Color My Childhood Green (for my father)

     Green is the overriding color of my childhood. Every memory I have has some element of green in it, despite the obvious lack of harmony green has with having grown up in a city dominated by concrete and asphalt. The Brooklyn of my childhood was definitely green.
     My favorite sneakers were kelly green Pro-Keds. I remember wearing them until the rubber soles separated from the canvas body of the shoes.
     I remember seeing the green in my eyes when I looked in the mirror. They are olive green, a color I have never seen in anyone else’s eyes. Everyone mistake them for green – even the DMV – but I know better.
      One of my earliest memories is walking along the street with my mother. She was wheeling my cousin in a baby carriage, and we were walking next to a pile of rubble that used to be a building. I was wearing a lime green sleeveless polyester pullover (everything was polyester in the 60’s), matching shorts with seams down each thigh, and a coordinating headband.
      Our kitchen was small and neat. It was dominated by a huge, avocado-green refrigerator. The single best feature was that the fridge on top and the freezer on the bottom. The metal cabinets were painted the same avocado color.
      My mother is fond of saying she has a “brown thumb”. That she can’t for the life of her make plants grow. But I remember flowing spider plants and descending philodendron spilling from window pots and planters and into my world. 
     We used to strip leaves off the long, flexible branches of a particular type of weedy bright green perennial found in untended gardens, and call the remaining stalk a “whip”. These whips became a pirate sword, a teacher’s pointer and a weapon to flog an unsuspecting little brother.
      Every spring, like clockwork, the big oak tree in front of my house rained thousands of seed pods down on the sidewalk. My friends and I called the pods “spinners”, and gathered great handfuls of them – the green ones were best. We sat and split them open at took out the seed. The remaining v-shaped pod fit beautifully over the bridge of a kid’s nose. A bit of sticky moisture left by the seed acted like glue and held it there. We spent hours laughing at how we looked, and flicking seeds at each other to try to knock the pod off.
      Green is the color of so many other things I remember, like the blue-green of the pool in my yard, or the iridescent green of the traffic signal at the corner in front of Aldo’s Pizzeria, or the lush-looking green of the hillside in the colorized scenes from the Wizard of Oz.
      But the most dominant green of my life is the leafy green of the infield grass. I spent the better part of ten softball seasons six steps behind the grass, four strides off the first base line, studying the batter in the chalk-lined box beyond. The earth of this verdant field rooted my relationship with my father, who knew everything about softball, and, by extension, everything about everything else, too. The endless series of Saturday afternoons created my hero. I am a ballplayer, like him, and am a teacher, like him. And if I can ever be half the person he is, I will be grateful.