I can almost hear the sound of some distinguished actor doing the voice over introduction to the movie. In the opening, the sun would be shining and the season would be forever summer. There would be a breeze blowing out to rightfield coaxing even the most innocent of fly balls into the woods behind our sandlot. A transistor radio would be alternately playing Cleveland Indian baseball games and Top 40 radio hits from CKLW in Detroit.
Aroma from backyard charcoal barbeques would fill the air on Sunday afternoons. My brothers and I would be recruiting anyone in the neighborhood for wiffle ball, kick the can, hide and seek or any number of mystery games we invented along the way. Cool nights would force us into windbreakers as we chased lightning bugs with open jars. And it would all seem to last forever.
Of course, that’s the catch. Back then, it did seem like it would never end. I remember sitting on our front lawn on an August afternoon in the middle of the 1960’s and thinking about the long summer I was living. September and everything that came along with it seemed so far in the future for me that day. Ultimately, September did come but so did more adventures and experiences and before too long, another summer.
It doesn’t work like that anymore. Now time is so fleeting I sometimes think that somebody secretly stole a couple of hours from each day or a day or two from every month. I can’t seem to slow things down to the pace I used to enjoy, the pace I want. Things seem so busy and hurried now that I feel accomplished when I can go to work, cut the grass and get a good night’s sleep all in the same day. But those long ago days when I was younger, those days that I so romanticize now, suddenly seem clearer to me. It’s as if they have something to teach me and I have things yet to learn. My days at that house on 412 Vineland were not that many, less than six years in all. Nor were they especially glamorous. But they have carved for themselves a deeper canyon in my memory than most of the other times in my life. I didn’t know how special that time was then. My guess is that few of us do. But right now, I’m thinking that I’m not the only one who lived at a 412 Vineland.
(And here’s an interesting sidebar to that. On July 4th we have a celebration in our village and we live on a street that gets a lot of pedestrian traffic on the way to the annual parade. One of the people walking by that day stopped briefly and looked at our house. He said to me, “I grew up in that house.” I smiled to myself and thought that was probably his 412 Vineland.)
