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hand to show me how you wore it when expecting a bunt, or a pop, or to scoop up a grounder. Hot smashes were another matter—line drives. The spit in the mitt, he claimed, cooled off the ball. “That’s the way to cool one,” he’d yell after Kenny Keltner had snared a liner along the third base line.
    The last clipping we came to, the last story in his set, was an account of his play for the Browns one day. The clipping was real and the headline amusing, but the story may have been about another time, another team, than I was told it was. I still wish to think my father had made the grade, a grade that lofty, even though it led to a sickening humiliation. It seemed my father tripped over something while chasing a foul beyond third base, where he was occasionally stationed, and fell, wet mitt and all, swallowing his chew when he hit the ground. He did manage, nevertheless, to get a good pock fromthe ball, which he held in the air while the tobacco went down. A moment later, dizzy and green, as the newspaper gleefully reported, my father threw up on the field.
    My father always told this story for my amusement, but I could see he felt a little sorry, a little sad—not because he’d fallen, or been sick, but because those good sweet years were now so far away, as are the small parks, the ardent crowds, and the grass which would shine its green shade on a player’s palm.

THE FIRST FOURTH FOLLOWING 9/11
    In my boyhood, the Fourth of July was a day set aside for noise. It was, I thought, such a suitable idea that no one I knew could be thanked for it. The Fourth was for small towns as well as for small boys. Things went bang at odd moments all day, but during the late afternoon people often gathered in the local park for a potluck picnic. Tables were customarily covered with white paper, but the bandstand would be decked out in red and blue bunting. There the town band would play robustly sentimental and patriotic tunes, badly but with beery energy, and a politician or two might speechify, making sounds as meaningless as the caps that went off for no reason other than exuberance. There would be a softball game, sack races, and, on the meditative side of the picnic grounds, horseshoes carefully tossed to collar a problem as if they were weighty thoughts. Their clang always seemed calm and immensely reassuring to me, and the men who tossed them at least serious, if not wise. They offered, before and after every turn, thoughts, briefly put, on the state of crops, morals, and the nation.
    The women cleaned up after the men had eaten their hamburgers, beans, and potato salad, then sat about the tables gossiping, fanning away warmth and flies. I saw nothing the matter with any of this … I was busy being a boy, and I saw nothing the matter withthat either. I threw cherry bombs into the pond where there had been ducks that morning. Too excited to eat sensibly, I rushed from one activity to another, a large red firecracker in my left fist, as real as if it had been drawn by Norman Rockwell, a glorious burst that I was saving for the day’s end, which I knew would otherwise be marked by girls waving sparklers and shrieking with glee as they ran to make tracers within the darker environment of the trees.
    Sports, food, speeches, music, noise: each a gift of the day that marked our independence, the day that was supposed to repuff our pride and reaffirm our loyalties. My father was an athlete but he had duties beyond the field of play. He was a veteran of the First World War and a member of the American Legion, so on the morning of the Fourth he would dress himself in puttees, a Sam Browne belt, and a shiny tin helmet, then oil the valves on his cornet, which would have stuck since last fingered, and make a few soft-mouthed toots to hear whether his lips were still strong enough to do it. The Legion’s small band would turn out for deaths and patriotic anniversaries, either to sound taps or tire out a few Sousa tunes. Then, as