The afternoon was cool blue with a couple of puffy clouds as I stepped off the center island into the beach-bound lane of Lindell Boulevard and settled into my Roy White stance, twisting my feet pigeon-toed, choking upon the bat, holding it tight to my body, and pressing air into my lips in concentration like he did. Across the street, on the sidewalk in front of my house, my friend Phillip stood with a baseball in his right hand, a mitt on his left, and a question in his raised eyebrows: Are you sure?

Given the fresh green of our perpetually brutalized patch of lawn, it must have been late spring.

Behind me, across an oval of grass, on the Park Avenue-bound side of our street, there was Mrs. Crabapple and the lady on the corner who looked like I DreamIDream of Jeannie and had a Corgi like our dog, Coco. On our side the old people one house closer to the beach gave us hard candies with soft centers wrapped in crinkly paper if we sat on their plastic-covered sofa and talked for a few minutes. The pineapple ones were the best. Some old Jewish people in the neighborhood had concentration camp tattoos on their arms, like the old lady who owned the candy store on Park Avenue, who showed us hers once.

“It’s fine,” I told Phillip, a big, funny kid with a plump red face and curly blonde hair, usually easy going but just then worried about our decision to play baseball that day with a real baseball and real bat and facing the house instead of stoop ball, our usual version, played with a tennis ball or red rubber ball, a broom handle for a bat, and facing the street with our red brick steps as a backstop so balls and strikes bounced back to the pitcher and the worst that happened if you really killed one was it flew into Mrs. Crabapple’s yard and she would yell at whoever went to get it, which is why we called her that. Once our red rubber ball bouncing into the tire of her car caused an entire grownup confab in her driveway with Mom and even Dad, who happened to be home, talking, gesturing, placating. In politics he called it “moving them up a notch,” moving your opponent one step closer to you, and he did it in real life, too..