My house in Cupertino, CA had a plum tree in the back yard. Every year we would fill up bags of plums (brown paper sacks from the grocery store, no plastic option back then, just paper) and hit the streets selling them for 50 cents a bag or something like that. I hated those plums, actually still do. Anyway, my brother David was up in the plum tree, sitting on a branch and bouncing on it as he was singing the Cheerios commercial, "Gonna have a pow-pow-powerful, good-good feeling from Cheer-Cheer-Cheerioooooooooooosss...." snap! The branch breaks and Dave goes down. With a concussion. Mr. Glass-Head.
Carl and I were walking home from Fremont Older School on the path they made through the acre or so of dirt that was basically a 4 foot wide strip of tar-asphalt that they would make a new layer on every year or so, creating quite a lip. We come upon david laying on the path next to his bike. He apparently had the experience where the front wheel got caught and he went down. We just walked past him, came in the front door and asked my mom, "Why is David's sleeping on the path?"
And we had a punk of the neighborhood named Ronnie Brown. He threw a huge rock at Chris Nordstrom, who ducked, and it tagged David in the head! Blood and gunk. Maybe a helmet would have come in handy to just hang out in for those first 10 years of life.
But as the weather gets nicer I always go back to us playing Hit The Bat out in the street. You know- someone hits the ball and whoever catches it rolls it back to try and hit the bat. When it hits the bat and bounced in the air and the batter caught it before it hit the ground he was still up, but if it hit the ground then the person who rolled would then bat. Rolling the ball was a bit like reading the greens on a golf course- you had to figure for the slope of the street and such. The funny part is we would have a ton of us out in the street and when the ball was hit there would be more mitts being thrown at the ball than trying to catch it! It almost was more rewarding (in a weird way) to make sure someone else didn't catch it! And everyone's mitt had a name- The Noodle, The Crease (Carl could never get a good crease on his mitt), The Slap, The Reach (Nordstroms mitt was unusually long), The Claw, The Utah Mold (my cousin came down for a while to stay and brought his mitt), The Extended Reach, and there were others. Hours of good old wholesome fun. Well, the city let us know for weeks that they would be repaving our streets and on what day we would need to have our cars off the roads. Mrs. Mitchell, for whatever reason, was the only person who didn't move her car. She drove through the fresh asphalt only to have to turn around at the barricade and drive back up the street, leaving troughs and lumps up and down the street! I relate this because many were the cursing of Mrs. Mitchell... once we went back out to play, you'd roll the ball, it being right on course for the bat only to get caught in one of her tire grooves and then horribly missing the target. Bloomin!
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