Knots in My Yo-Yo String Read Online Free Page B

defeated Ellwood City, 4–2, to become Connie Mack Knee-Hi champions of Pennsylvania.
    In the awards ceremony after the game, we were given jackets saying STATE CHAMPIONS . Ellwood City players got trophies. A jacket would eventually wear out and be thrown away, leaving me with nothing to show for our great triumph. But a trophy was immune to frayed cuffs and moth holes. A trophy would be forever. I watched as each Ellwood City player walked up for his trophy and half-wished I had been on the losing side.
    A week later, during a banquet at the Valley Forge Hotel in downtown Norristown, to my relief, we were each given a magnificent trophy.

    Two buddies (Anthony Greco and Bob Hopple) and me (left), heading off to dance at Grace Lutheran Church, 1955. I’m wearing my Knee-Hi State Champions jacket.
    Chucking dust on a four-base diamond was only part of the baseball life. There was the long list of major league batting averages to pore over each Sunday in
The Philadelphia Inquirer.
There was the baseball encyclopedia, my first history book, to study. Long before I knew the difference between Yorktown and Gettysburg, I knew Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average (.367) and Cy Young’s total career pitching victories (511).
    There were cards to flip. We bought Fleer’s bubblegum just to get the baseball cards, and then we dueled. Slip one corner of the card between forefinger and middle finger and flip outward, Frisbee-like, toward a wall. The kid whose card lands closest to the wall picks up the other kid’s card. The stacks of cards I won this way would be worth a fortune today if I had kept them.
    There were baseballs to tape. Seldom in our sandlot games did we have a ball with a real stitched horsehide cover still on it. Most often the balls were covered inblack utility tape. A white ball was a real treat. It meant that someone had sneaked into the medicine chest at home and used up half a roll of first-aid tape.
    There were hours to spend bouncing tennis balls off neighbors’ brick walls, any wall but that of the mysterious barber across the street. For hours each week I scooped up the rebounding grounders, practicing to be a great shortstop. Considering the thumping I gave those houses, it’s a wonder I was never chased off. Maybe the people behind the walls understood that in my mind I was not really standing on George Street but in the brown dust of Connie Mack Stadium, out at shortstop, fielding hot shots off the bat of Willie Mays.
    And there was the glove. My glove bore the signature of Marty Marion, slick-fielding shortstop of the St. Louis Cardinals.
    Each year at the end of summer vacation, I rubbed my glove with olive oil from the kitchen cabinet. Then I pressed a baseball deep into the pocket of the glove, curled the leather fingers about the ball, and squeezed the whole thing into a shoebox. Standing on a chair, I set the box high on a closet shelf. Baseball season was officially over.
    For the next six months we would hibernate, shortstop and glove, dreaming of the Chiclets-white bases at Connie Mack Stadium, feeling in the palm the hard, round punch of a grounder well caught.

Good
          Boy
    Like cowboys and then sports, grade school was a constant presence in my life, though not an especially interesting one. It seems to me that most interesting stories about grade school are told by kids who got in trouble. I never got in trouble. I was, as they say, a Good Boy.
    But what is a Good Boy? From the world’s point of view, it is a boy who appears to be good. The key word here is
appears.
For I believe that beneath the appearance of most Good Boys is a Bad Boy waiting to break out. Oh, I don’t mean bad in the sense of committing crimes or hurting people. I mean bad in the sense of, say, leaving a wad of chewing gum on the teacher’s chair. Or washing the blackboard with spit. Or jumping up from your seat in the middle of silent reading, standing on top of your desk, raising your fists to the