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and Dad and all the rest of the kids going crazy as I rounded the bases on seven errors and slid into home a hero. We lost the game to the Midgets that night, 22 to 7, and I cried all the way home. It was a long time ago, but sometimes I can still hear them shouting out in front of Pete’s house on Hamilton Avenue. There was Bobby Zimmer, the tall kid from down the street, Kenny and Pete, little Tommy Law, and my best friend Richie Castiglia, who lived across from us on Lee Place.
    Baseball was good to me and I played it all I could. I got this baseball mitt when I was seven. I had to save up my allowance for it and cash in some soda bottles. It was a cheap piece of shit, but it seemed pretty nice, I mean it seemed beautiful to me before Bobby and some of the other guys tore the hell out of it.
    I remember that I loved baseball more than anything else in the world and my favorite team was the New York Yankees. Every chance I got I watched the games on the TV in my house with Castiglia, waiting for Mickey Mantle to come to the plate. We’d turn up the sound of the television as the crowd went wild roaring like thunder. I’d run over to Richie’s house screaming to his mother to tell Richie that Mantle was at bat.
    And Richie would come running over with his mitt making believe we were at Yankee Stadium sitting in our box seats right in back of the Yankee dugout and when Mantle hit a homer you could hear the TV halfway down the block. Richie and I would go completely nuts hugging each other and jumping up and down with tears streaming down our faces. Mantle was our hero. He was like a god to us, a huge golden statue standing in center field. Every time the cameras showed him on the screen I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
    Back then the Yankees kept winning like they would never stop. It was hard to remember them ever losing, and when we weren’t watching them on TV or down at the stadium, Kenny Goodman and I were at Parkside Field playing catch-a-fly-you’re-up for hours with a beat-up old baseball we kept together with black electrician’s tape. We played all day long out there, running across that big open field with all our might, diving and sliding face-first into the grass, making one-handed, spectacular catches. I used to make believe I was Mel Allen, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Did you see that?! Did you see that, folks?! Kovic has just made a tremendous catch and the crowd is going wild! They’re jumping up and down all over the stadium! What a catch, ladies and gentlemen, what a tremendous catch by Kovic!” And I did that all afternoon, running back and forth across the gigantic field. I was Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and all my heroes, rolled into one.
    When we weren’t down at the field or watching the Yankees on TV, we were playing whiffle ball and climbing trees checking out birds’ nests, going down to Fly Beach in Mrs. Zimmer’s old car that honked the horn every time it turned the corner, diving underwater with our masks, kicking with our rubber frog’s feet, then running in and out of our sprinklers when we got home, waiting for our turn in the shower. And during the summer nights we were all over the neighborhood, from Bobby’s house to Kenny’s, throwing gliders, doing handstands and backflips off fences, riding to the woods at the end of the block on our bikes, making rafts, building tree forts, jumping across the streams with tree branches, walking and balancing along the back fence like Houdini, hopping along the slate path all around the back yard seeing how far we could go on one foot.
    And I ran wherever I went. Down to the school, to the candy store, to the deli, buying baseball cards and Bazooka bubblegum that had the little fortunes at the bottom of the cartoons.
    When the Fourth of July came, there were fireworks going off all over the neighborhood. It was the most exciting time of year for me next to Christmas. Being born