prompt: keepsake, title: the road to cooperstown in misc. flash fiction

When I was a young boy, the only thing I found interesting about my hometown was that we had an affiliated minor-league baseball team, the smallest city to have one. The lowest affiliate of the New York Mets, in the New York-Penn League, for teenagers drafted straight out of high school.

Most of them, of course, wouldn’t make the big time but just a few of them in five years would be millionaires playing on WWOR, near Young Peoples Day Camp, no doubt feasting on Goya and Fudgies The Whale in the terrifying miracle, New York City. Four-hour drive a world away but one summer they had to live in the place I tried to escape with books and TV. A momentary distraction on the road to fortune and fame. That’s how I saw my childhood as well, back then.

They moved when I was nine, of course, first to Pittsfield then finally to Brooklyn, so unfairly close to the goal of all dreamers. Maybe starting out at the edges of greatness isn’t a good idea, maybe time down in the sticks running on nothing but hope pushes you harder. Maybe distance makes it matter. Most of them never made it, either way. I went broke in Brooklyn once myself.

For the great, the road to Cooperstown’s paved with five-hundred home runs. Where I grew up, the road to Cooperstown’s paved with five-hundred speed traps on Route Twenty-Eight, every cop for thirty miles slavering to nail reckless tourists with the tickets to pay their mortgages.

When I was a teenager, someone rummaged through the defunct team’s old office and found a roll of tickets for the Little Falls Mets. I bought a few to hold as keepsake. I collect all kinds of souvenirs from that team thirty years gone, pennants, programs, all the ephemera minor-league teams generate. I save them as physical proof it all actually happened. It all seems so impossible, seems so far away, those young men striving for greatness, my own dreams. But the tickets held a special magic for me, I wore them in hospital bands for surgeries, sacrificed them after teenage heartbreaks over girls who could only love boys who play guitar, until I eventually only had one of them left to my name.

In my twenties, I went back to the Cooperstown Hall, past all the speed traps but there was no mention of my Little Falls Mets. A footnote at best thirty-odd years ago, now beneath history’s notice entirely. In this life, though, we take our lumps and learn the little ways to make marks, nonetheless. I folded up that last ticket, tucked it behind the frame of some random exhibit. If you happen to see a fleck of blue somewhere in the frames, maybe it’s even still there. At the fringe, my Little Falls Mets enshrined in the Hall of Fame despite all sane reason the contrary.

And in some even tinier more secret way? Maybe that star-struck yearning little boy too.