Home is Lenipe Falls, New Jersey, a little town that still huddles against the slimy banks of the slow-moving Passaic River just a few miles west of New York City. People still fall in love there, get-married, have children. Some still dream of something better: going away to college, becoming rich and famous, discovering the meaning of man’s place on planet earth. The Passaic River, indifferent to human dreams, still carries the flotsam and jetsam of civilization back into the dark, cold depths of Newark Bay. But home is much more than a place; it is also a time, and in that sense, Thomas Wolfe was right: “You can’t go home again.” My childhood home of the Eisenhower years, 1952-1960, exists only in my memory, and even the best maps computers can make will not bring me home again to Lenipe Falls.
There are no falls, but the Lenipe Indians once roamed the same woods that I did and paddled their canoes down the same muddy river on whose dusky surface I had once drifted through endless summer days in a homemade rowboat. In my summer dreams, the Passaic became the mighty Mississippi, and I was with Huck Finn in search of Cairo, Illinois. At Cairo, Huck and I would find freedom for the slave Jim and start a new life fighting for social justice and a better world for all mankind. But after missing Cairo in a fog, Huck and I just drifted with the current, further and further into slave territory. The only meaning became the journey itself and not the end. I wondered then, and wonder even more now, if I would always miss the turn at Cairo and spend the rest of my days drifting aimlessly down that great dark river.
The only storm cloud over the Passaic was the fear of nuclear annihilation. The Russians had the bomb and would drop it on our school if they had the chance, but we were ready. In our weekly bomb drills we huddled against the inner walls of Washington School with our coats over our heads, surely safe from the worst that the Russians could do. Some families built elaborate concrete bomb shelters in their yards, but many of these were soon converted into swimming pools. My father’s plan for surviving the bomb was a metal garbage can filled with canned goods that would keep us alive for weeks in the cellar, but little by little the cans disappeared, and the garbage can was eventually used for garbage. In truth, even the Russians could not disturb the deeply entrenched tranquility of Lenipe Falls, New Jersey, a place where baseball was much more significant than politics.
In an age of video games, satellite television, and what passes for non-stop communication, I sometimes need to remind myself that there was a time when the major reason for communicating was baseball. My friends and I lived it, breathed it, and dreamed of playing for one of the three New York teams: The Dodgers, Giants or Yankees. When I moved to Lenipe Falls, I had to decide which of these teams was to be my religion, and once I decided
