Mickey, Roger, Whitey, and Yogi

I've begun to enjoy watching baseball highlights of late, just as I have long enjoyed watching the NFL highlights. Every Monday morning (which would be Sunday night back there in the old country), I watch highlights from all the pro football games. I can't watch the full games, as that would require payment for a special package, but that's probably a good thing because that would have me sitting in front of the TV from sunup to sundown. At least. 

But the astounding thing about tuning in to the baseball highlights is the memory that is touched of watching in the living room of my childhood home with my brother and my father. Dad was a big Yankees fan, and so we were big Yankee fans too, and back then, in the 1960s, the Yankees always won. How wonderful it seems now to have watched Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra and Tony Kubek and Hector Lopez--these legends of the sport. Was I really alive in such a brave time? Yes, I was. And I remember it. I remember collecting the thin cardboard baseball cards, and chewing those thin squares of pink gum which came with the cards and seemed to me at that time what the baseball cards themselves must taste like, were one to chew them. I remember sitting on the floor at the foot of my father's chair, I near one leg, my brother near the other, the smell of my father's pipe tobacco, the smoke drifting between us and rising to the ceiling. It was one of the rare things we did together--I, my brother, and our father. We shared something, a brief camaraderie. We had this together at the height of the baseball season. And we had Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford and all the rest. We had them too, for a season.