It was the beginning of summer vacation.
With old worn gloves on our handlebars and bats in one hand
my brothers and some friends rode bikes to the junior high.
After picking teams, we played all day long.
The score was not important. We just played for fun.
We liked hitting it hard off the 8th grade science building,
or catching an inning ending fly ball and running in.
The first day turned into a second, then the whole summer.
We would start our game early in the morning
at a field behind the junior high.
We always picked a different team than the day before.
The inning was not important, we just played for fun.
Most days that summer we played until we ran out of sunlight,
then riding home with stars twinkling in the sky.
The summer was almost over,
when two cars and a truck pulled to the curb.
A crowd of strangers came through the gate.
They were taller, bigger and older.
It was us against them, now we wanted to win.
We played hard until just before dark,
and arranged to play the next day.
Our opponents were in the Air Force at Vandenberg.
We hit it off the science building, they hit it over.
We lost several balls in the bushes between buildings.
We came close to winning, still we had fun.
Then we lost our last ball over the science building.
We found it on the first day of school,
in a classroom on the other side of a broken window.