A Christmas Tradition - A Little Shelby Strother

Merry Christmas everyone. 
TL

Each Christmas Day Contains the Past, Present and Future

By SHELBY STROTHER

TL's Favorite Book

It did not matter that the wind-chill was life threatening. It was Christmas morning, and a bright sun stabbed the frozen land. And children were playing.

The decision over which to play with - the official World Cup soccer ball or the Turbo Football - never materialized. With all the snow, a soccer match was out of the question. So spirals of pink and black performed in the most sincere imitations of Rodney Peete and Joe Montana floated back and forth in the yard.

What a nice sight.

The Annual Second Chance is near - it's called New Year's Eve. It is the window of opportunity where the hopes and fears of all the year (not to mention the mistakes) can be erased.

But Christmas Day is a time of reinforcement and the essence of tomorrow. And children playing with toys are the finest examples of what that tomorrow looks like.

I look out the window. I've been in that yard. All young boys have. Sports become such a part of childhood. Santa is aware of all of this, naturally.

This particular day is exquisite, I think to myself. I take personal inventory, not only of blessings and personal satisfaction, but of the presents of Christmas past. Still the kid, I suppose.

I got my first basketball when I was six. I made my first basket a year later. There was a tetherball set; I must have been eight. And a football helmet when I was ten. A Carl Furillo-model baseball mitt at eleven. There were tennis rackets and fishing poles and boxing gloves and shrimp nets and a Mickey Mantle 32-inch Little League bat and one time, even a badminton set.

Every Christmas, I'd play out my dreams and my mind would fly over the rainbow, imagining my propulsion. Of course, I would become a major-leaguer, an All-Star, an all-time great, a Hall of Famer. We all would. My vision extended well beyond the day.

My athletic ability, alas, never kept stride. It was not the worst realization I would ever make.

But I have noticed a direct correlation between Christmas gifts and sporting dreams. The dreams are for the young. So are the gifts. Usually, the two disappear in unison. The rare few who project into greatness discover they do not need imagination to make those lofty flights of fantasy. Hope is not the co-pilot. Expectation is.

It must be a wonderful view.

I was thinking about all of this when another memory nudged me. My 17th Christmas I got a typewriter.

It was about the same time that I'd maneuvered my fantasy a few extra miles. I'd received a baseball scholarship to pitch at a small school in Florida. There were other opportunities, other colleges available. But none that would allow my athletic vision to continue.

I had expected a Christmas of more games in the yard. More dreams to celebrate. I got a typewriter instead.

"What am I going to do with a typewriter?" I asked.

My mother said I'd need it for college. But she also said, "Sometimes you get too old to play games. But you never get too old that you can't use your imagination."

Sometimes Christmas is taken for granted. Almost always, in fact. I think Christmas music, and I hear bells. I turn on the radio and I hear someone named Elmo and Patsy lamenting their grandmother's head-on collision with a reindeer. I think of the meaning of Christmas, and I think of the most special birthday in the history of the world. But I turn on the TV and there are all these Claymation raisins doing Doo-Wop homages to the joys of buying machines wherein a microchip can seize command of entire generations.

Christmas (will soon) be gone, 364 days to go. But children still play. They chase the wonderful image of themselves as they would like to be seen. Christmas is their favorite arena. But they settle for lesser stadia.

But remember this - the present is sometimes confused with the package it comes wrapped in. Sometimes the gift is simply the freedom to imagine. There may be no greater one.

It was a great typewriter. I still play with it.

- A column by Shelby Strother

(For my Blog Entry on Christmas Eve over the past six years, I've alternated by posting memorable columns from a few of my all-time favorite writers. This column is, by far, my favorite column of all-time so read on my friends and "followers."  Here is to Shelby and a Merry Christmas to all).

###

Notes: For those of you who did not know Shelby Strother, I pass these little tidbits along; He was a very good friend. I've lost a father and an older brother. I've agonized and felt helpless as we've since watched close relatives and friends of the family pass away, but Shelby was the first good friend in my life who went and got cancer and then died. My good buddy, Bob Rose, did the same damn thing this past year.

Back to Shelby... I can remember Shelby attended the 1991 NBA All-Star Game in Charlotte, NC. That Sunday night, he said that he didn't feel well and was going to bed early. That was about Feb. 10, 1991. The next month was a bad dream, each minute of every day for a solid month. Shelby died in the suburbs of Detroit on March 3, 1991, leaving his wife, Kim and two great little guys, Tommy and Kenny (the latter joined Shelby in heaven a few years back but that is a terrible fact of life to be told another day). Shelby grew up in the great State of Florida and loved it. I met him when he was a writer for the Denver Post. He went on to be a sports columnist for the Detroit News, but when big news was breaking and the News needed a writer, they sent Shelby. Berlin Wall coming down, off went Shelby. I could go on.

SHELBY for CHRISTMAS: Must Read Column

Just as I did back in 2007 & 2009, here's a little Shelby for Christmas. It doesn't get any better than this column to pass along the true meaning of Christmas.

Saddlebags, a book dedicated to Shelby

By SHELBY STROTHER

It did not matter that the wind-chill was life threatening. It was Christmas morning, and a bright sun stabbed the frozen land. And children were playing.

The decision over which to play with - the official World Cup soccer ball or the Turbo Football - never materialized. With all the snow, a soccer match was out of the question. So spirals of pink and black performed in the most sincere imitations of Rodney Peete and Joe Montana floated back and forth in the yard.

What a nice sight.

The Annual Second Chance is near - it's called New Year's Eve. It is the window of opportunity where the hopes and fears of all the year (not to mention the mistakes) can be erased.

But Christmas Day is a time of reinforcement and the essence of tomorrow. And children playing with toys are the finest examples of what that tomorrow looks like.

I look out the window. I've been in that yard. All young boys have. Sports become such a part of childhood. Santa is aware of all of this, naturally.

This particular day is exquisite, I think to myself. I take personal inventory, not only of blessings and personal satisfaction, but of the presents of Christmas past. Still the kid, I suppose.

I got my first basketball when I was six. I made my first basket a year later. There was a tetherball set; I must have been eight. And a football helmet when I was ten. A Carl Furillo-model baseball mitt at eleven. There were tennis rackets and fishing poles and boxing gloves and shrimp nets and a Mickey Mantle 32-inch Little League bat and one time, even a badminton set.

Every Christmas, I'd play out my dreams and my mind would fly over the rainbow, imagining my propulsion. Of course, I would become a major-leaguer, an All-Star, an all-time great, a Hall of Famer. We all would. My vision extended well beyond the day.

My athletic ability, alas, never kept stride. It was not the worst realization I would ever make.

But I have noticed a direct correlation between Christmas gifts and sporting dreams. The dreams are for the young. So are the gifts. Usually, the two disappear in unison. The rare few who project into greatness discover they do not need imagination to make those lofty flights of fantasy. Hope is not the co-pilot. Expectation is.

It must be a wonderful view.

I was thinking about all of this when another memory nudged me. My 17th Christmas I got a typewriter.

It was about the same time that I'd maneuvered my fantasy a few extra miles. I'd received a baseball scholarship to pitch at a small school in Florida. There were other opportunities, other colleges available. But none that would allow my athletic vision to continue.

I had expected a Christmas of more games in the yard. More dreams to celebrate. I got a typewriter instead.

"What am I going to do with a typewriter?" I asked.

My mother said I'd need it for college. But she also said, "Sometimes you get too old to play games. But you never get too old that you can't use your imagination."

Sometimes Christmas is taken for granted. Almost always, in fact. I think Christmas music, and I hear bells. I turn on the radio and I hear someone named Elmo and Patsy lamenting their grandmother's head-on collision with a reindeer. I think of the meaning of Christmas, and I think of the most special birthday in the history of the world. But I turn on the TV and there are all these Claymation raisins doing Doo-Wop homages to the joys of buying machines wherein a microchip can seize command of entire generations.

Christmas (will soon) be gone, 364 days to go. But children still play. They chase the wonderful image of themselves as they would like to be seen. Christmas is their favorite arena. But they settle for lesser stadia.

But remember this - the present is sometimes confused with the package it comes wrapped in. Sometimes the gift is simply the freedom to imagine. There may be no greater one.

It was a great typewriter. I still play with it.

***

I frequently make note in this blog, if you want to buy a great book, "Google" ' Saddlebags and Shelby Strother' or head to Amazon.com and do the same.  Then, buy the book.  Click HERE.

Mom Always Batted Cleanup ...

Last Christmas, I tapped in a gem of a column, I must say. Of course, it was one of the easiest columns ever written by a blogger because it was written by the great Shelby Strother and I re-typed it from his book, Saddle Bags.

Well, I am taking the same road today. A column by Shelby. Enjoy it.

***

It was a sound that shall never go away. The sloshing noise of the washing machine was like a siren going off to my 11-year old ears. Disaster was imminent.

My jeans were in the washer, dirt caked on each knee, as usual. And precious -- no priceless baseball cards were in the right rear pocket. One of the more monumental trades in the history of the neighborhood was about to become a soggy wad of sloop.

Mickey Mantle, Warren Spahn, Ernie Banks. Soon to become indistinguishable, illegible, worthless. All because of a frivolous error of omission.

The panic was so real, the disappointment so looming. A month of negotiation, 20 cards of lesser significance and several days of lunch money were undoubtedly being washed away.

I ran full speed through the house. screaming, demanding the cursed Maytag be stopped. I slid on my knees, pulled open the washer door, dumped both hands into the hot, soapy water and began groping for my jeans.

"Are you looking for these?" asked my mother, reaching into the sanitary pocket of her sterilized housecoat, and pulling out the baseball cards.

It was the first time I kissed her without being asked.

Good ol' Mom. Steady, dependable, covered a lot of ground. Batted clean-up. Sacrificed a lot. Great team player. She'd have made one hell of a shortstop.

Which, of course, she was. It was during the time I was infatuated with the notion of becoming another Nellie Fox. I always wanted to be a second baseman. But before I got the courage to ask Dad to work with me on the double play, I asked Mom. She became Luis Aparicio.

The routine was simple. My brother would tap a ground ball to my mother. She'd scoop it up and flip it kind of lady-like to the vicinity of the dish towel we used for second base. I would try to catch the ball, drag my foot across the rag bag and throw it to my brother, in Nellie's image. By then, he had discarded the bat, picked up his glove and transformed from hitter to first baseman with only a twinkling of imagination. It was 6-4-3, if anyone was keeping score.

My throws were awful, my form ridiculous. More often that not, the dish towel would get tangled in my rubber cleats and I'd trip. My throw, already off balance, would go straight down and bounce inches from where I soon collapsed.

Whenever that happened, the shortstop would become the mother again. First aid, sympathy, whatever was needed. She wasn't a good athlete, only a good sport. But Dad liked sports and Mom was Dad's wife. This was back in the days when ERA meant earned run average and Title IX didn't mean anything. What it really meant was the TV game of the week took precedence over the romantic movie she loved as a kid. It meant sitting with the family, folding socks or underwear, reading a magazine and occasionally asking who was winning and what was the score.

Mom managed the clubhouse. The team came first. She wanted it that way.

There was the time I decided to chew tobacco in Little League. Nellie Fox chews it, I argued. No deal. I knew it was futile. I'd secretly experimented with the chew once. It was awful. So I found a substitute.

Turtle food.

It looked like tobacco, smelled bad enough to be tobacco, and, if you mixed it with gum, formed a nice semi-lump that made my cheek stick out. Just like Nellie's.

An hour before game time, Mom discovered my intentions. She laughed at the thought of turtle food being in my mouth. Then she fretted. Then she suggested the magical qualities of Tootsie Roll as an alternative. Wad up one of those babies, slip it in and...perfect.

I jumped on my bike, making allowance for the extra ballast crammed into my disjointed jaw. I almost didn't hear the stern warning, "I'd better not hear of you doing any spitting."

Then, as always, she added, "And, have a good time, honey."

There was always a special meal that had to be cooked because someone had an early game and someone else had a later one. There was only one way to put an ouchless bandage on a skinned knee. And, only Mom knew how to do it.

There was only one Mom.

I don't remember if I always told her thanks for playing hurt so often, for supplying emergency sew jobs and last second pep talks. Or, if I always told her I appreciated the uniforms which were always clean, the bleacher support which was always positive and the coaching, which was always by the rules.

I think I forgot to do all these things because I thought Mom was like Lou Gehrig and would always be in the lineup. But it's been 15 years now since I realized nothing is forever.

It's a fine day to brag about mothers. I just did.

Now, it's your turn.

By Shelby Strother.

***

I think I'll stop typing - and call my Mom.