Never Look Back

“Don’t look back, you can never look back.” (From The Boys of Summer by Don Henley)

With the sixth, and perhaps last game of the World Series, being played, I am still stuck on America's national pastime. Granted, Don Henley didn’t write this song about baseball; it was a look at the youth we left behind, growing older and wondering “what if”. The title, though, reminds me of the book of the same name by Roger Kahn, which looked at the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. But it all comes back to being a kid, goofing around, feeling freedom from your very belly. It is summertime and you don’t have to answer to anyone.

Unfortunately the seasons change, the boys of summer hang up their gloves and their bats, kids go back to school, black bear stock up for hibernation. And the rest of us try not to look back with melancholy. Can’t look back, never look back.

It does seem fitting with all that depth I’ve written so far that I should close with my other favorite baseball quote. “There’s no crying in baseball.” (Tom Hanks in “A League of Their Own”)

Memories of Hot Summer Nights

As I write this, it appears from my internet sources, that the Texas Rangers are leading the St Louis Cardinals three games to two in the World Series. There was a time when I kept up on such things. Especially in 1982 when the Milwaukee Brewers played in the World Series. I was in college at UW-La Crosse and the campus was in quite a frenzy.

Way before that though, there was a time when I was a kid and on hot summer nights we would listen to Brewers baseball on the radio.

On sticky August nights, with only one twelve inch round metal fan to cool the whole house, my parents wouldn’t turn on any lights, except for the single bulb above the kitchen sink. We didn’t own a blender, but Dad would dump milk, ice cream and Nestle’s Quik into one of mom’s white mixing bowls and whip it together with the hand-held electric mixer. With Bob Uecker and Merle Harmon announcing the play by play in the background, my dad would pour the milkshake into tall glasses that had a picture of a woman water-skiing on the side. The glasses had to be from the 1950’s because the woman wore one of those bathing suits with the pointy bra and long legs. Scary how vividly I can picture that in my head.

I think Mom still has those drinking glasses. I didn’t think to snap a photo of them, so here is my dad instead, circa 1977.