Games Brothers Play

     Aside from baseball, football was the only other sport my brothers and I would routinely play together, just the three of us.  Basketball on our non-regulation hoop took the form of HORSE or involved the kids in my mom's day care, but we could play a reasonable facsimile of football through a game we invented and named "Interception."  The name was so chosen because that was the primary indicator of success.  For instance, if my brothers were on offense, one passing to the other, my goal was to stop them from scoring, and intercepting the pass (you are not allowed to run the ball) was the best way to do that.  When we invented the game, I could have never known it would become a Thanksgiving tradition-- one which I would enjoy more than I ever thought possible once I was no longer "benched" by the condition of my health.

The Game of My Life

     For about seven straight summers, from the day school got out until the day we went back, you could find me and my brothers behind our house playing together every day.  Living in a home on a hill situated along M-24, which is a state highway where cars always fly past at 55 plus miles per hour, we had no front yard options unless they involved counting blue cars that drove by.  But that was fine, because behind our house, we had place that was our own little field of dreams.  "Down the hill."  "Down the hill" meant only one thing to me and my two younger brothers:  baseball.