Chapter Two: Saturdays in the Fall

This is a story that happens every year, right when the leaves change their colors and football is in the fall air. It's a real story, and that makes me nervous.

Welcome to Chapter Two of The Stories We Tell, a nostalgic lookback on friendship, growing up, and the hopes we have of becoming heroes.

It’s The Wonder Years meets The Sandlot with sprinklings of Friday Night Lights. New stories will be published weekly. For a list of all chapters, please visit the Chapter List here: Chapter List - The Stories We Tell.

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Chapter Two: Saturdays in the Fall

Those two photographs - one taken in ‘92, the other in ‘93 - bookend two flag football seasons. The seasons were all that mattered then, shouldn’t mean much today, but somehow still do. They’re good stories, I hope, because I still think about them, still write and revise the memories, wanting with time to get the words right. 

But before I tell these childhood stories, I’m going to share an adult one I’ve never told before. It’s a story that happens every year when the leaves change their colors and football is in the fall air. It’s a living story and that means I can’t wrap a moment in memory and dress it up with the words I want to remember. 

It’s a real story and that makes me nervous. 

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It’s a Saturday in October. I rise early, kiss my wife’s forehead as she sleeps, throw on an old sweatshirt and older jogging pants, and step outside. The fog is there, but lifting, and I start to walk. First past the traffic circle at Franklin Corner, the morning chill biting at my cheeks. Then down Church Street, a canopy of leaves overhead taking me through a tunnel of reds and yellows. They blow, some, with an easy wind.

I pass an old fire station turned coffee shop, pumpkin and nutmeg smells mark the season. Circles of smoke pass into memory with each breath I send out. Two birds chirp, and a dog howls staring up into a tree. I look. A squirrel shimmies along a long limb smiling, I hope, at the pup below. 

Jay Avenue is behind me now, and I see steam rising off the grass at the park where I’m walking. It’s the same park I walk to every year when the seasons change, and fall starts playing all its best notes. I watch the steam stretch toward the just rising sun and smile. Though not meaning to, my pace picks up. I’m pulled forward by the memories I see playing on a loop like SportsCenter highlights. 

I stand inside the edge of the park and look across the big patch of grass. A baseball diamond and dirt infield sit tucked into one corner. Rows of tall trees wrap three sides. It’s a place set back off a side street. And I know, especially at this time, will be empty. Sometimes, I think, it feels good to walk alone in the fall. 

Crouching, I press my hands into the ground. The grass is soft and still wet with the morning dew. A chill runs from my fingers to my shoulders. I close my eyes and picture the fields we played as kids. 

One with rows of flower beds marking the end zones tucked inside the wrought iron fence of the town’s old Historical Society. It ran thirty yards but as kids we felt it could be the Horseshoe. 

The other, in front of Ryan’s house, had a small hill running the length of the yard. Touchdowns and first downs meant passing the concrete walkways and stairs heading up to his house and his two neighbors. It’s a wonder more bones didn’t crack. 

I walk inside the field without a pattern. The dew seeps through my shoes, and the wet, morning grass cold against my feet makes me smile. This feeling is one of the reasons I’m here. 

In my head, I press play on a mixtape of old memories. Clumps of grass cling to the soles of our shoes, our chests puff, and sweat runs. A small rubber football flies into the sky. We lose it, for a moment, in the morning fog. “What’s wrong? Can’t catch?” One of us will taunt when the ball lands on the field. It’s Saturday, the sun is awake just enough for us, a game will break out soon, and it feels like nothing else in the world could ever matter. 

It feels good to be at the park. It’s quiet, but not silent. Chilly, but not cold. And I’m here with bits of the past, ones I can count on to make me smile. 

I keep walking and wonder if I come here every year to escape. Like I’m looking, if only for a few minutes, to hide from the grown-up feelings and obligations that can never be as quaint or as easy as the childhood ones. I wonder what’s wrong with me. Why I return like this every year. Why I want to beat back the pressures of now with the comfort of the past.

Then, I lose myself again in the fall. 

Cleats digging into soft grass and mud dripping off elbows. A football tucked into one arm with a goal line in the distance. How the butterflies in my stomach before a game had me so nervous, I almost didn’t want to play. How that nervous energy exploded on the first whistle and bursts of adrenaline carried me the rest of the way. The sight of a clock ticking toward zero and a game on the line. Looks shared in the huddle between best friends, when our eyes and silent head nods spoke the only words that needed to be said. 

Every October I make a walk like this one. I want to feel the fall in my bones and it let it return me to the magic of being a kid, to take me back to the simple joys of a Saturday game of catch with friends, when nothing mattered except the smack of a football against our bare hands, the smoke coming off each breath, and the cool, wet morning grass against our feet. 

It might be an escape from today into the easiness of the past, but it’s one I’m happy to make.