The Pecan Park Eagle

First of all, I grew up in Pecan Park in the Houston East End, during the decade that followed the end of World War II. The values and outlook on things that formed for me there never left and flew away. We called our little rag-tag sandlot baseball team that home-based at the vacant lot at the corner of Japonica and Myrtle streets by the aspiring name of the Pecan Park Eagles. We called the place “Eagle Park” or simply “The Lot.” It was a place for all-day baseball games and dream-building. Baseball became my first love in that time and place – and it has remained so for me my entire life.

Many years beyond those Pecan Park days, my only child and son Neal came along. In the process, Neal got a dad who was old enough to be his grandfather – and I got a son who pulled me out to the playground for a little pitch, catch, and fungo hitting for the first time in umpteen hundred eons. It felt great again to be out there on the sandlot again. For Neal and me, it was an abandoned school yard near our house, one with a mixture of blossoming purple wildflowers and some pretty tall patches of high standing weeds, but we didn’t care. Besides, I had an ancient history of looking for lost baseballs in the high grass – and it was time for Neal to learn about that sort of thing too.

One day, on the Fourth of July in 1993, we had just finished a nice little workout under a sky full of tumbling cotton candy clouds when it hit me like a brick. The sounds of a wooden bat landing hard upon the ball, the one-of-a-kind smell of an old leather glove snapping up grounders and near errant throws, and the smile that broke wide on Neal’s face when he made a good play in the field — all these things and more — came rushing at me like a giant emotional wave from deep within some ancient cell in my soul. Silently I looked around for the now invisible faces of my old Pecan Park Eagle teammates, the ones that had been scattered from me by the winds of time and always changing life circumstantiality. I missed them all, and all the summer baseball time we had together back in the late ’40s and early ’50s – and I wondered if they also, now and then, ever felt the same way about me. Playing ball with my son that day had reawakened a whole beautiful chapter of my early life, but I was by then an expert at rationalizing strong feelings and pushing them down – and so I did.

Or so I thought.

As we were walking home, Neal suddenly exclaimed, “Daddy, I see a baseball in those tall weeds!” As I looked own to my left, I saw it too, and I reached down into the bramble to pull it up. My hand immediately told me that it wasn’t a whole baseball, at all, but only an old brown cover of one. Still, I worked to free it from the weeds that pinned it down and I drew it up from the earth and into the sunlight again.

I just held the baseball cover in my left hand as we continued the one-block walk home. I felt a silence within me and, for a wile, all we could both hear was the sound of our feet, sloshing through the high weeds on the way home.

“Daddy,” Neal finally broke the silence with a question, “what are you  going to do with that old thing?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said.

When we arrived home, I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and sat down with the old baseball cover at our kitchen table. The following poem poured out of me like water from the tap faucet. It’s the best explanation I can offer as to why I chose to name this blog site “The Pecan Park Eagle.” I want this place to be home plate for all the subjects that are dear to the hearts of so many of us who love baseball, Houston, and history. All I can provide is my outlook on things, in whatever form it comes out, as either prose or poetry.

Here’s the poem that awakened something in me sixteen years ago that continues to show no signs of ever going back to sleep:

The Pecan Park Eagle By Bill McCurdy (1993): Ode To An Old Baseball Cover I Found While Playing Catch with My Eight-Year Old Son Neal On an Abandoned School Yard.

Tattered friend, I found you again, Laying flat in a field of yesterday’s hope. Your resting place? An abandoned schoolyard. When parents move away, the children go too.

How long have you been here, Strangling in the entanglement of your grassy grave, Bleaching your brown-ness in the summer sun, Freezing your frailness in the ice of winter?

How long, old friend, how long?

Your magical essence exploded from you long ago. God only knows when. Perhaps, it was the result of one last grand slam.

One last grand slam, a solitary cherishment, Now remembered only by the doer of that distant past deed. Only the executioner long remembers the little triumphs. The rest of the world never knows, or else, soon forgets.

I recovered you today from your ancient tomb, From your place near the crunching sound of my footsteps. I pulled you from your enmeshment in the dying July grass, And I wanted to take you home with me.

Oh, would that the warm winds of spring might call us, One more time, awakening our souls in green renewal To that visceral awareness of hope and possibility.

To soar once more in spirit, like the Pecan Park Eagle, High above the billowing clouds of a summer morning, In flight destiny – to all that is bright and beautiful.

There is a special consolation in this melancholy reunion. Because you held a larger world within you, I found a larger world in me.

Come home with me, my friend, Come home.

Tags: Baseball, History, Houston, Personal

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