Memoirs: Pete's First Visit -Part 2

We ran to the edge of the yard overlooking the winding lane as Margaret and her new friend made their way up the hill. We screamed, jumped high in to the air and the little ones swung on the wooden gate as they got closer. We loved seeing her. She was beautiful with her pencil-thin waist and slender hips. Her hair was long and so were her nails. Her ivory complexion was flawless against her dark snappy eyes.

She was full of life and was eager to share it with anyone she considered to be her equal. I felt we were no longer on her level, since she had moved away and was much wiser than we ever hoped to be. However, blood runs thicker than water, and that loyalty ran from her veins to ours, which we found to be a lifeline into a larger world.

“Hi kids….I want you to meet Pete Kennedy”, she said in a nervous but excited tone. We quietly smiled back. Pete was definitely from the city. His attire gave him away. His shoes were made of soft white cloth with matching strings. The fabric was attached to the soles by a thin strip of rubber. We could not help but chuckle at those “sissy” shoes. Dad and my brothers wore heavy leather shoes with dark rawhide strings. It was quite a contrast from what we were seeing for the first time.

Pete stood like a scared rabbit. He seemed stiff and uneasy as Margaret began reciting our names. Figuring there were too many to remember, she went back and gave brief descriptions so he could identify each of us more easily. She described me as “the one who sings.” (During her high school days, she had taken me to school on “talent day” and had me sing before the assembly. As a five-year-old, I was scared to death. I cried and asked Mom to make her stop taking me, and she did!)

The nervousness that Margaret showed and the stiffness that held on to Pete, seemed to fade as we swarmed around them asking a million questions. I liked holding and smelling her soft, sweet hands. She was graceful and looked beautiful in her city clothes. In a way she didn’t seem to belong to us anymore. She belonged to a bigger world. She told us about riding in streetcars and seeing buildings taller than our barn. The more she talked about her new life, the farther she seemed from us.

Pete became as inquisitive about us as we were about him. He seemed fascinated with the life we lived and soon began asking questions. He wondered what we did for fun. He did not see any books to read or games to play. There were no bats, balls or dolls. We hadn’t thought much about it. We were learning that country kids have ways of playing that city kids aren’t aware of. We needed to clue him in.

When we told him about swimming in the pond, he wanted to know how we had learned to swim. We told him that the older kids could “kinda” swim from one side of the pond to the other, but the rest of us couldn’t. The shallow end had a lot of broken glass on the bottom, so we were not supposed to wade in that area. He had a look of horror on his face as the thought of us kids in a pond with glass on the bottom. He didn’t think any of us should be in the deep end unless we could swim. We assured him we were fine because Dad had given us inner tubes to hold on to.

The following day was swimming lesson 101. Pete organized us according to size and had us line up on the bank. He demonstrated the various kinds of strokes and how we were to do them. I was convinced he was not the sissy the boys thought he would be. As he swam across the murky water, the muscles popped up on his back like the ropes on our tree swing. Within a few days, we were all swimming. We were safe from the glass because we could all stay in the deep end. I only wished he had come sooner. I had stepped on a piece of glass the week before which cut off the tip of my second toe.

The following day was a day I will always remember. Pete changed our worlds forever. He had been hinting that he had something for us, but we were unable to guess what it was. On that day, he went to the trunk of his car and presented us with a tube of fuzzy green balls. We had never seen anything like them before. We felt them and rubbed them against our cheeks. They were soft and yet firm. They bounced. We wondered what we would do with them. Pete explained that they were tennis balls. These were the balls he played tennis with at the University of Cincinnati. We knew we were not going to be dressing in white shorts and canvas shoes, so what were we supposed to do with the balls?

We invented all kinds of ways to play with them. My favorite was “handy over.” One team threw the ball over the house. If the other team caught it before it bounced on the ground, they could sneak around the house and “tag” anyone on the opposing team thus gaining a point. If they missed catching the ball, they had to yell “handy over” and toss it back over the roof to the other team. For the team on the front side of the house, the big challenge was to catch the ball before it went bouncing down the hill and into the creek. The teams rotated so one did not have the disadvantage of being on the front side each time.

We played this until the sun went down and we could no longer see the ball. This game might sound too simple to be fun, but we would strategize to make it more difficult to win.  My brother, Charlie, discovered that if you threw the ball with just enough force to let it reach the peek of the roof, then it would slowly roll down the other side of the roof and onto the ground. It would surprise the other team, who was standing far from the house thinking it was coming over high in the air. They could not get to it in time to catch it before it bounced on the ground.

Also, we realized you could see through the house since the little bedroom window lined up with the front living room one. We would watch to see heads pass across the windows. That would tell us they caught the ball and were coming to tag us. The other team got smart and bent under the window without being seen. (I’m sure this was another one of Charlie’s ideas.) The opposing team got caught as they watched, thinking no one was coming.

We took the balls down to the meadow, which lay on the south side of the house and barnyard. We gathered thick sticks from the nearby woods and played softball. There was no greater thrill than to hit one of those fuzzy green balls and send it soaring in the air while the outfielder was jumping over dirt clods and running through wild dandelions to make a catch.

My brother, Tom, who is two years younger than I, developed a knack for juggling the balls. He started with two and then advanced to three. They were the perfect weight. They were small enough to fit into a kid’s hand and fuzzy enough to stick to one’s skin. Sometimes he would bounce one on the living room floor and then throw his leg over a it was on its way up. We all tried our hand at juggling, but Tom always remained the champ! Since the balls were rubber and filled with air, we took them to the pond and tossed them across the murky water. They did not hurt when we missed a catch and they bounced off our heads. 

The tennis ball story has stayed with us all these years. We still enjoy talking about the day Pete Kennedy introduced us to the world of tennis! We could not help laughing behind his back at his dainty shoes. We held our breath and later our sides as we laughed about the pants he put on as the sun grew higher in the sky. They, too, were white with slits up the sides. We thought they barely covered his “you know what”. Needless to say, we all gawked and were assured he was okay.

Our curiosity grew until one of us got up the nerve to ask him about his attire. He explained that he played tennis. These were called tennis shoes and the shorts were made so the player could move without being restricted. The slits allowed one’s legs to stretch so he could reach for the ball. The canvas shoes were light weight and would not weigh the player down like a regular pair of shoes would do.

We were a private bunch about seeing each other’s bodies. Mom would not allow anyone to dress or undress in front of the opposite sex. It was a sin she would not tolerate. For the first time in my life, I was looking at flesh in an area I had never seen before. And it was on a person I hardly knew.