Here is what I miss: Slithering -- belly to ground -- through Frank Ford's azalea bushes, winding soundlessly, shrewdly and snake-like, enveloped in darkness, stealthily advancing, approaching, one breathless, imperceptible movement at a time.
Until -- crackling leaves betraying me -- Bernie Johnson, a silhouette backlit by a porchlight, spins to locate me. And I, locking in my breath, go flat and still, nose to the damp, sweet earth, hoping to freeze there undetected.
There are stars overhead and warm summer breezes, and I can hear the trill of crickets in the night. I do not move, but lie there listening to my racing, pumping heart whose mounting drumbeat finally fills my heaving 12-year-old chest.
This is what I miss: Watching in wait, poised cat-like, ready to pounce the instant Bernie finally disappears around the corner of the house, leaving exposed the red Folger's can, haloed in the porchlight; then erupting with a cry and running bold and fleet toward the dented can, where Betsy and Amanda and Pike are held captive by Bernie -- who is "it" -- who then turns and races me to the can, full-speed, legs spinning. But I -- having crawled cunningly close -- am already there and kick the hell out of that dented red Folger's can and send it flying, clanking onto a concrete driveway, freeing the hostages and sending Bernie to retrieve the can while the rest of us vanish into the night like a gust of darting sparrows set loose upon the wind.
And this, too, I miss: Sunday afternoons in the fall when the sky was flawlessly blue and the low-angled sun cast its autumn radiance upon the rust-colored leaves and us, a pack of high school boys playing football. Down at the park. Smashing each other into the turf. Grunts and groans and bloodied noses. Tear-away sweatshirts and mud-stained jeans. The blimp-like leather ball hurtling through the November air. Bodies thudding. Tight spirals and frosted breath and "post" routes, beating Jimmy deep.
Playing on.
Buttonhooks and down-and-outs and a pump-and-go. Leaping and bounding; glorying in our swift, fluid bodies. Back and forth, up and down the field; going all-out. Young rams butting heads and egos; rollicking collisions. Flashing tempers; seething anger.
Playing on.
Until it all comes down to this: The red-orange sun flaring through half-naked trees. Twilight descending upon the field. The air gone cold and gray. One last play.
Line up head-to-head, do-or-die. Eyes fixed, muscles taut. Totally engrossed. Every move, half-move, every flinch crucial. Totally focused. An intensity thick as smoke.
Snap, sprint, cut, feint, your man is by you. The ball is airborne. It's on target. Bird in the sky. You run with all your might, leap high as you can and reach -- fingers extended -- as far as your body allows. Three fingertips smack leather, flinging the ball crazily off course as you descend and, way off balance, stumble harshly to the ground . . . as your man, tumbling, eyes riveted on the swirling pigskin, gathers it into his chest and collapses into the endzone, cradling the ball with the day-winning score, cheers erupting.
It's over, quick as that; the spell goes poof. Your whole being sinks, not just because you got beat but because you know it's over. Sudden death. The magic washes away. It is Sunday night and you have homework to do and a test tomorrow at school. And you cringe at the gruesome thought of it all.
As a boy I knew the happy deliverances of play: swingsets that turned into spaceships, sandboxes that became whole cities, a backyard hoop transformed into Madison Square Garden ("Temple drives the lane, goes up and . . . JAMS it home!").
I felt emancipation most sharply at the boundaries, the intersections of beginnings and endings -- fleeing the bounds of school, unloosed from the boring confinements of chores or church, flinging off my "good" clothes and shiny shoes like a caged mustang getting free and flying out into the Sunday afternoon ripe with sun and wind and fenceless horizons.
Conversely, the burdens of "reality" returned with the abrupt termination of carefree play: a school bell ringing at recess; my father's beckoning whistle. Those moments have left an indelible pang in my psyche that still twinges whenever "reality" calls.
My first sense of time and its passing -- of my own mortality really -- was forged in the final precious days of August when the countdown to school began, ending the seamless, timeless extravagance of unfettered summer. A similar shadow loomed over school-year Sunday nights, as the grim countenance of Mrs. Pernici gathered in the back-to-school gloom with its book reports and science projects and the perplexing thickets of word problems in math.
These were the goblins of my existence, but at play I was transfigured. I was in my element, redeemed. The intoxicating lure of play, of course, is that it provides escape -- escape from the duties and disciplines enforced with growing up. But play's real beauty is that it is not only a means of escape from, but it also offers an escape to. It is a passage to the plains of Zeus. It carries you into realms accessible only to those who give themselves up completely to the game -- only that, a game. And that is the sweet irony: you become totally absorbed in a figment of your imagination, an artificial construct that is extraneous to life's more earnest and worthwhile enterprises. Yet when you are there, playing, you shine.
So I miss these times, too:
Long, long sunny summer days playing baseball on fields of green; relishing the feel of a ball hit cleanly, admiring its arc as it soared like a rocket launched heavenward; savoring the snap of a ball snagged out of midair, popping snuggly into the pocket of my supple mitt; sailing like a madman around third, nothing in life more important than beating that missile-peg home, throwing myself homeward headfirst to beat the tag and raise a gritty cloud of red-clay dust.
Or playing basketball at the Y on Friday nights during high school; not like the team practices or games you had seven days a week for six months every year, but those gym-rat pickup games when you and Mitch and Stuart and Mike played your hearts out, cutting and weaving, jumping and hustling, shooting and blocking shots until the pick-and-roll, the give-and-go became second nature, until all your moves coalesced into a dance choreographed solely by instinct and carried you onto a plane ruled only by your imagination; until you and Mitch and Stuart and Mike dissolved as individuals, ceased being separate parts and blended into a universe of confluent forces, awkwardly, mortally ethereal. Transfiguration.
That is what I miss: that delectable metamorphosis that comes from the sorcery of play, when it all comes together, all the elements of your being transfixed -- your muscles and nerves and all five senses, body and soul and brain all ratcheted up to some efflorescent zenith; and then you cross over. Everything else -- worries and pains, constraints and clocks, self-doubts and distractions -- they all melt away; and all that matters, once the spell is cast, is that goal, that shot, that ball. That moment.
Call it a high; call it being in a zone. Fully engaged. Transcendent.
It was easier when I was a boy. I had more time for play. I had fewer things on my mind, fewer problems, fewer pressures. I didn't hurt, as I do now when I run real fast or lunge too abruptly. I am not as fluid now. My body isn't so easily freed from the bonds of rigidity, gravity, mortality. It is no longer my willing, tireless cohort.
And playmates are harder to find. Even my sons, who were kind enough to share their games of wiffle ball and hide-and-seek so that I might run through childhood all over again, are reluctant now to have me tagging along. There are those who do not look favorably on a man of my age simply wanting to play, to run and jump, to frolic, cavort and gambol, to have fun simply because it is fun.
But when I'm confronted with a day full of sunlight and sky, when the air is glassy clear, the trees are full and the wind is on the wing, I still want to play, to run headlong toward the day, to lose myself in games. This, to me, is still the best of life, these moments of pure, effervescent exultation when the body and the soul and the day become one. Jubilation.
So I am a hopeless case, incurable, unrepentant -- because not only do I miss those holy games of childhood past, but I miss this:
Saturday mornings when you couldn't wait to get outside after breakfast, heading over to Ricky's house, gathering up Carl and Annie and playing all day long, it didn't matter at what -- chasing around the neighborhood, hiding in the alley, wiffle ball, hotbox, flying kites, morning turning to afternoon, swings and slides, cardboard forts, pulling out the hose, water-spray rainbows, dodge-ball, pine-cone wars, shooting hoops, climbing trees, riding bikes until the sunshine waned. Until the shadows gathered and the lightning bugs came out. Until the stars -- "Starlight, starbright . . . hey, let's play kick-the can."
You never got tired, you never stopped -- not until mothers and fathers called from their lighted porches, like harbor bells tolling, like far-off horns calling all wayfarers home to port. And then tomorrow, you'd get up and do it again.
That's what I miss.