When my parents first discussed the possibility of leaving the town where I spent my growing-up years, I tried not to appear too disappointed Whatever the reasons, families relocate, and the resulting changes demand that new connections be forged, and in the course of time, that old attachments become subject to the rust of inattention and the weathering of passing years. Comrades are gradually replaced, new brotherhoods fashioned, and the past swallowed by the consequences of the present. Given time however, the rust takes on an enduring patina, and from that mysterious transformation one of life’s greatest treasures almost always emerges, the joy of remembering.

A particular memory keepsake of my own began on a vacant lot where neighborhood kids gathered for after-school games of touch football. Not surprisingly the account I documented was entitled “Two Below the Belt.” This is how it reads:

Well do I remember the good citizens of Villaville -- different in every way, and at the same time, exactly alike. Nineteen hundred strong, they spent autumn weekends cheering for the mighty Panthers, and in the spring, worked cheek by jowl to make the town's peanut parade a grand success. They shopped together, worshiped together, visited together, and when bad news made its way into a neighbor's home, they wept together. Culturally, however, these folks were as different as tamales and sauerkraut. Polish living on one corner, Hispanics on the other, and in between clusters of Dutch, German, Czech, and African American. There were even a couple of Jewish families to sweeten the melting pot, and at the edge of town a crusty old Bohemian made neighborhood kids step lively when their softball landed in his kitchen garden. Each square block was a study in cultural anthropology, and Saturday morning at the old Aztec theater was like a visit to the Tower of Babel
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Though it sounds a bit rustic by contemporary standards, it was a great place to grow up, and we thought ourselves quite cosmopolitan. A place to discover, to stretch the mind, and to come to grips with life. A cultural goulash, Villaville was a place where kids learned to roll their R's, roll with the punches, rock and roll, and, when fortified with an ample supply of Bull Durham, roll their own. It was also a place where they learned that the similarities shared by people are vastly more important than the differences.

Take the group which met in the afternoon after school for a game of Two Below. "Ya'll wan'na play tube-low," some immature voice would excitedly suggest, as if his mind had just given birth to a brand new concept.

Our field was a grassy vacant lot in the neighborhood, and the combatants were a dozen junior-high kids of every shape, size, and color. Our best athlete was a boy whose Christian name was Peugh (pronounced like a skillet full of cooked liver smells), and whose last name contained at least twenty consonants, no vowels, and resembled a Soviet street sign. The poorest athlete was a gangling girl named Angel whose parents would have proven dismal failures as fortune tellers. Angel was a selfish and mean-spirited kid whose temper fits were legend. It goes without saying that, while avoiding any contact with Peugh, everyone took perverse pleasure in laying vicious blocks on little Angel. The result was that seldom did a week go by but that Angel fled the field in tears, followed immediately by the appearance of her mother, who at some earlier time had obviously had a flyswatter surgically attached to her right hand.

The most popular member of the group, however, at least from the male perspective, was Lucinda Ann Lumas. The fact that she couldn't block, run, or catch was of no consequence when compared with the prospect of standing next to her in the huddle. Just a whiff of her delicate perfume was alone enough to insure a high slot in the draft. And of course there was always the chance that Lucinda might, by some fluke of fate, wind up catching the ball, allowing some lucky pre-teen, pre-pubescent, pre-adolescent boy a chance to legally, legitimately, and with just the right malice aforethought, place two hands just south of that luscious waist. Ahh, the joys of two-below.

The most interesting player among our membership, though, was Richard Rodriguez, a smiling youth, whose athletic contributions were modest at best. To our group, Richard was boringly average. The fact that he routinely had seizures which caused him to freeze in the middle of a given activity was thought by our bunch to be quite ordinary. Every team had such a player, we supposed, and it was the responsibility of the other participants to freeze as well. When someone yelled, "Richard’s out" we knew to screech to a halt, and wait for the competitor nearest our friend to yell "go.” Then back to the business of football. No big deal.

Of course, somewhere along the continuum called life, the games of Two Below came to an end, and the friends of my youth became lost in the clutter of college, employment, and life itself. My family moved from Villaville in the middle of my sophomore year, and I never again saw my friend Peugh. I did manage to squire Lucinda Ann Lumas on several outings before my departure and discovered her perfume to be just as intoxicating in the balcony of the old Aztec as it was in that junior high huddle. Unfortunately I lost touch with Lucinda, and with Jack Koch, Little Jack Compton, Skinny Brown, and all the rest.

Am I likely to see them again? I can only wonder. Do they ever, along the silent corridors of evening think of time spent in my company? I can only hope. Years escape, ponderously at first, and later like the flight of a bullet, but somehow the memories of those youthful treasures remain, captured in the exchequer of our soul. The faces become hazy to be sure, and the escapades lack perfect focus, but the bond is forever, a treasure box from the long ago, an amulet worn snug around one's neck against the uncertainty of time.

How thoughtful of God to allow my life to be enriched by those memories. That must be why they call it touch football.