Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust

I’ve written before about how unathletic I am, even giving myself the title of “worst wrestler ever”.  But just because I wasn’t very good does not mean I didn’t have fun. One of my fondest memories from my junior high years was playing tackle football, without pads, with my friends on the vacant lots of Slatington.

This was certainly not organized football run by the school system nor the Booster Club. This was my friends and I having a good time getting dirty and banged up and maybe even scoring a touchdown.  No touch football. No flag football. Tackle all the way. No one ever got seriously hurt. Well…there was that one time. More on that later in this post.

I was an uptown boy. The downtown kids probably had their own places to play. We had two that I can remember. First, there was the Bell Telephone property on Second Street. We played there for a little until they built a new building on OUR vacant lot! I remember playing most of our games on a vacant lot across from Harding Funeral Home. It was almost perfect. It was a rectangle. It had concrete posts every few yards, good for calling first downs.  The negatives were an empty fish pond on one end and a wooded cliff on the other. Halftimes were spent swinging on the Tarzan swing that someone built over the cliff.  Kids today can’t play on that field because it is now a blacktop parking lot for the funeral home. To quote Joni Mitchell, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”.

So, banged up with cuts and bruises but no broken bones. Until. I was playing football with three cousins, Mike and Terry Burke and Jim Becker.  This time we were playing in the huge yard of a secluded mansion close to the Burke’s home. Jim was running with the ball. Terry caught him by the ankles. Jim fell onto his shoulder and broke his collar bone. We quickly went to Terry and Mike’s mom for help. I can still hear Aunt Lorna Burke yelling at us for being so careless! Kids!!  Haha! Good times!!  So, in a couple days I will be 67 and still have not had one broken bone. Yeah, I know, probably shouldn’t have said that.

Where were the places you played as a kid? Remember the good times that seem to be harder to find today?  Remember the boundless energy and thrill of an exciting future? Remember the friends you spent time with then and how you assumed they would be friends for life?  I do.  Every single day.