Common Ground

I was five going on fourteen.
It was Spring, Summer and Fall.
It was hot, cold, sunny, rainy, windy, sultry.
It was morning, afternoon and twilight.
There -
perennially enticing,
known to all as the "common land",
betwixt a neighbor's house and the community pool,
three sides bounded by woods and the fourth,
by a steep 10 foot earth embankment abutting the road -
a recessed dirt and grass clearing lay.
Here,
where there was nothing
but simplicity, openness and emptiness,
the children of Moon Hill
in lasting ritual
filled the air with
belligerent cries of seasonal sport, archetypal games and clandestine powwows.

In Spring and Summer
pick-up baseball games erupted
with
fervid hands
clasping alternately the priapic bat handle
climaxed by
the winner's cry of
'TOPSIES!'

This ardent foreplay established the order
for the much anticipated
pecking order choosing of sides,
where one's talent - or lack thereof - was ruthlessly exposed.
Bases and foul territory were then carelessly laid out -
a half-buried stone, vague lines drawn in dirt, an indistinguishable tree or bush -
which led inevitably to
pugnacious, loud, heated, vehement, explosive
yet
quintessentially therapeutic verbal outbursts.

The intrinsic pastoral nature of baseball made the actual game itself
eternal bridesmaid
to the black hole of our
impetuous, immutable and volcanic testosterone.
Baseball over, it was quickly forgotten,
but the brawling, argumentative give and take
lingered long into our emotionally charged farewells.

Late summer and fall gave way
to pad-less tackle football.
Sides were chosen quickly, intuitively, with nary a word.
Long ago in the glorious, mythical sporting past of older siblings,
undisputed boundaries were decreed.
The competition was fast, furious and sublime.
Like the exuberant play of young, wild animals,
our rollicking ebb and flowing runs, passes and robust tackles
were punctuated by yelps and grunts of unalloyed, primordial joy.

Unlike the civilized game of baseball
never once
ever
did either an heated exchange or injury
occur
in this
blissful savagery.
At game's end,
happily exhausted
arm in arm
we strolled away
lionizing
both our own and each other's
high-spirited, sportive exploits.

On various mutable days of
Spring, Summer or Fall
a lax game of Hide and Seek gave birth to a new math.
When you were 'it'
(eyes half-closed and others scampered off hidden)
what began as a loud deliberate count
soon dissolved into
a motor-mouthed, barely audible romp through the sixties, and seventies,
veering into an outright skip of the eighties and or nineties, then
peaked by an emphatic clarion 100!
and a
'HERE I COME, READY OR NOT!'

Turning,
inevitably a practical joker standing inches from you,
touched the tree and whooped:
' I'M IN!'
Indignant, you cried foul,
followed by return recriminations for your faux counting,
which irrevocably led to the game-ending
'OLLIE OLLIE IN FREE!'

Popping quizzical from trees, bushes, boulders
the rest,
on hearing the dueling remonstrations,
weighed in vigorously on one side or the other.
The impulsive, overwrought, ironclad logic
of:
'YOU CAN'T DO THAT! - YES I CAN!'
'NO YOU CAN'T! - I CAN!'
'CANNOT! - CAN!'
reigned supreme.
The airing of grievances
culminated in a dissatisfied circular stand-off.
A brilliant suggestion would be made to
throw rocks at squirrels
or
embellish tall tales about an uncanny boxing prowess
or
get something sweet to eat.
For a brief, tantalizing interval
a fragile peace hovered between the warring factions,
until, once again,
a spark of hubris
ignited yet another over-heated brouhaha.

After days of rain
when the field, bemired in mud, was rendered unplayable,
we took our revenge on flotillas of hapless snails.
Poking their happy heads from their miniature RV's,
the unsuspecting mollusks were gathered and lobbed onto the adjoining road
where passing cars made a strangely satisfying crunching sound.
Days of hot sun
when the oppressive heat cooled our passion for field sports
we, towel and bathing suit in tow,
languidly strolled by barefoot on the grass path,
sporadically hot-stepping the searing pavement on a double dare,
but ignoring, as children do when in the here and now
the passing, presently fallow field of past and future play.

On days of winter
when the ice-hardened earth precluded all attempts of antic gamesmanship
or,
if covered by the ubiquitous snow
the play ground was rendered irrelevant
because
its inherent flatness was useless for sleds
and
snow fights need not a particular space
but
mere spontaneity.

One breezy fall afternoon,
after departing a friend's house and
under the spell of an organic resistance to return home,
I sat down on the field's top embankment
in a child's meditation of randomly throwing small stones.
I paused long enough to watch a swirl of
dead, light-maroon maple leaves
frolic
a chaotic spiral dance
in hiccup syncopation
up
down
this
and
that
and
every which
way
across
the empty terrain.
With a sigh and a twinge of envy,
I stood up
grabbed one last stone
and with all my might
flung it far
into a stand of leafless, impassive trees.

As I reluctantly shuffled home,
little could I then apprehend that,
bound
within this indistinct patch of land,
lay
the enduring promise to chance upon
life
unbound.