When I was just a wee young lad, we often played a game called ‘rollie-bat’. The reason it was called rollie-bat was because whoever was at bat had to lay the bat down on the ground in front of them and whoever fielded the hit tried to roll the ball across the ground and make it hit the bat: roll the ball and hit the bat, so: rollie-bat. There were numerous rules one might spontaneously call out (corn-stalks, pop-ups, tick-tocks, etc.). That part was the most fun.
So. We could play rollie-bat in somebody’s yard, but the grass was clumpy and there were pebbles and such that made rolling the ball an inconsistent experience, consequently we preferred to play in the street. At the intersection of Larkwood and Roxanna, our prime spot, there were storm drains that occasionally gobbled up the ball, and we had to stop playing and get somebody strong (preferably one of the Piephoff boys, or if we were lucky, Mr. Piephoff himself) to open the manhole cover so we could climb down into the sewer and fetch the errant ball and continue playing. On an off day, we might lose the ball several times, so usually the adults just left the cover off for the duration. The whole process of removing the heavy iron cover and revealing the dark secrets beneath the earth was always a mysterious thrill for me.
Things went on in this way for a young lifetime, likely many lazy summers and the bright crisp autumns that followed (when school started back again and all the children in the neighborhood would line up at the corner of Larkwood and Roxana to catch the public school bus). It was one such early autumn school-morning; and I remember distinctly that it was Friday the 13th (one of my first because we were all discussing it in hushed tones at the bus-stop) and I made an outrageous claim, openly boasting that “Friday the 13th was a lucky day for me”. But Howard Maness’s little brother, Alan, answered that he’d always had bad luck. I started to man-splain down to the younger Maness about metaphysical principles and how a change in world-view could alleviate his condition but his older brother Howard stepped in and admitted the family secret that his brother had always been ‘accident prone’; –a startlingly new term for a fact that made me pause to reconsider. Deep in thought, I clambered up the steps and into the bus when we heard somebody holler outside the door. I whipped around just in time to see Alan Maness disappear down the coverless manhole. Sure ’nuff, Howard was right.
Have a lucky Friday the 13th. (And I have a tree down in my driveway from recent weather; our venerable old Gothic Oak has lost all of its massive top. It will survive: there are abundant spur shoots that cover the main trunk and it now looks like a small, stout tree. But I cannot get into or out of the driveway).
