BILL CADY Word Count: 149,227 - At My Friend's Place

Bill Cady, The Early Years … by Bill Cady 132
Back to the crux of my story. I was six years old. The Willow Street School,
where I‟d be starting kindergarten that fall, was a block and a half from our house. It had
two baseball diamonds. All the neighborhood kids started going up there to play ball.
You can only get away with borrowing another kid‟s mitt just so many times before they
start telling you to get your own.
That‟s a “Dad job”, goin‟ to get that freakin‟ mitt. A boy‟s supposed to be able to
count on his old man for that. I asked, and asked, and asked, and asked him to take me to
get a mitt. In one huge ear and out the other. Finally, just after summer vacation started
for kids who were already going to school, Mom took care of it for me. She worked at
Gamble‟s Hardware in the Edgemont Shopping Center, 2.4 miles away from our house.
After a call to Bob, her boss, he agreed to guide me when I got there.
Funny, she gave me a five dollar bill to get my first mitt. I bought a mitt in 2003
for a boy whose father was as big a shirker as my old man, but it cost me $90.
I pedaled my Hiawatha bike, cream fenders with an emerald green frame and
racing stripes, the entire five mile round trip. For every stroke of my legs the entire ride,
I grew angrier and more hurt because that asshole would rather read a freakin‟ magazine
than take care of his boy. Don‟t do that to your kids, unless you want the story in Harry
Chapin‟s song, “Cat’s in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon”, to happen to you. Don‟t do it.
###
Perhaps I‟m feeling a need to pick on someone, so I‟ll tell you another funny part
of my life. I was born a bastard. Technically. My folks went before a Justice of the
Peace before I was born. Not before the seed was planted, but sometime before I was
born, anyway.
Leviticus, Limited 33-0505963