bironic

The one position in baseball I always wanted to play was pitcher. One spring before Little League season started, I found a large piece of plywood, painted a strike zone on it and set it up against the garage wall. Then I measured back to a pitcher's mound and practiced for hours with a tennis ball (if I hit the strike zone properly, it would bounce right back to me).

The first day of practice, everybody on the team was given the opportunity to try a few pitches. Unfortunately, my first pitch caught the edge of the plate and ricocheted into the coach's crotch. I didn't get to play pitcher that year.

My sister and I had a game we would play outside our house. Our front wall is high above the pavement and there are 3 fire hydrants that rise up and can just be reached by dangling legs when you sit on the wall. We'd sit on the wall, wait until we could hear a car coming, jump down and run around, up the drive across the lawn and have to touch the wall before the car passed the hydrants.

Wow, I was athletic in those days.

My father had a game for driving to school in the morning: he'd ask a question, then turn the radio on for a couple of seconds to get the "answer". Often, it was just a jumble of noise, or music, or half a word, but it made us laugh. One day, when we were living in California, I remember that he got a perfect answer to a question, and my brother and I were howling with laughter for the rest of the drive. It bothers me that I remember the question - "What do you think of Thomas?" [my brother] - and that it was one of those foggy fall mornings that made driving along the spiraling road to the Spanish-style Catholic school on the hill feel like climbing into a cloud, but I can't remember the answer for the life of me.

Hunh, just realised all three of mine so far have been Dad-memories.