Barry

Every so often in a person’s life, something happens thatframes a part of it in a significant way. There are the obvious things – milestone birthdays, weddings, births,deaths – and then there are the things that need reflection and a bit of a changein perception to understand them.In 1986, I was nine years old. I guess that puts me in the summer betweenMs. Ryan’s third grade class and Mr. Montgomery’s fourth. There was nothingremarkable about that summer, nothing that stands out in memory, even in the fadingfilm photographs that exist as vestiges of a childhood I vaguely remember.1987, same way, save for the newly-acquired hobby of collecting Topps baseballcards with the wooden borders after Little League games. 1988 saw an All-StarGame in the cookie cutter stadium that had been the best place in the world,but what else?Then came 1989 and that place didn’t seem so good anymore. The scandal of Pete Rose took the innocence awayand broke the heart of a crumbling industrial town in a ...