The Playing Field

The Playing Field

Growing up during the 1950s and ’60s in our working-class neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we could easily fill a whole baseball league. All it took was a couple of kids tossing a ball of some kind back and forth and, within minutes, a baker’s dozen or more of kids would pour out of back doors, eager to join in whatever game was afoot. Kids would open screen doors and stick their heads into living rooms just long enough to shout out to siblings, “Ya wanna play?” Friends would stand in front of each other’s houses, hallo-ing in the accepted fashion of our neighborhood, “Hi-o, Eddie! Hi-o, Maria!” That was the Pied Piper note sounded to draw streams of kids, like so many high-spirited rats, out onto our playing field.

When I began babysitting at the age of 11 or 12, I was bewildered by the rather anemic pastimes of the upper–middle-class children with whom I spent too many hours for too little money. A short distance away geographically—although worlds away in other respects—was a neighborhood full of Harvard scholars and prosperous architects, business executives, doctors, and lawyers—no Indian chiefs. I babysat for their children. My impression of the life led in that heady realm was, to borrow the jargon and tone learned from my own kids decades later, “Bor–ing!” The children’s bedrooms were organized into tidy, well-equipped play areas: art corners, dress-up corners, reading corners, building corners. It all reminded me of school.

It was a relief to get back into my own rough-hewn neighborhood with its jagged edges and mishmash of houses—one, two, and three-family structures—varying in condition from shabby to just short of genteel. The kids themselves were equally rough-hewn. We constituted a motley crew, diverse in virtually every respect, except perhaps that of race. Typical of the Boston area, we were mostly of Irish and Italian heritage. But we were every size, shape, and weight; we were pale, burnt red, and burnished brown; we were befreckled, pocked, and acned; we were homely and handsome, pretty and plain, kempt and unkempt. And we were geniuses at having fun.

A large tarred lot, a kind of unofficial park, was available to us most of the time for ballgames of various kinds. We’d play daily for hours during the summer and school vacations, after school and on weekends. A game might begin in the morning with one group of kids and as players peeled off for lunch calls and afternoon chores, others quickly filled their places.

Our reputations on the playing field ran the gamut from “brilliant” to “stinks.” But if a kid wanted to play, he or she got to play. Beneath the tough veneer of teasing and taunts, a deeply democratic heart beat in our rough tribe. You might be picked last or second-to-last and a groan might go up from your teammates when you fell to their lot, but, once the game began, you were one of the team. And no one could play as often and as hard as we did without getting good at something. I was afraid of the ball, but I learned to run like the wind.

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Some summer evenings, instead of ball, we’d play Relievio, a complex version of hide-and-seek that I adored. Players were divided into two teams, the hiders and the seekers. The seekers would remain at home base, usually someone’s front porch, while the hiders spread out through the neighborhood, seeping into invisible nooks and niches like so many rivulets of water from a swollen stream. Seekers would head out to find, tag, and capture members of the other team, leading them back to home base, now transformed into jail. A few seekers guarded the jail since hiders still at liberty could dash onto the porch and set the prisoners free with a cry of “Relievio!”

We would start before the sky had even begun to blush into evening. Working-class dinners were generally finished, dishes and all, by 6:30 or 7 p.m. We’d play passionately until nearly 10 at night. Our parents, softened by summer, let curfews and bedtimes slide by with impunity.

I loved Relievio, thrilled and titillated by the scared, butterfly feeling I got in my belly when I peeked out from my hiding spot and spied someone stealthily stalking me. But some nights I became so enraptured by the way the moon looked from my crouched position, or so entranced by the sweet scent of a window-boxed jasmine, that I missed entirely the “Olley-olley all-in-free!” that signaled the end of the game, calling us all in from the far corners of our farflung playing arena. No one was left to seek me out.

No one except Kenny. Kenny Donovan was no matinee idol—a little pudgy, a little pimpled, a little tough—but everyone liked him and never minded that he always captained one team or another. Kenny had kind of a soft spot for me, making sure that I was never a last pick for a ballgame, making sure to seek me out after everyone else had retreated to their lit houses. With laughter and bumping of hips that nearly sent skinny me into the street-lining bushes, he’d tease me home. The soft hiss of nighttime sprinklers, keeping the green promise of grass against the hot July and August sun of New England, accompanied us as we walked.

The more darkness closed in, the more we opened up. The silky sheen of night softened the harsh angles of our neighborhood and softened the hard spots forged in us through hard times. The velvety air was generous and forgiving, filling us with something our older selves might have called tenderness. The closer we got to home, the quieter we became. Our hands touched as if by accident and we carried the charge of each other into our houses, into our beds, and into our dreams. Good night, Maureen. Good night, Kenny. Oh, good, sweet summer night.

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Maureen Ellen O’Leary is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College; her essays have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers, including The Monthly.

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