ESPN  

MY HOMETOWN, BUFFALO, N.Y. — Where's your womb?

You heard that right, not room, womb.

Where is it that you go where total peace reaches out and comforts you?

That cloud with no cares.

Is it a person, place, or thing?

Is it a big bowl of mashed potatoes, chocolate, soft headphones for loud music, books?

Is it alone in a boat surrounded by the morning mist, a country lane kicking stones, or sitting propped against a tree on a hill of sunflowers, the beach?

Is it coffee with mom, leaning against the workbench out in the garage with dad, lying on your bed talking with sis?

I'm in my womb, and for me that's Buffalo, N.Y.

I'm a homer for my town of Buffalo, so if you're a fan of another NFL AFC East team, you might want to look away.

I don't believe that you can never go back home. I think you never leave it, it never leaves you.

It's the cowlick of your life.

I've lived in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, California, Florida, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

But I'm always a Buffalo guy. Moved, but not removed.

If you are looking for the backbone of America, you better start here.

I am a man of place. Place makes me feel good. Buffalo is my sense of place. Place matters.

So, welcome to my place.

db started here

I don't know where I really started, mom and dad never said, and frankly it would have creeped me out if they did, but this house here is my first place.

Back in 1952 it was white and black, no star, no fence. No one on my block owned a fence. In fact from the end of my driveway, to the end of Steve's driveway was how far you had to go to get a touchdown. Jack's pool and Mrs. Stroupe's tomatoes where then, and will always be, out of bounds.

No matter what state, what city I'm in, I always catch a tip toe on the line pass every time I walk down the produce aisle.

This is the place where I met my family.

When my grade school down the street let us out early one afternoon, just after lunch and playground recess, this is the house I walked into to find my mother crying over an iron board in the living room, face streaked staring at the TV. I don't know what day it was, but the date was November 22, 1963.

None of my friends came out to play that day.

I didn't know it at the time, but about 8 blocks away, another elementary schooler, Barbara Sullivan, was going through much the same thing. Tonight, Barbara Sullivan, now called Barbara Barone, is sitting on the other side of the laptop talking to one of our kids.

No home I'll ever own will ever be as big as this small postwar tract home on a corner lot in the Buffalo suburb of Lincoln Park.

On about the year we got our first color TV we moved to this home. I remember Dad having the movers leave it out on the sidewalk for most of the move. He didn't have a business card to hand out, but he had a color TV.

This is the house where I watched men land on the moon, and heard a "ter-let" flush for the first time on TV. I sat here and watched Buffalo burn in "Living Color" in the '60s, got my first car, my first kiss, my first lie to mom and dad. My mother would stand in that front door and tell me to be home, "when the streetlights came on, " while also telling me where not to go, which is where I always went.

I was lying before I left the front porch.

Many days I would meet my friend Dave who lived down the street. He had a Zebco rod and reel with some line, a white and red plastic bobber and one hook he stole out of the tackle box in the trunk of his dad's chevy.

I had two worms.

We would pedal off down a whole bunch of busy streets, go the wrong way up a thruway off-ramp, over the towering Grand Island Bridge, down another busy highway, finally stopping at Beaver Island State Park.

Usually only one worm survived, which is why we brought two.

We'd walk onto the beach, Dave would tape the dried shriveled dead one on to the hook with the scotch tape we kept in the saddle bag under the bicycle seat, grasp the reel with both hands, cock it back and swing it like a baseball bat while letting go of the reel button thing.

We lost a lot of dead worms to the beach until we found his mother's Christmas tape. Then we would stick the butt of the rod into the sand and go buy some hot dogs and Root Beer.

After an hour or so we would go back and see if the dead worm had caught anything yet. Dave was the only person I ever knew who had a subscription to an outdoor magazine so I tried to learn as much as I could about shriveled up dead worm fishing, but usually by about a half hour before we needed to start heading back from the place we weren't supposed to be, he would turn to me and say, "Is the live one dead yet."

I would reach in my pants and pull as much of it as I could get out, and hand it to him, and he would spit on it, then put it on the hook, folding it around, over, criss-crossing, doing whatever he could to make sure it would stay on for his five foot cast.

We never caught a thing and wouldn't have known what to do with it if we had.

Dave went on to spend an entire career in the Navy. I went on to writing about fishing. In Buffalo, life happens like that.

Sorry the picture of my high school, Kenmore West Senior High School, turned out all crooked like that but this is the place where I earned so much detention there's a pretty good chance I may still owe them a couple of days in study hall, and I'm under deadline and didn't want to take the chance.

Up until my high school years I was pretty much flunking most everything dealing with English especially anything involving verbs, nouns, tense, and SPELLING.

It was here I made it an art form.

If you count summer school, it only took me about 5 1/2 years to get through 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. I pretty much majored in shop, mainly because they didn't have that in summer school, so I had to pass or face the same 9-fingered teacher the very next year.

In wood shop I made an almost plumb birdhouse but turned it in for my final exam missing just one thing — the hole needed for the bird to actually get in.

Same with metal shop. I made a black wrought iron mailbox with no way to get the mail in.

Seven years after graduating from high school I somehow talked this place, The University of Buffalo, into letting me in to their night school, but was horrified to find out that my first class in college was going to be English 101.

If you happen to be looking at this building straight on from inside a minivan during a rain storm, to your right would be one of the most important places in my life... this building.

It was here where I became a writer, in Peggy Henderson's English 101 Tuesday and Thursday, 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. class.

In a corner room in this building I got the first "A" I ever received in my life, and it was in English... writing.

Everything I have now can be traced back to that one paper.

This is the Delaware YMCA, the place of my first job at age 15. I was a camp counselor, life guard, and youth leader even though I was still very much a youth myself.

The "Y" taught me that if I wanted to buy a hamburger and fries I would have to work all day Saturday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. to do so. Until the "Y", money was a somewhat foreign concept to me seeing that my "bank" pretty much consisted of borrowing change from my father's dresser or digging behind the cushions in the couch once the rich relatives went home.

Every summer we would take a bunch of city kids out to the woods to a summer camp called Oakwood, or something like that. That was the place where I discovered poison ivy, bees, a fellow counselor named Kathy, and a taste for the magic of being in the outside.

I couldn't find Oakwood when I went back to look for it, where I thought it was. I only saw neighborhoods, nature in 1/2 acre lots. While the camp is gone, friends from it are not. I still converse with them to this day, so Mark, Mike, Don, Michael, Landy, Willie and B. G., thank you for bringing me outside with you.

I learned about economics from that place there as well. Freddie's Donuts. As a child they were the best donuts on the planet. My father worked right down the street at Sears selling refrigerators and air conditioners. Payday was Friday. If he came home and made a big sweeping arc of his arm, resulting in a loud plop of the Freddie's Donut box on the counter, it had been a good selling week.

No donuts was not a good week.

Ralph Wilson Stadium, home of the Buffalo Bills. My father and I never talked much at home, but this is the place we had conversations by the quarter. Somehow he would begin by saying, "I can't walk in that snow but O.J. can dance around in it ..." and somehow end the sentence by finding out how I was doing in school.

I was paying attention to the game, he was paying attention to me.

While not actually admitting it, there might be this slight chance that by complete accident through some sort of freakish — maybe planned but not confirmed as such — event that a part of dad will always be at the stadium due to the fact of, while not admitting to, a design malfunction that cause a little bit of ashes to fall out a 10 mph moving car at a spot pretty much used by him and his friends to tailgate before Bills games.

Don't read anything into that except the fact that Dad may well indeed be looking forward to the upcoming Bills season due to some sort of ground level opportunity that came his way.

And that brings me to this place. Buffalo's waterfront. My special place within my special place. In good times, in bad times, this is where I would come to sit, watch, dream.

I'd look at the horizon, while dreaming about sailing over it. If there is such a thing as hope, I know it resides in that line between water and sky.

This morning I watched as 100 or so of the best bass anglers on the planet left from my favorite spot, chasing their own personal horizon.

Whatever your comfort zone may be, a thing, a person, a place, that's where the dream chase begins.

— db

Don Barone is a member of the New England Outdoor Writers Association. Other stories of his can be found on Amazon.com. For comments or story ideas you can reach db at www.donbaroneoutdoors.com