MOZART DIDN'T PLAY SECOND BASE --- by Josef Behrens
When I was three years old my father and twin uncles took me to my first baseball game. Needless to say I was enthralled. When I was seven they took me to my first major league game at Yankee Stadium where we sat in field boxes near Lou Gehrig and Hank Greenberg. The final score was 8 to 7 but for the life of me I can't remember whether if was New York or Detroit who won. No matter. A few years later when my baby sister turned eight I took her to Yankee Stadium. She had never seen a baseball game (no TV in those days) and immediately became a fanatic fan and still is to this day.Go figure. Anyway with all this love of baseball hovering around me of course,I couldn't get enough of it even though I was too young to read the box scores in the paper. My ever present violin lessons (unfortunately for my musical bent mother) had absolutely nothing to do with baseball but throwing a ball around with my friends (none of whom had to practice the violin) took precedence over practicing scales.Which brings me to the gist of this little story.When I was a boy there were no board games other than Monopoly although we did have marbles and toy soldiers. So we were obliged to make up our own games. We did play baseball with a tennis ball and - I must digress - when I was ten I hit 72 home runs (still a tennis ball record) wthout mind you any steroids.Sorry about the interruption because now I want to get to that part of this tale which has always tickled me not to mention my mother. This story has to do with a tennis ball and six house painters. As a boy I lived in a two family house next to another two family house (they were very common in those bygone days).. There was the ever present driveway between the houses which accommodated one car. The six painters were busily painting that side of our neighor's house directly by my driveway. By the way I was, for the record, eleven at this time and a rabid Brooklyn Dodger fan whose announcer was Red Barber, my idol.
Well I decided to invent a baseball game using my trusted tennis ball. I put together in my mind two teams and two lineups none of which really existed and proceeded to throw the ball in the air. The idea of the game was that the higher I threw the ball the further the "batter" had hit it. If the ball nudged the roof it was a home run. Emulating my idol Red Barber i broadcast the game pitch by pitch and hit by hit. Suddenly my mother called out "Josef come in for lunch"at which the painters dropped their brushes and in unison yelled "Hey lady he can't go in now it's the ninth inning!" Boy did I love baseball.
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