For all the moms who washed our clothes and watched us play and wound up watching the mailbox and waiting for the phone to ring. A nostalgic pause in middle-aged baby boomeras lives, aJust a Little Raina]a is a collection of the reflections of several men and a one remarkable woman who played on the sandlots of the 1950s and early 1960s, traveled the world in the face of the Cold War, many as military brats, and got down to the grim task of the Vietnam War before they realized that their childhoods had ended. Chronicled by a first person narration that speaks for a generation, these old friends consider the quick ride that they were on and its impact on who they are now, both pragmatically and spiritually, and how different their childrenas lives are from their own. Regardless of your age or station in life, you will find a little bit of yourself in these pages, as these participants, older now, revisit their childhood dreams and a few nightmares with the magic of that big hit that they all got at least once in their lives, still sweet in their minds. Grandparents, hometowns, childhood and military friends, gone or gone their own way, but never forgotten, like the crack of a bat and the smack of a mitt which were the piperas call to a game for generations of boys who were caught up in the sirenas song of baseball. We have been trying to recapture the definitive moments of our past ever since it became the past and we began looking back wistfully, wondering where it went. Was it Fitzgerald who told us that we do not look back, searching for events, we merely search for our youth? If you didnat cry, or at least get choked up when a son and his dead father played catch in Field of Dreams, then you have lost the magic. But, I bet you had it once, just like all the rest of us did. We may have filed the unpleasant things in our lives off in some corner of our minds, but not baseball. We are still waiting for that perfect pitch. And just when the curtain is falling, weall be wanting one more at bat, one more race down the base path, one more real game.
