My Parents Part 1*

*True story of Al Zimbler’s life as it appears in his eighth short story humor book MORE BEDTIME STORIES FOR NIGHTTIME LOVERS.

My parents were very protective and supportive of me, especially during my youth. It was because of them I became a great softball player. In Chicago it was 16-inch softball that was the raging game and played only in Chicagoland. It was played without a glove and with slow pitching. Every spring I started spring training not outside but in the house.

My father was the one who conditioned me to be the fastest guy on the bases. I stole the most bases because of his training method. The way he would do it is to chase me around the dining room table with a big leather strap when he got angry, swearing at me in Yiddish. From this I learned how to do those quick starts and stops and to accelerate quickly.

My mother was the one who taught me how to catch those high fly balls no matter where they were in the outfield. (I played the outfield on my softball team.) No, she did not play fungo with me. Instead she and I had our own method. I spent most of my free time playing baseball and was outside most of the warm weather months. We lived on the third floor and I did not want to spend time going upstairs and eating lunch. Instead I arranged for my mother to throw down a sandwich to me. I would call up to my apartment window and, when my mother opened the window, I would yell, “Ma, throw me down a sandwich.” But we had to be sure that there was no wind blowing or else the bag would veer off to the side. As the bag sometimes contained a jar of liquid, I really tried hard to catch the bag or else I would have to clean up broken glass. And let me tell you, if you missed a meatball sandwich, it ended up looking like a pizza. I became proficient catching the bag no matter where it was headed.

As for my parents being protective, they didn’t let me go swimming even though there was a public swimming pool in the park located just across the street from our apartment. They finally relented when I was 10. I didn’t own a bathing suit then, so I was forced that one day to use my father’s one-piece bathing suit. I was a little embarrassed, especially since it didn’t have a jockstrap as part of the suit. To make sure I didn’t drown, my mother made me take a rubber inflatable tube to wear around my stomach. She then said a little prayer and sent me off to the pool.

I came back alive, and my mother said another prayer that I hadn’t drowned. “Ma,” I said, “I’m 10 years old, 5 feet 2 inches, and the pool was a kiddie pool.”

“All right already,” she said, “the next time you don’t have to wear the rubber inflatable tube.”

Talk about being an athlete – other than being a great baseball player I was a klutz at other sporting activities. I tried roller skating, you know, the clamp-on skates with the skate key. I fell so many times that all of my long pants became short pants because of my father’s skill as a CPA person (not a Certified Public Accountant, which is what I became, but a Cleaning, Pressing and Alteration person). He was a master tailor.