Today

I rummage in a drawer stuffed with socks, hoping to find my foam clown nose. I want to wear it when I am photographed with my crewcut. Knowing how to accessorize an outfit is a gift, I think. In October, the clown nose will become the beginning and end of my Halloween costume.

I reach to the back of the drawer where the mismatched socks consort and I find the souvenir baseball, one I received long ago at a game at Yankee Stadium. The inscriptions on the ball seem to have faded since the last time I had it out, even though the ball has been protected from the daylight.

Yankee Stadium, long ago

I am young: the ride into the city on the Long Island Rail Road thrills me more than the game does, but less than the souvenir baseball will.

It's a night game. The lights aren't nearly so bright as they are now for night games. They are grayer. The bank of seats cantilevered above us shields us from the night and from the light mist that falls before the game. The strength of the girders and I-beams supporting the massive stands above us interests me more than the game does. In black-and-white cartoons, I have seen them collapse. In my dreams, a gorilla has chased me over such beams. No one else seems concerned.

The stranger who joins us at Yankee Stadium doesn't have his kid with him. I am old enough to realize that he isn't my father's friend. He isn't a relative and he isn't a neighbor. Those men, relatives and neighbors, are addressed by first name, Jim or Frank or Dick. My father addresses this man by only his last name, without a mister. He calls my father by the familiar abbreviation of our last name. We men of the family are used to that. All grown men in New York address each other by their last names unless they are relatives or neighbors, and sometimes the neighbors that the men aren't particularly close to are addressed as the strangers are.

This man pays me more attention than I am comfortable with. I don't know the words unctuous or patronizing yet, but when I learn them in the future, I immediately think of this night. I don't remember his face, but the dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, and gray hat match what my father wears. All men working in the city wear that uniform unless they have the good jobs, the ones that let you climb the girders to rivet the beams together, or that let you drive the train. I will learn later that he is a salesman. My father is an engineer, but the wrong kind, and he is in charge of a project for his employer, an oil company. This stranger hopes to sell my father something, I learn over breakfast the next morning.

When the stranger leaves us for a while during the game, I get the impression that my father is relieved. I feel ill from all the snacks and sodas that the stranger has been buying, and I am tired and looking forward to riding the train home. When the stranger returns, he has the baseball. My father allows him to give it to me, but I can see that he isn't entirely comfortable with the gift.

Such a substantial, inedible gift perks me up. Ford, Mantle, McDougal, Skowron, Grim, Richardson, Crosetti, Bauer, Sturdivant, Ditmar, Larsen, those great 'E' names like Elston Howard and Enos Slaughter, and baseball's best name, a name that sounds old even then, Stengel, Casey � they're all there. I've heard these names on the radio. I've heard them on the television. These are important men, but men that my father refers to by last name only, so they're not relatives or neighbors.

Years pass and I've been hit by enough bad hops and inside pitches to realize that no gnarled-knuckled pro ball player could have signed his name in the schoolbook cursive that appears on this ball. When I recognize this, I allow several more years to pass before I admit it to others. The ball follows me everywhere.

Jones Beach

We � my father and I, and my mother and younger brother, paired just so � walk the boardwalk at Jones Beach at dusk, and when the sky is dark, we watch the fireworks. I am young enough to watch seated on my father's shoulders.

I fall asleep during the fireworks, but stir at the finale. When the fireworks end, my father lifts me from his shoulders and sets me down. My legs are asleep and the pins-and-needles feeling stings. He picks me up for the walk to the car, carrying me like an infant, cradled in his arms, just as my mother carries my younger brother (an infant? a toddler?) who continues to sleep.

Hicksville, Long Island

In a gauzy, pre-dawn gray, all of us who can stand � my mother, my father, my brother, my sister, and I � wait on the new patio behind the house. The smooth concrete cools our feet in the early morning. My youngest sister, an infant, sleeps inside. My father has arisen two hours early and has awakened us all so that we can view the eclipse.

After the eclipse, he must head to the station to catch the train into the city. The sky is still dark when he leaves for the station and is dark again when he returns that night.

As he departs for the station, my father greets the milkman by his first name. Because the milkman has delivered milk to us for many years, and because his path has often crossed my father's at this early hour, special rules seem to apply. I don't remember if the milkman permits himself the same familiarity. My father is less familiar with the bread man, who arrives later in the day. He always addresses the bread man by the name painted in script on his panel truck, Dugan.

Houston

Big oil moves us and many of my father's co-workers from New York to Houston. The transplanted co-workers call one another by their first names. Maybe their common uprootedness permits this, or maybe they've adopted the more casual and familiar manner of chronological peers in the South. I never learn. I am cautioned myself to use sir and ma'am inside school and out when addressing adults. We kids might get away with omitting that formal manner of address with a transplant, but not with a native. My god, we are naive.

What if I don't use it, Dad?

Eyebrows would rise, he says.

Superciliously?

That's redundant, he says through his grin, amused by my wordplay. Try it, please, he asks.

It's a small enough thing, so I agree to.

Houston, a few years later

Dad has a brand new car, a '64 Chrysler, lots of white, lots of chrome, good looking. I like it too, but I am fifteen.

On the second day, still flush with the pride of new ownership, he's in the driveway admiring the car in the twilight.

That grill treatment has character, don't you think?

I ignore the absurdity of this proposition and bank a free throw.

The tires. I nod toward the car, not looking at him or the car.

The tires? What about them?

Would it have killed your Depression-warped soul to spring for whitewalls? For another fifty bucks, you might have had a good-looking car.

I swish my next five free throws.

Fifteen.

The farm, decades later

We've buried my brother Jim beside his maternal grandparents. Back at the farmhouse, my father and I have drawn apart from the party in progress behind us. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the sun at our backs, facing the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania as the late-afternoon sun washes them in a hundred shades of green and gray.

Nothing greener than this part of the world in spring.

No, sir.

A red-winged blackbird swings on a cattail by the pond across the road.

The more distant the gaze, the drier the eyes, so the blackbird remains peripheral and my gaze climbs toward the far hills until I'm unable to distinguish the most distant of the hills from the gray clouds massed like mountains above them.

I keep thinking that the next time I see Jimmy, I'll have to tell him what a great party this was.

Yes, sir.

Here, now

These small stones, words and images, set like a weir in the stream of consciousness or memory � more and more the same thing, I think � might remind us where we've been, who we've been, what we've loved, and whom.

I didn't find the clown nose.

Reading:
Student work.

Weathering:
Cool, bright, open-window weather.

Watching:
Flocks of wild turkeys along the roadsides, deer at night at the foot of Williston, a coyote in the headlights at the top. TV or tapes? Not this week.