Knots in My Yo-Yo String (14 page)

Lucky and me in better days (1953).

*  *  *

My life, once so tidy, so perfect, was coming apart. In those first two years at Norristown High, it seemed I lost everything I once had.

I was no longer the big-shot ninth grader in junior high. I was a nobody tenth grader in high school.

I lost my girlfriend not long after she lost the ring of tiny hearts. Her final note said: “Everyone should get away from each other for awhile.”

I lost my leadership in the classroom. Whereas I had been a ninth-grade whiz at algebra, geometry in tenth grade befuddled me.

I lost the election for class president.

I lost Louis Darden, my friend and defender. I looked around one day and he was gone.

I lost my dream of becoming a major league baseball player. Though I played a pretty good shortstop for the junior varsity in tenth grade, the following year found me still on the JV’s and still unable to hit the curve ball.

I lost my speed. In gym class and team practice races I found myself in the middle of the pack. Once I was even the monkey.

I lost my dog.

And most of all I lost George Street. Halfway through tenth grade we moved to Locust in the North End, where the cellars were called basements, where the furnace was fueled by gas, not coal. Our new home
was a brick single-story twin with a driveway beside it for parking the car. It had a yard in front as well as in back. The sidewalk was gleaming concrete.

I lost George Street not only as a location in town but also as a neighborhood in time, a placid side pool of spear fields and black-taped baseballs, of Lash La Rue and grandstand cheers and Roadmaster roamings, a ten-year-long moment that gave me my sense of myself and the world around me. And then the rush of minutes was upon me and I was swept downstream. Instinctively I listened for Mrs. Seeton’s whistle, but it did not reach the North End.

Bleak. Dismal. Dreary. Gray. These are the words that come to mind when I think of that time. In fact, the only sunny day I recall was the one on which Lucky died. I do not mean to say that I gave up. I went out for sports, did my homework, went to school dances with the guys. I got my driver’s license. I was still just as friendly as I had been a year before, just as neat, just as earnest. But whereas life had once responded by making me king and valedictorian and president, now I was getting election condolences and C’s in geometry. Life, like my girlfriend, had dumped me. My string was nothing but knots.

I visited George Street, trying to feel again how it had been. I rode past Dovie Wilmoth’s house on Haws Avenue, this time in the family’s turtle-green Pontiac. I walked along the railroad tracks humming “Pomp
and Circumstance,” doing the hesitation step. In my bedroom I touched the cardboard prom crown, now hanging from a corner of my dresser mirror.

When I looked up at night, I discovered that the stars over Locust Street were in the same places as they had been over George, only now they seemed even farther away. They did not inspire me to think of endlessnesses of time and space, they did not make me swoon. They simply made me feel little and lost. Late one night, still awake, I saw tiny sparkles in the dark, as if the starry sky had fallen into my bedroom. It took a minute to realize that I was seeing glitter fallen from the prom crown, a sprinkling on the floor by my dresser, invisible during daylight, caught now in the moonbeam streaming through the window.

On Friday evening, October 11, 1957, at Roosevelt Field, site of my fifty-yard-dash triumph five years before, Norristown High School played Lower Merion in a football game under the lights. Lower Merion was a powerhouse. Over the preceding three years they had won thirty-two games in a row. But Norristown was good, too. It figured to be a close, fiercely contested game, and it was. I was a junior now, sixteen years old, and my autumn sport had become soccer, but I still loved football. I was one of thousands in the grandstand.

As the teams changed field direction for the start
of the fourth quarter, Norristown was leading, 7–6. Each team had scored a touchdown, but the Aces of Lower Merion had missed the extra point. But now a Lower Merion halfback was breaking free and racing downfield, blue-and-white-shirted Norristown Eagles in pursuit. The Eagles stopped him on the one-yard line, and the stage was set for one of the great moments in Norristown’s scholastic sports history.

First down and goal to go on the one. One little yard. Thirty-six little inches. Lower Merion. Thirty-two straight victories. Who could stop them? In the bleachers across the field the Lower Merion fans celebrated. Norristown fans grimly awaited the inevitable.

The first Ace ball carrier plunged ahead helmet-first, the Lower Merion side erupted in a touchdown roar—but, strangely, no touchdown sign came from the referee. The ball carrier was crumpled in the rude arms of Eagle defender Mike Branca. The ball had advanced nary an inch.

Twice more the Aces ran the ball, attacking different points in the Eagle defense. The results were the same. The sound from the Lower Merion side was rising and falling as if directed by a choirmaster. But now, as the Ace quarterback bent over the center for the fourth time and barked out the count, Roosevelt Field fell silent. For the fourth time the Ace quarterback handed the ball to a running back—they refused
to believe anyone could stop them from ramrodding the ball thirty-six little inches—and for the fourth time the ball failed to penetrate the end zone.

The impossible had been done.

Now it was the Norristown side that erupted, with a roar and a celebration that continued through the end of the game and burst from the stadium and spread out across the town and late into the night. I rode the tide. Lower Merion! We had beaten
Lower Merion!
I couldn’t believe it. At home in my room I could hear the blaring horns, the shrieks of victory.

Again and again, following my old habit, I replayed the miraculous Eagle goal-line defense in my head. I went to sleep re-experiencing the event, re-feeling the thrill. In the morning I woke up and daydreamed on—and began to realize that I had a problem. For no matter how many times I replayed the goal-line stand in my head, I kept falling short of satisfaction. The scoreboard had said the game was over, but for me it wasn’t, for me it was somehow frustratingly incomplete. I discovered that Roosevelt Field was not the only field that the game had been played on; the other was inside myself. The game kept happening and happening within me. I could not come to the end of it.

And then for no reason that I can recall, I sat down at my study desk and reached for a pencil and paper and wrote down a title. Then I began to write rhyming verses. And the verses became a poem:

At last, for me, the game was over.

On a September day in 1992, thirty-five years after Norristown High’s historic goal-line stand, I stood before an audience of children and adults in Fargo, North Dakota. I was there in connection with my novel
Maniac Magee,
which had recently won the Newbery Medal for children’s literature. The important award on this day, however, was the Flicker Tale, which had been voted to
Maniac Magee
as a favorite of North Dakota’s young readers. A hundred elementary-school kids sat cross-legged on the floor as I accepted the plaque.

After giving a little talk, I invited the audience to ask questions. There were many. One of them stays with me still. It came from a boy, who said, “Do you think being a kid helped you to become a writer?”

Good question.

After writing “Goal to Go,” I gave it to my father and forgot about it. Several days later I opened the
Times Herald
to the sports section, and there was my poem, printed in a box with the headline “Student Waxes Poetic.” At school the next day everyone—kids, teachers, football coaches—told me how much they liked it.

That, I believe, was the beginning. By the time I went off to Gettysburg College two years later, I knew I wanted to be a writer.

I graduated from Gettysburg, attended the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, spent six months on active duty with the Naval Air Reserve, got a job as a menswear editor for a department store magazine, and in my spare time began to write my first novel.

Three years later I finished it, but no one wanted to publish it. So I wrote another.

And another.

And another.

Wrote them on my lunch hours, after work, weekends. Four novels over thirteen years.

Nobody wanted them.

In the meantime I gained a wife, Eileen, also a writer, and six kids. One day for dinner we had fried chicken. There were leftovers. I packed the unclaimed pieces into a paper bag and put it in the refrigerator, intending to take it to work for lunch the following day. But when I opened the bag early the next morning, I found only chicken bones. The meat had been eaten away.

No doubt this was the work of one of the six little angels sleeping upstairs. Knowing no one would confess (I’m still waiting), I went to work that day lunch-less and began to imagine how it might have gone had I known who the culprit was and confronted him or her in the kitchen. By noon I decided to write down
my imaginings. I was about to do so, intending to describe the scene from the point of view of the chicken-deprived father, when it suddenly occurred to me that there was a more interesting point of view here—namely, the kid’s.

And so with ballpoint pen and yellow copy paper in a tiny windowless office on the fifth floor of the Chilton Company in Radnor, Pennsylvania, I wrote these words:

That night at home I kept writing. I gave the chicken snatcher a name, Jason, and an age, twelve. And I started remembering. Remembering when I was twelve, when I lived in the West End, when I went to Stewart Junior High School, when I wanted to be a
shortstop, when I rode a bike, when I marveled at the nighttime sky. In my head I replayed moments from my kidhood. I mixed my memories with imagination to make stories, to make fiction, and when I finished writing, I had a book, my fifth novel, my first about kids. I called it
Space Station Seventh Grade.

It became my first published book.

In the years that followed, I continued to write stories about kids and to rummage through the attic of my memories. Norristown became Two Mills in my fiction, George Street became Oriole. There is a prom in one book and a girlfriend named Judy in another. There is a beautiful blonde who lives on an avenue called Haws and a mysterious man on whose front steps no kid dares sit. There is a zep and a mulberry tree, a Little League field, a park, a zoo, a band shell, a red hill, and a mother who whistles her kids home to dinner. There is a river called Schuylkill and a creek called Stony and a grocery store on a corner next to a house whose address is 802. And a brown finger in a white mouth. And a boy who is a wizard at untying knots in yo-yo strings.

Do you think being a kid helped you to become a writer?

I could have taken days to answer the boy’s question, but neither he nor Fargo had that much time. So I simply nodded and smiled and said, “Yes, I believe it did.”

Jerry Spinelli
is the author of many books for young readers, including
Maniac Magee,
winner of the Newbery Medal;
Wringer,
winner of a Newbery Honor Award;
Loser; Crash;
and
Stargirl.
A graduate of Gettysburg College, he lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, poet and author Eileen Spinelli.