Andy Young: Unforgettable

By Andy Young

I was unable to read the newspaper one morning last week. But that allowed my mind to go elsewhere, and on the day in question that precipitated an unexpected trip down Memory Lane, with several side excursions along the way.

Grandma Spaine made this baseball quilt for Andy Young
when he was 10 years old. COURTESY PHOTO 

Some highlights:

I’ll never forget hitting four home runs in a pickup softball game on the University of Connecticut campus. Three of them actually cleared a reasonably distant fence, too!

I’ll never forget making the last out of the final game of the first half of the Easton Little League season when I was 12 years old. My team, the Hawks, was rallying, but with the tying runs on base the pitcher for the Bears, who happened to be my cousin, got me to pop out to the first baseman, which meant that their team (and not ours) were first half champions.

I’ll never forget seeing all three of my children born. The thrill was indescribable, as was (and is) my gratitude for being born male.

I’ll never forget the 25-cent wager that I made during my freshman year of high school with Jeff Wohl, who sat next to me in homeroom for four years. The bet was that whoever was absent from school first had to pay the other a quarter. Neither of us cared much about academics, but because we were both healthy and cheap, no one ended up having to pay.

I’ll never forget the baseball quilt Grandma Spaine made for me when I was 10 years old. In fact, I still have it, thanks to my sister finding it in our mom’s attic decades after I had left home and then sending it to an elite textile hospital for repairs.

I’ll never forget playing pickup basketball on Gary’s driveway, at Fig’s house, and at Noel’s barn.

I’ll never forget riding back from Pennsylvania to Connecticut in the middle of the winter, wrapped in two army-issue sleeping bags, while seat-belted in the (open-air) back of my cousin’s Subaru Brat. It was awfully cold, but it was also 100 percent less expensive than a bus ticket.

I’ll never forget the numbers 6602 and 2714. $66 and two cents was what I got paid (after taxes) for a 40-hour week of manual labor at my hometown’s apple orchard. I made $27.14 for working a 16-hour weekend.

I’ll never forget my first major league baseball game. I had never seen greener grass! It was the ninth-place Astros vs. the 10th-place Mets, so the crowd was probably sparse, but my father accurately informed my brother, my cousins, and me that there were more people in Shea Stadium that night than there were residing in our entire small hometown.

I’ll never forget coming face-to-face with a huge deer that came thrashing through the remote field where, early one Saturday morning, I had been left by my boss with instructions to fill each of the 20 large burlap bags he had given me with five dozen ears of corn. Thankfully, after staring down at me for a few seconds, the buck chose to scamper off in another direction. Apparently, he was more scared of me than I was of him, although then, as now, I have no idea why that would have been the case.

It’s astounding how vivid these memories still are after so many years have passed. But what’s more mysterious: why, given my ability to summon long-ago events in such great detail, can’t I remember back five minutes, when I left the glasses I need to read the newspaper someplace that for the life of me I can’t recall? <