Brooklyns Lose

I'm glad when I can get outside. I go down to the basement and get out the plastic hose. We live in a nice section in Flatbush here?two-family houses, with a little plat of ground out front. It's not much as far as ground goes, maybe six feet from the house to the sidewalk. Most everybody has a little shrubbery.

I get out the hose and I water the shrubbery because we haven't had any rain in a week. Next to me lives Saul Ruskin, who is my neighbor. Saul is sitting in one of those aluminum-and-plastic chairs that folds up, and you wonder how it holds his weight.

The plat out in front of Saul's house he's filled in with cement, so he has sidewalk from the house all the way to the curb, and no shrubbery, no grass or weeds to worry about.

"I should be a farmer?" Saul says. "I wanna raise crops, I move out to the suburbs."

Saul watches me as I hook up the hose. He has a stub of cigar in his mouth, and he says around the cigar, "A tough one to lose, Joe. Them Reds allus get hot against us."

"They have to win once in a while," I tell him.

Saul is a dyed-in-the-wool Brooklyn rooter. I see he don't feel too good about this one, either, and it makes me feel a little better.

"These clubs come in here loaded," Saul says. "They save their best pitchers for Brooklyn. They do all their hittin' at Ebbets Field. It ain't right."

"That's baseball," I tell him as I start to squirt the shrubbery.

"Couple of Sundays back I see Pittsburgh," Saul says. "They score eighteen runs in two games. They don't score eighteen runs in a whole season. That's the way it goes."