The Steps

 Last evening I had the opportunity to check out a group of youngsters trying out for a little league travel team. One of them was Ragin' Cage. It is his first, and possibly last depending on his mood, attempt at something like this.

We stood outside a block walled building as the tryouts were held inside due to poor field conditions at the diamond they usually use. Young boys were running back and forth, hitting off tees in cages, pitching off mounds and fielding off astroturf floors.

Toward the end several boys were throwing some sort of round weighted bags against the block wall and it brought me back to a time when I was their age and younger. We didn't have much as kids but we had baseballs and a glove or two. I originally started out living in a half double next to a very large church. We were so close you could touch both the church and our house at the same time.

The memory made me smile. We lived in the inner city and there were no open fields nearby, plus North of 50 and I were too young to go there by ourselves. But we had steps. In front of the church where two sets of concrete steps, if I remember, 5 high then a short few yards to another set. What these allowed us to do was to throw a rubber ball against them and catch it with our gloves. We would literally do this for hours. The only hiccup was if you missed the first set of steps the second set really didn't help much and whoever threw the ball had to go get it. Then it was the other's turn until he messed up.

North and I did this daily. We rarely had a true baseball and the rubber ones were cheap and took a lot of abuse. When we finally moved out a little further east to a single house, I actually lamented losing the steps as the only ones we new had were up against the back porch, and bouncing those rubber balls off the metal screen door wasn't something my father put up with for long.

It's amazing how boys and baseball bring back those types of memories, but it was a childhood filled with great memories and baseball moments.