Few things can arouse my interest, and hold my attention, like the series finale of a television show. There’s just something about knowing this is the end, this is the last time, this is the closing of the door and the turning of the page, that ignites an interest in me. Oddly enough, I’ve even tuned in to series finale episodes of shows that I didn’t even watch. Some endings were amazing — The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wonder Years — some fizzled — Lost, Seinfeld — and some still make me cry like a baby. I’m looking at you Little House On The Prarie. Ultimately everything ends.
Perhaps I love series finales so much because real life is so rarely like that. With few exceptions, like graduations, last day at a job, or moving day, rarely do we get the privilege of knowing this is the last time for something that has been special, important, and significant to us. I once read a quote that simultaneously amazed me, and broke my heart: one day your parents put your down and never picked you back up again. Do you remember that day, as a child or a parent? Certainly not, but it happened, and now that you are aware of that fact it’s bittersweet and regrettable. If you are like me, you wish you could go back to that moment and soak it up and really appreciate it, but you can’t. This is precisely why I love series finales of television shows, because you know it’s coming, you know to value every second of it as the last grains of sand slide down the hourglass.
For the better part of a day I have been trying to remember the last time my childhood friends, the Green Acres boys, hung out and played ball together. I can’t do it. Hundreds of hours of memory footage has scrolled past the screen of my mind, and while the finale eludes me, there are dozens of other “episodes” that I will stop to view and laugh about every time I run across them. I wanted to share with you a few of my favorite episodes.
In the “pilot episode” we moved to the Green Acres subdivision, near the southern border of the Pulaski city limits, in 1985. I was ten years old at the time and had mixed emotions about moving into this house at the corner of Morgan Street and Jackson Drive. Little did I know at the time, this would be the first of four houses on Morgan Street and Jackson Drive that I would live in, spread over the next ten years. When I finally left Green Acres for good I would be married and have my first child. My feelings were split because we were leaving the split level house we built on fifteen acres in Hidden Hills. Hidden Hills was a dream come true for a little boy. I had a laundry chute, a basement, satellite television, two ponds, a spring, a creek, woods, a dog, a goat, a dirt road, but I didn’t have many other boys to play with. As much as I loved Hidden Hills, I missed living in Vale’s Mill subdivision with its cadre of kids that made up my pre-pubescent posse. Moving to Green Acres, which was much bigger than Vale’s Mill, meant a return to the communal comraderie that I was lacking on the farm. Reluctantly I gave the place a chance.
The point my parents pitched the most in trying to sell me on the move, was the two brothers my age who lived across the street. The boys across the street turned out to be Mark and Chad Cardin. Mark was two years older than me, Chad was a year younger, and our fathers worked together at Pulaski Rubber Company. Soon they would become our coaches and we would become teammates in Little League and then high school baseball. But none of those leagues could compete in intensity with the countless games that would take place over the next decade in Green Acres subdivision.
Many of my favorite episodes from life in Green Acres were the ones that involved the Cardin brothers. The first time I mustered up the courage to cross Morgan Street to the Cardin house was motivated by a desire to join in a tennis ball game already in progress. For those who aren’t familiar with tennis ball, it is simply baseball played with a tennis ball. When you live in a neighborhood there are far too many windows and far too little room to use an actual baseball, so our ancestors invented tennis ball.
Mark and Chad were in their front yard with two other neighborhood boys, Tony Sisk and David Wamble. David moved out of Green Acres shortly after we moved in, and Tony remains an enigma to me to this day. His mother was from Thailand and her name was Satan — I swear on a stack of Bibles that was her name — but everyone just called her At. My prevailing memory of At is from the day I got in her flower bed to retrieve a stray tennis ball, only to have her erupt from the front door excitedly chastising me in Thai. I high tailed it out of her garden in a reenactment of Jesus’ words to Peter: Get thee behind me Satan. I only met his dad once, but the rumors in the neighborhood were that he was in the CIA and lived in Alaska.
This group of four reluctantly let me in on the game in progress, after a brief tutorial concerning which trees were out of bounds, that balls bouncing of a roof were “live balls” and that a ball had to be above the lowest hanging tree limb on the far side of Tony’s yard to be a home run. Since you can’t play tennis ball with an odd number of players, we switched to a home run derby. I’m pretty sure when I won the home run derby I won their respect and my place in their circle of friends.
During the summer months we played tennis ball every single day, usually for at least half of the daylight hours. We took breaks during the hottest part of the day, or if it was raining. When we had a respite from tennis ball we were inside playing Bases Loaded on Nintendo. And just like we did with our tennis ball games, we had a spiral bound notebook where we kept up with all of our statistics so that we could have definitive proof to settle our disputes as to who was the greatest among us. Sometimes the stat sheet couldn’t provide an answer for our arguments, at which point the matter had to be settled through physical combat, usually a battle royal in a completely dark room. This method usually settled the matter but it had a tendency to get a little out of control too, resulting in things like a butcher knife being thrown across a room and sticking in a door near someone’s head, and a hole being knocked in the “popcorn” blown ceiling that we had to “repair” with crumpled newspaper, oatmeal, and spray paint. To this day our cover up hasn’t been discovered.
Most of my favorite episodes were the ones that revolved around sports in all of their forms. Within a couple of years I was old enough for my parents to trust me to take my bike and venture out beyond the Jackson Drive/Morgan Street block and go exploring deeper into the neighborhood. Just a couple of blocks away, between Brindley Drive and Gordon Lane, was another tribe of Green Acres boys made up of Tim White, Mark Mullins, John Paysinger, Jon Eubanks, Troy Lindsey, Chad Stewart, a kid named Gavin and a boy we just called Mater. By this time David had moved away, Mark and Tony could drive and date girls, so Chad and I merged with the greater Green Acres gang, resulting in enough of us to formally have teams when we played sports, and to develop three formal seasons: tennis ball, basketball, and football.
With additional kids came access to additional yards and that meant multiple “stadiums” for our games. There was the one in the Cardin’s front yard, the wide open field between Tim White and Mark Mullins house, and the sunken field between Jon Eubanks and Chad Stewart’s houses. Each field had it’s own unique design and appeal. The open field had a perfectly placed ditch for a home run marker, and a house just beyond it, whose roof made a perfect target for highlight worthy home runs. The sunken field was awesome for two reasons: the hedgerow which gave it a Wrigley field feel, and being six feet lower than the street gave it a “Green Monster” at Fenway Park vibe. In the hot months we played tennis ball on these fields, in the fall we played basketball in any one of a half dozen driveways — although we were just as likely to build ramps or use exercise trampolines to aid us in slam dunk contests — and in the winter we played football. And by football, I don’t mean two hand touch or flag, I mean full blown, no pads, tackle football. It’s a thousand wonders none of us got killed. We had an unspoken rule that if we woke up to snow, and school was canceled, we were to meet at the sunken field for snow football by nine a.m. Countless unwritten rules, rituals, traditions, and inside jokes were born on those fields as we forged our friendships through competition. To this day, if I see Tim White, one of us will say to the other, “Do you play beisbol, we play beisbol too” — a line from the Hispanic kids in The Bad News Bears which we frequently quoted when we got together for a game.
There was a window of time when we were too young to drive cars, but old enough that our parents let us go where we wanted on our bikes, so we ventured across the highway into another neighborhood, Terry Estates, which was home to an actual city provided softball field known as Richland Park. By this time we were old enough to hit a tennis ball a country mile, diminishing the fun of home run derbies in our neighborhood, but prompting us to play baseball on a softball field. Instead of strutting like a turkey in spring because we hit a tennis ball onto a roof, now we were peacocking around the bases after sending shots towering over the tree lines. Pretty soon we started inviting pretty girls to join in the baseball games, and that pretty much brought an end to the ball games.
In the years prior to our wanting to be around girls, there were plenty of episodes where we waged all out war on the Green Acres girls. Next door to Tony and the Cardins was Heather Roberts, and sisters, Rae and Ryan Marks, who were frequently with their friend Amanda Mitchell. Perhaps it was a mixture of jealousy, boredom, and just plain meanness, that prompted us to torment these girls. Heather had an awesome, fancy, two story playhouse that her parents had built for her in their backyard, whereas we boys had to use whatever scrap wood we could find to construct our own tree houses. One of our first tasks was to build a tree house that was higher up than the Robert’s playhouse. Upon completion we christened our construction by raining down fire from above in the form of fireworks launched into their playhouse, sending them running and squealing into their actual house. When we didn’t have fireworks we simply used slingshots with acorns, rocks, marbles, or pretty much any projectile we would find. I suppose the fact that they never got hurt was simply the fortunate fact that we had terrible aim, except for that one time.
I highly doubt Tony’s dad was in the CIA, but the fact that he had technology before anyone else we knew had even heard of it only fanned the flames of rumor. Tony had a paint ball gun before I even knew such a thing existed. For kids who were accustomed to using plastic guns and shouting “Bang” when we played war, this was revolutionary. You could actually shoot someone with paint, forever ending the argument,
“I got you!”
“No you didn’t, you missed.”
“Yes I did.”
“No you didn’t.”
“You’re a cheater.”
“Nuh-uh, you’re the cheater.”
If you shot someone with a bright pink ball of paint there was no arguing about who got who. But before we tested it out on one another, the next door neighbor girls jumping on the trampoline made for much better target practice. For once, my normally awful aim was true, and I shot one of the girls clean off the trampoline. Believe it or not, I run in to some of those girls from time to time, and they actually speak to me. Women truly are the fairer sex.
Another popular episode revolved around the games we made up just to entertain ourselves. Games like Water War, which involved collecting everything you could find that would hold water and filling them up. Water balloons, pitchers, and coolers would be filled with water and placed strategically around the yard, along with hose pipes capped with spray nozzles and traditional water guns. The rules were simple: try not to get wet, and try to get the other guys wet. Every man for himself. One of the proudest moments of my life came one hot summer day when I lugged a cooler onto the roof of the house, and used a hose pipe to fill it, after which I dumped it like a waterfall onto several unsuspecting combatants. Eventually the invention of the Super Soaker water gun revolutionized the world of water war much the same way I imagine Panzer tanks changed the face of World War 2.
Water war was basically harmless, though likely costly to our parents utility bills, but twice a year we took our war games to a whole new level. The Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve meant one thing to us: fireworks war. Picture a dozen boys using every penny of allowance, birthday money, spare change, and yard cutting earnings splurging on fireworks. Like water war, the rules were simple: divide into two teams and shoot all of your fireworks at the other team until everyone ran out. Our explosive ordinances would then be customized into specialized weapons for war. Backpacks were filled, bottle rocket or Roman candle launchers were fabricated from PVC pipe, and slingshots were employed to launch firecrackers, cherry bombs, M-80’s and smoke bombs at the adversary. It was equally as awesome and awful as it sounds. Both every mother’s nightmare and every boy’s dream simultaneously. When we finished debris would litter the ground, powder burns would need treating, and a layer of smoke as thick as fog would cover our battle field. Despite some close calls, no one lost an eye, or a finger.
Once, while doing experiments to perfect modifying our fireworks into more devastating weaponry, we inadvertently made what would today be consider a bomb, and likely a terrorist act. Remember my friend Tony, you know the guy who’s dad was allegedly CIA, well he was particularly skilled in this area. After dissecting countless firecrackers to harvest their gunpowder, we filled a toilet paper roll with what we harvested, sealed it with wax, put it in a tree, lit the fuse, and ran. The ensuing explosion was so powerful it caused people all over the neighborhood to come out of their houses to investigate and blew off a tree limb as thick as our wrists. All of this following a failed attempt to build one using a piggy bank and gasoline. Mom’s if you are reading this, yes, unsupervised boys are that stupid. The higher the number of boys gets, the lower the I.Q. number gets. If we had done this in today’s climate we would likely be in Guantanamo Bay. I guess it’s true that God looks after children, animals, and idiots.
Speaking of idiots, several memorable episodes involved Water Tower Hill. If you followed Jackson Drive due south, it eventually shot nearly straight up several hundred feet in elevation to a water tower sitting on top of a hill. A snow or ice storm would draw the entire neighborhood to that hill, children and adults alike. Climbing the hill in the snow was quite an effort, but like I imagine scaling Kilimanjaro, K2, or Everest, it was worth every ounce of effort. The ride down, be it on a sled, a saucer, or like me, a piece of rubber from my dad’s factory, was epic. Shouts, squeals, and laughter would echo through the neighborhood.
Of course, sliding down it at ground level, padded by several inches of snow is one thing, riding down it on a bicycle is another. I’m pretty sure the closest I have legitimately come to dying in my forty-two years on this earth, was when, at the age of nine, I tried to ride my bike from the very top of the hill. It was common, and quite exhilarating to ride your bike from the first driveway about halfway up the hill, but I longed for more. Emboldened by my friend Troy’s urging, I walked my bike to the top of Water Tower Hill and then pointed my front tire toward the bottom. Looking down that asphalt slope I felt like my childhood hero, Evel Knieval. With a deep breath I lifted my feet from the street and placed them on the pedals, letting gravity take over. Within ten seconds I knew I’d made a terrible mistake as the bike accelerated to such a speed that I couldn’t keep my feet on the pedals and the handlebars began to shake violently as the front tire wobbled out of control. The rest of the details are a little sketchy to me, but somewhere around halfway down I lost control, was pitched over the front of the bike and together we tumbled and rolled our way to the bottom of the hill. I must have looked like I was attacked by a wildcat with all of the blood, bruises, and road rash covering me from head to toe. Oddly enough I don’t remember being in that much pain, not because I am so tough — I am a total sissy — but likely due to shock or a mild concussion. Troy helped walk me back to his house, where his mom called my parents at work, before putting me on the couch with ice packs and frozen pizza. For the record, I still played in my minor league baseball game that night.
Fortunately my bike was fixable, which was essential, because it was my main form of transportation on our trips to the Green Acres Village strip mall at the end of Morgan Street. Virtually every day our band of boys would ride our bikes to Green Acres Village to eat double cheeseburgers at Chew-n-Chat and then play arcade games, shoot pool, and just hang out eating candy and drinking Slush Puppies at the Sak-n-Pak. The owner was a mild mannered man named Donnie who didn’t seem to mind being invaded by rambunctious boys every afternoon. When we got bored we’d go next door and rent a Nintendo game or movie from Berry’s Video and then head off to one of our houses to play them.
Eventually my parents ended up buying the house across the street, after moving away briefly, and then temporarily moving into a duplex at the entrance to Green Acres. For years my uncle Wade lived in that house on the corner of Jackson Drive and Morgan Street, and my first home after I got married would be two houses down and directly across from the Cardins. Mark and Chad’s mom Jane still lives in the same house, and ironically, after he got married, David Wamble would move into the house that once belonged to Tony and his mom At. Except for the kids who grew up living in that neighborhood, not much has changed in Green Acres, but eventually these episodes, that are still on rerun in my mind, came to an end.
There once was a popular television show called Green Acres, but it didn’t have an official finale. After the 1971 season CBS canceled the show, and the last episode they filmed was just the end. Without warning, it was just over. The roughly ten seasons that made up my time with the Green Acres boys suffered the same fate. There was no official last tennis ball game, or water war, or trip to Green Acres Village. One day we went home after one of these events and we just never did it again. Just like that, one of the most important seasons of my life had come to end. Oddly enough, in 1990, after nineteen years off the air, CBS aired a reunion episode called A Return To Green Acres. Who knows, maybe one of these days, after all these years, the Green Acres boys just might have themselves a reunion too.
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