Nothing to worry about
It was a quiet day in the neighborhood. I was supposed to meet with my friends Ronald, Dave, and Jude to play stickball outside Jude’s apartment. His apartment overlooked a perfect place for stickball. It is a set of garages for residents that want to pay extra to secure their cars. The garages are parallel to each other with concrete flooring between them. At one end of the garages is the street and at the other end is a large wall, similar to the Green Monster at Fenway Park. We would meet there to play. On the wall was drawn a strike zone and certain garage doors on the right and left sides were designated as first and third with a drain in the middle of the concrete midway between the garages designated as second base.
On this day in particular it was only the four of us playing. It was two on two. One person pitched for each team and there were a lot of invisible runners on base with only two batters on the opposing side to play.
Across the street at the far end of the parking facility, was the yard of Old Lady Crabtree’s yard.
Ronald and I were on the same team. The game went well until Dave blasted a ball (a Spaldeen for those of you uninitiated to city vocabulary) into Old Lady Crabtree.
The usual rule was if it landed in her yard, it was hers to keep, for no one wanted to tangle with her. However this day it was my ball that was hit into her yard and Ronald said,” Let’s go get it.”
“Are you crazy?” was my retort, “She probably has man-eating dogs and bear traps on her property to catch us.”.
“Seriously, That’s just superstition,” was Ronald’s reply. “She’s probably not even home. What could possibly go wrong? Don’t worry about it.”
Far be it for me to actually pay attention to why we set up rules about her yard, after all, bear traps and man-eating dogs did sound a little ridiculous. I mean, what was there to worry about.
So both of us went across the street, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE
PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING sign and climbed over the fence that surrounded her property since the gate was locked to her backyard. I should say that I was the one who climbed over the fence. Ronald said he would stay back and keep watch.
It didn’t take me long to figure out why there was a fence around the property. Aside from the brush, I had to climb through on the other side of the fence (later discovering it was poison ivy), she did in fact, have two rather big german shepherds loose on the property. And she was definitely home.
I just barely managed to make it back to the street side of the fence without getting bitten, my clothes getting rather disheveled in the race through the bushes by the fence. All we could hear as we went back to our friends was her high screeching voice, “You little brats stay off of my property, or I will call the police and send you to jail! Can’t you read!”
Needless to say, I didn’t get my ball back. We all left the playing field to go to Jude’s house, not wanting to be identified by her to the police which we were sure was going to happen.
From then I promised myself that I would not listen to any of Ronald’s suggestions again. Well, you know how that worked out. Listening to Ronald, what could go wrong?
