun is beginning to set over Windsor and my new-found deity was climbing back onto Joe Gentile’s bus and on to the major leagues.
I often wonder, especially in the spring, whatever’s become of Hal Smith. He was something of a guitar-playing minstrel; maybe he found a new limelight. Or maybe he espoused corporate law, or took to selling vinyl siding. Somebody’s said he lives in Texas.
No matter; I’d give lots to see him again, have a chat, maybe about that World Series home run, maybe about that salad day back in Essex. Maybe I could con him into a coke.
He owes me one.