Originally published June 1, 1993, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
There were only seven of them but they sure were trying to play a game of baseball, certainly our best game, yesterday afternoon out on a field where each strong breeze sent swirls of dust billowing around the young shortstop. One of them had a portable radio and it was tuned to the Bulls and Knicks in Chicago where Michael Jordan was having himself a normally incredible first period, but on the sandlotbare skin of the Faneuil Street playground in Brighton they were hardly paying attention and the announcer’s voice was only background music for kids looking to hit.
“One more,” the batter yelled.
“You already had three,” the pitcher told him.
“You was wild,” the batter insisted. “Come on, one more.” “Give him another one,” a kid at second base agreed. “OK,” the pitcher said. “One more.”
He posed for a moment on the flat mound before throwing the ball. The pitch arrived on an arc, slow and fluttery, and the bat whipped through the air, causing a “ping” as it met the horsehide, the ball rushing off the aluminum like a rocket in between short and second base.
The boy at shortstop reacted immediately. In one graceful move, he stepped toward the middle of the infield and, bending, came up with the ball in a single fluid motion.
“Where are you from?” the shortstop was asked later. “Over there,” he replied, pointing to the projects. “No,” he was told. “What country?”
“Oh,” he laughed. “Cambodia. My whole family is from Cambodia.”
He is 14. He said he was born in Battambang Province in a country ruptured and destroyed by a whole community of nations. He said he was only a year old when his mother, father, three sisters and two brothers headed west toward Thailand. He said he has no memory of their misery. He said his mother, one sister and a brother died en route to freedom. He said all this quite matteroffactly, too.
The boy who hit the grounder was black. The pitcher was Hispanic. The second baseman was the shortstop’s older brother. The three other players were white. A league of nations in the middle of Brighton.
All of them played on a day committed to recalling the sturdy sacrifice of people who never sought death in defense of democracy. The names on all the markers everywhere are those of ordinary citizens who paid an extraordinary price simply because their country requested service.
Yesterday, with past wars remembered around the sound of a present trumpet, the empty city had a lazy, smalltown feel. Many of its playgrounds were alive with the sight of innocent youngsters in uniform, practicing and playing a sport, baseball, that makes a spectator smile.
And there was basketball, too. From the edge of Chinatown to the heart of Roslindale, it seemed, for at least a moment, that the guns had been stored, that the violence that has stolen so many lives and deprived so many people of the basic civil right of feeling secure and safe on their own streets and porches had abated in honor of Memorial Day.
It is always a bittersweet Monday, this last one in May, when old parents, surviving brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and widows gather to spread flowers on earth pulled over young men, frozen forever in time; their lives chiseled in granite on tombs that sit aside quiet lanes of cemeteries. The last murder, the latest casualty in our ongoing urban wars, had occurred early yesterday morning in Dorchester.
Sylvester Brantley died before the parades began. He was 19. He was shot once, right in the head, which did the trick. He was declared dead at 1:30 a.m. He was the newest reminder of how much and how quickly things have changed in a nation now nearly anesthetized to violence. One minute we pause to pray for those lost in battle. The very next we bury someone else killed in a country exploding from within; the carnage senseless, sinful and nearly without respite.
The hope and of course there is always that seems to lie with those too young yet to be caught and swallowed whole by the streets around them. Kids who symbolize better than any politician’s speech the unbounded optimism this land has always represented: The Cambodian shortstop, the Hispanic pitcher, the bleeding colors of children too gleeful in games to ever consider hate or bullets as a way of settling argument.
Unfortunately, the holiday passes. The smalltown air gives way to business as usual, to the petty neglect of politics and the institutional indifference that allows so many of our young to disappear from playgrounds, then from school, from the honor roll of employment and, sometimes, from life itself.
It used to be that, in America, the good could always grow and prosper. Now, sadly, we settle for the lucky merely surviving.
###