Even Old Coots Leave a Mark

It is so freaking cool today, and I love it. This is the time of year that makes me want to play baseball. I know, baseball is a summer sport, but when I was a kid, we played from spring until it got way too cold. My best time was the fall, less breathing problems. I always hit the ball but had a little kid, Johnny, run for me because of my legs being messed up from the polio. I hit that ball so far, way past outfield and into Mr. Sewell’s yard. Sometimes he came out and took our balls inside and kept them. He was a mean man who had bobtailed cats. When it was too dark to play ball, we used to sit and tell scary stories and most of them involved Mr. Swell. We thought he might be a werewolf and that he ate children.

One day, I hit the ball clean into his yard and up to his kitchen window and it broke the window. He came running out so angry and all the other kids ran and of course I couldn’t run so he caught me as I was trying to hobble away. He kept shaking me. You’re mom is going to pay for this he said. I started to cry and before I knew it, my mom was crossing the street with her eyes squinted up and she knocked him flat on his ass and said, don’t you ever grab one of my kids again you sorry son of a bitch. Then she half carried, half pulled me home. The next day, my uncle went over and fixed the old coot’s window. When Mr. Sewell died, he left all his cats and no children and no relatives. The city took the house and the neighbors took the cats. My mom let me keep one, it was a shinny black one and I called him wolf.
My sister still lives in the old neighborhood and there are still offspring of those bobtails running the neighborhood. Every time we get together, especially if we are sitting in the swing which faces the lot where he used to live, we talk about that old man. Funny, he had no children, no siblings, no one, but he has been immortalized in my stories and the stories of all the kids from our neighborhood. Everyone has a crazy story about Old-Man Swell.