‘The sports palace of my innocent years’
worries. Few responsibilities. No resentment or guilt or fear of the future. Nothing, really, except the next game. Divvy up the phone calls and organize the teams.
I was incredibly lucky that way — and I couldn’t help but think of it a few weekends ago, when I returned home to Buffalo to say goodbye to my childhood home.
My parents are in their late 80s now, so they finally (and reluctantly) moved into an apartment in January. The house was put up for sale. It’s empty now. I gasped when I walked in, never having experienced it without abundant life inside.
I mean, it’s just a house. I haven’t lived there for 30 years. But that is my house. That will always be my house.
Part of me associates the place with pain. Breakups, goodbyes, growing up, moving out, seeing my grandmother for the last time there. All of it raced through my mind as I closed my eyes in the weirdly deserted kitchen.
Bittersweet is a great word. It applies perfectly here. And you know what? In the end, it’s mostly sweet.
In the end, I remember my ancient house as the sports palace of my innocent years. I remember quirky little things that are very personally mine.
Like the bookcase I used as a strike zone for solo marathon games of Nerf baseball. Or the pink blanket I draped over the hockey net in the basement, leaving only the four corners at which to shoot tennis balls.
Or the 48-minute Nerf basketball games I played in the living room, driving my mother to distraction. I kept stats. I would often be the Cleveland Cavaliers of Jim Chones, Campy Russell and Bingo Smith.
Russell had an over-thehead shooting motion I copied. I told him this years later. He was working for the Cavs at an exhibition game at Mellon Arena. He looked at me like I was nuts.
I was. I played one-person football in the snow and twoon-two street hockey games at the top of the driveway and violent one-on-one basketball games against my brother at the hoop our dad dug into the ground.
When my brother was a toddler I would line him up at one end of the living room and order him to run at me as fast as he could and try to dive onto the couch before I could tackle him. Goal-line stands.
My dad was a history professor at Daemen College. His “study” was a tiny room filled with books. And for me, filled with golden memories. I would sit on the horrendous yellow couch, near the radiator, for eight hours each Sunday during football season watching PackersVikings, Steelers-Raiders, Bills-Dolphins.
I was obsessed with the 1970s Pirates, and in 1979 I finally saw them win it all (I was too young to appreciate ‘71). When Omar Moreno squeezed the final out, I walked halfway up the front staircase and took a seat, thinking, “So this is what it feels like when your team wins a championship.”
Ihad never experienced that.It wasn’t what I expected, either. Part jubilation, part “is this all there is?”
I was 14, and I have always looked back on that moment as the unofficial end of my childhood. Life just got different after that. The ground rules changed. Time began to fly like Omar Moreno on the basepaths.
Everybody got old. Including me.