The following is an excerpt from my book “It’s Complicated, Isn’t It?”

As a pre-teen, I remember being able to be laser-focused on an activity — so tuned in that I couldn’t fathom anything outside being present in that moment.  My brain was completely locked. I would be so zeroed in on my mission that I wouldn’t have noticed Raquel Welch right next to me in a string bikini.  I might ignore a bowel movement for as long as was physically possible… and then some.  This level of concentration presented a problem for my parents and the mandatory Church requirement.  

Living in the burbs of Southeast Portland, we didn’t have any place to play hardball in the immediate neighborhood.  That would have meant a trip to the park or nearby field.  This prompted my friend Scott to devise an ingenious innovation — a masking tape whiffle ball.  Scott was younger than I by a year, but we shared a love of baseball and were both very competitive.  

One Sunday morning, with nothing better to do, I wandered down to the neighbor’s house to find Scott experimenting with wrapping some masking tape around a whiffle ball.  Depending on how the ball was wrapped, you could get the ball to curve about 3 feet from pitcher to batter.  It turned every pitcher into Bert Blyleven faster than you could say, “I whiffed yo ass.”  There were no special seems to grip, no wrist turning, nothing.  All you had to do was throw the whiffle ball at the batter, and it arced like Halley’s Comet.  It might even drop a foot or two.  It was magical.   And with the extra weight of the masking tape on the ball, (if you manage to make contact), every batter was now Jim Thome.  That thing would sail across the sky in a trajectory so beautiful, it sent visions of grandeur as an MLB cleanup hitter through my mind.  That is IF I could connect with the ball. 

The game was pretty simple.  A home run was awarded for hitting the neighbor’s driveway on the fly.  Extra points if you hooked one up on their roof. Each time you hit one short of the driveway, that’s a strike.   The batter racks up home runs until he strikes out.   Then it was the next guy’s turn.  

We had to keep a supply of whiffle balls handy because every half hour or so, we’d have to do a roof climb and retrieve our supply of whiffle balls.  The old man next door didn’t like us climbing up there, but that never stopped us… we just learned to use stealthier tactics.  But he didn’t like it one bit.  I think we got away with it 99% of the time because his recycling bin was piled high every week with wine bottles.  He and the old lady were obviously day drinkers because when he did come outside, it was usually in his bathrobe, and he clearly hadn’t shaved or showered for some time, and he sounded like Foster Brooks.  

We had our favorites when it came to whiffle balls.  The taping of the balls became a science lesson.  Two wraps this way.  One that way.  Some balls would break better than others, so we used those first.  There was one ball that broke so well that we got into a fight over who wrapped it.

Scott and I are deep into a whiffle ball competition, and I am into it big-time.  One of the draws of the game was being able to humiliate your friend by throwing a curve ball so nasty that they looked foolish swinging and missing by a mile.   Expecially if it was strike three.  We could get each other to slam the bat down in disgust after missing a pitch that was flailing across the yard like a butterfly with no particular destination in mind.

If memory serves, the score was close, and I was ahead.  I had worked hard at developing a set of pitches that bamboozled Scott and left him pissed off at the thought of being defeated at the game he invented.  Then my sister showed up two houses down and yelled, “Time for Church.”  

This simply could not be.  There was no way my luck could have run so afoul that I would have to exit doing what I loved so much for the prospect of changing into my “slacks” and dressing up for an hour of church.  I was dumbfounded.  What did I do to deserve this?  I hated the Church rule more than a toddler hates nap time.  I was furious.  Incensed.  Fuuuuuuuuck me!  But there was no way out. That was the rule.