The Stickball Boys of Summer...in Autumn

(Originally published 12/4/12)

Last night the Kingsbridge Stickball Boys of Summer gathered together for the first time as a unit in quite a while—a decade or so, I’d say. Ostensibly, it was to commemorate a milestone birthday of mine from several weeks back. Strange, but it doesn’t seem like it was thirty-plus years ago when we were playing stickball games with abandon on the asphalt grounds of John F. Kennedy High School, just a few blocks from where we all called home. We kept copious records of all our exploits—the highlights and lowlights, too. As both the pioneering teenage statistician and contemporary middle-aged man archivist of all our stickball endeavors, I brushed off the cobwebs of the old scorecards that we faithfully kept for several years from the late 1970s through the early 1980s.

In this decidedly different age—simpler times, for sure—I included a “Saying of the Day” option on some of our primitively photocopied scorecards. "Sayings" ranged far and wide from a local pizza man named "George" to controversial and colorful Alabama Governor George Wallace. It seems that one member of our stickball entourage relished mimicking the latter’s distinctive southern drawl. A “Making of the President 1968” documentary, or some such program, aired on PBS at the time, because every single one of us knew where he was coming from when he impersonated Wallace shouting down an unkempt hippie heckler, imploring him to “Geeeeet a heeeeercut.” We were a unique and interesting brood of Bronx stickball players.

Courtesy of a pronounced rooftop clock and digital thermometer on the Exxon gas station just to the north of our playing field, both game-time temperatures—in Fahrenheit—and game durations were recorded for posterity as well. Let the record show that we played in temperatures ranging from forty-five to ninety-nine degrees. On one set of scorecards, I, for some reason, included “Hero” and “Goat” of the game blank spaces. Most of them were, in fact, left blank. Despite occasional unsolicited commentaries on the scorecards that were sometimes caustic and mocking, we generally opted not to underscore and offend individual games’ goats. While were a competitive lot, we had caring hearts, I suppose. And besides, we exchanged teammates from one game to the next. Sure, I scribbled at one point on a scorecard that “RC is a jerk,” and he responded in kind that I was meekly “sweating” under the pressure, but that was all in good fun.

Final season tallies found each and every one of us coming to the plate over one thousand times and pitching more than two hundred innings. Looking back, this heavy workload explains why I was often sore on Cardinal Spellman High School Monday mornings in springtime. There were no stickball spring training sessions for us. When winters turned into springs, we commenced to playing—up to the hilt and end of story.

Ah, but here we were all these years later, in the flesh, and having experienced lives after stickball—physical and emotional odysseys that have taken us a long, long way from the reassuring terra firma of a neighborhood high school with those crude home plate boxes on a graffiti-laden brick wall . Funny, but to a man, we recalled what was—very clearly as a matter a fact—but not so much the intricate details of the three decades that followed and that led us far afield of stickball in the Bronx. Why, exactly, I wanted to "assassinate" my longtime friend RC on a pleasant summer morning when Jimmy Carter was president, I've long since forgotten. I'd hazard a guess I really didn’t want to do that. And although stickball is now a relic of all our pasts—warm and fuzzy memories—we nonetheless continue to play ball with what we've got left in the autumn years.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Zach’s 1250

(Originally published 3/31/19)

I have filed away my yesterday under the “World We Now Know.” Walking along a Manhattan sidewalk and minding my own business, a young woman with a small dog came up alongside of me. She was jabbering away on her phone—a mile a minute—oblivious to one and all in her path. That’s par for the course in 2019, by the way. I heard her say something about a friend’s son who, apparently, scored “only” a 1250 on his SATs. “That’s not such a bad score,” the lady—in a generous mood, I suppose—added.

Now, I doubt such a reassurance would assuage Zach’s mom or, for that matter, Zach. For they both know that a 1250 score is—ipso facto—the kiss of death. Admittance to the most prestigious of prestigious schools just isn’t in the cards. And, let’s face it, status is everything to the status-seekers. 1250 doesn’t buy too many bragging rights. I don’t why, but Lori Loughlin popped into my head at that moment.

A footnote to my encounter with that annoying woman so wrapped up in an annoying personal phone conversation on a hopping city sidewalk: She would, on occasion, acknowledge the fact that she was indeed in the bright light of day. It happened when her little canine friend passed a spritz of urine and then—lo and behold—a couple of marble-sized poops as we used to say. In the immediate aftermath of both the Number One and the Number Two events, the chatty dog walker excitedly exclaimed in a baby-like voice: “Very good!”

After that stimulating experience, I came upon a stretch of sidewalk with scattered white paper plates on it. For the better part of a block, the grounds were littered with them. Each individual plate had the word “God” scrawled—in black magic marker—on it. The Lord works in mysterious ways, I thought. But, then again, everywhere is God’s Country, isn’t it?

Speaking of God’s Country—New York City—police officers with machine guns can now be seen in front of busy entrances. I spied three of them at a Madison Square Garden entry point. As I passed by, another passerby queried one of the cops. She wasn’t wondering why the man had a big gun strapped to his shoulder. She just wanted directions to the Empire State Building. You see that big antenna in the sky. Follow it like the Three Wise Men followed that Bright Star.

It’s the new normal and I’m happy the police presence is there. I just wish they didn’t have to be. I considered taking a close-up image—of the “World We Now Know”—but decided against it. I’ve heard this subway announcement more times than I can count: “Backpacks and other large containers are subject to random searches by the police.” Ditto the street. Pocket cameras, too, are not off limits. The last thing I wanted was the confiscation of my faithful companion.

In the Land Down Under—the subway—my trip commenced at the Van Cortlandt Park terminal, which is above ground. A homeless man with a cane—whom I’ve seen before—greeted me and asked if I could spare some change. I gave him two dollars. He replied, “You made my day!” I hope I really did. On the subsequent ride downtown, a panhandler entered the subway car requesting “food” or “any cash that you could spare.” While he informed the assembled that he was homeless, his approach was all wrong—no detailed back-story and a somewhat intimidating manner. I gave him a dollar and a woman—with her young son—offered him some food. It was a bag containing cut pieces of grapefruit. While he readily accepted my buck, he turned down the fresh fruit. My advice is that if you are going to ask for food or money—because you are hungry and homeless—accept the food as well as the money. It’s better for business.

Another fellow then got on the train who didn’t appear to be homeless. He didn’t ask for anything and sat directly across from me. Before the man uttered a word, I sensed menace afoot. He just looked incredibly angry. The guy also listened in to others’ conversations and muttered aloud various profane responses to them. All the while his eyes threateningly flitted back and forth. They caught mine for one brief second. I quickly turned away. Can’t let that happen again! A family of tourists appeared concerned. Fortuitously, he exited the train after only a few stops. I noticed, though, that his simmering anger accompanied him to the station platform as he seemingly considered his next move, which I thought might be reentering the subway car. When the doors closed and the man was on the other side of them, I was greatly relieved and so were the folks from Dubuque, Iowa.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

The Waning Agog Factor

(Originally published on August 10, 2014)

Thirty-seven years ago on this day, I was at once in Boston and agog. The adult impresario of this Bronx to Beantown adventure was a neighbor and friend named Richie. My brother Joe and I—two teenagers absent as-yet-invented iPads or flip video cameras—accompanied him to what then seemed like a very faraway and even exotic destination.

While we were out of town the “Son of Sam” was captured. A Boston Globe headline in a sidewalk newspaper machine alerted us that the fiend was in police custody. We were pleasantly surprised when we dropped a dime in the slot and the machine’s front door pulled open, permitting each of us to grab a paper. Evidently, man and boys alike had never purchased one from an inanimate object. I guess we thought it would be dispensed like a bottle of soda or a candy bar. Still, we felt like we were a long way from home when we read the details about this serial killer, a man who had been in our midst during that especially hot summer and the summer before.

We had seen the Red Sox at Fenway Park the night before and also peed in a communal urinal there, which was yet another first for us. I sat beside a gangly grandfather and his grandson, I surmised, because the latter called the former “Pops.” Pops was pretty old and, when nature called, had more than a little difficulty navigating the ballpark’s steep steps and cramped aisles. He was a dead ringer for Our Gang's Old Cap. The Red Sox beat the Angels 11-10 that night in a back and forth slugfest. The Globe deemed it one of the most exciting games ever played. Richie, however, noted how “dilapidated” the environs were, and obviously liked the sound of the word, branding countless Boston edifices and nearby locales with the same unflattering moniker.

Dilapidated or not, the three of us were generally agog throughout the trip, blissfully going about the business of exploring foreign terrain before anything called e-mail or Twitter existed. Joe had a hand-me-down, fold-up camera with him that took blurry pictures. Richie wore a strap around his neck attached to an over-sized instant camera during our sightseeing. His photos developed a bit on the green side, including shots at Harvard University and of the Charles River. No flash meant no pictures could be taken of the Green Monster by night. On our way home, we naturally couldn’t pass up America’s most historical rock in Plymouth. This rather pedestrian boulder had at some point cracked in two and been cemented together—not a particularly compelling visual and even less so in shades of instant-picture green.

There were no digital cameras or iPhones in existence, so thus no capacity to post our pictures on Facebook, which wasn’t around either. We were merely content with being agog as we climbed the Bunker Hill Monument and toured Old Ironsides. The dilapidated surroundings all around us actually astounded us. We called home from pay phones. In the present age of instant gratification, with all too many people engrossed in their Blackberries or some such technological device—and walking the streets like oblivious automatons—I fear that the Agog Factor just ain't what it used to be…can’t be what it used to be…and that’s really kind of sad.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)