It Got REAL In My Backyard!

When my friends and I got wiffle ball games together in our backyards, it got very real! First, we raked the dirt (and watched our dads turn red). Then, we attached our respective spray nozzles to our hoses and gently sprayed the dirt. Next, we laid down the baselines and batters boxes with powdered chalk my friends got from the piles at their real little league games (you should've seen how many Coke cups come out of their trunks!) Then...came the pregame show! Yes, I said...the pregame show! One of us would interview the other in which the one answering would break off the immortal cliches, "Looks like we are gonna have a good game today. Lookin' forward to it and should be a lot of fun!" Or "Well, we're lookin' to get the bats goin', hope that are pitching does well and hopefully score a lot of runs!" After that, we looked at our lineup cards (notebook paper cut like lineup cards and filled in with the players we would all imitate).And the game was on! We played in two backyards one catty cornered from the other. So, yes, there were Home and Away games! Did I mention I had a table on one side of my house that had a running hose on top of it? See that way, the water would naturally fall over the edge and Presto...instant Royals fountains! Oh yeah, before the game there was batting and fielding practice with a radio in a window of the house to simulate music as the players were on the field. Once, my next door neighbor gave us a huge tent that was torn. He thought that if you spread it out and folded over the torn part, we could use it as a tarp on "home plate!" And...he was right! When three outs came with someone on base, we threw our batting helmets with a flick of the wrist while our teammate got our glove and retrieved our helmet. Our "dugout" was a picnic bench against the back of the house with big rocks laid down, parallel to the house with an "opening" to go into the dugout. And when the game was over, we immediately went into "grounds crew" mode and started raking and covering home with the tarp. I miss those times and I miss those friends. If only I could borrow Stewie Griffin's time machine or Doc Brown's DeLorean for just a day!