Street Football

When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Chicago in the late Sixties my pop, the Master Chief, used to toss the football around in the quiet suburban street - Hillside Avenue in Glen Ellyn, Illinois - out side our big old house.

Those times; the crisp acrid smell of the fallen leaves, the cool snap of the autumn air, the perfect heft and flight of the prolate sphere...they are still lovely memories of my father.

Now he and I are far apart, and at 86 he is no longer able to toss the ball with the same authority as he once did.

So it has fallen to me and my son to maintain the family tradition. So we took advantage of the break in the rain we're enjoying Thanksgiving Day and tossed the little football about for a while. He's a good tosser, the Peep. Catching? We're working on that.

Mind you, my father is famous in our household for his observation (during a late summer baseball-toss in which a hard throw coming out of the falling darkness popped me right in the face) that "You should have gotten your glove up."

The Master Chief knew even then that life is harder than a baseball and just as likely to hit you in the face when you least expect it.

Unless you get your glove up.