I chalked down a line from the Peaky Blinders movie that came out over the weekend. I was going to talk about pubs, but then I put chip and dip in the grabber section.
Now that’s something worth talking about. Because before hummus, before queso, before guacamole, before anybody tried stacking five ingredients into a glass bowl and call it something special, there was the real thing.
A box of Jay’s potato chips and a tub of Dean’s French onion dip. No frills and no food processor. Just salt, crunch, and something cold and creamy to drag it through.
Summer of ’75, we played baseball every morning and afternoon. It wasn’t organized, we didn’t have coaches or a scoreboard. Just a bunch of kids chasing a baseball across cracked pavement and uneven grass.
We played until somebody’s mom yelled, or the sun dipped just enough to make it hard to see.
There was a kid down the alley, Timmy Banacek who had something better than a clubhouse. He had a fort built up in the rafters of his garage. You climbed a ladder that didn’t feel all that safe, hauled yourself up into a world that felt like it belonged only to us. That was the rule, once you were up there, you were one of the guys.
But you didn’t get in empty-handed. You had to bring something.
One afternoon I took a box of Jay’s from my ma’s cupboard. I didn’t ask, I just took it and walked out the backdoor. Then I walked down the block to Kresge’s with whatever change I could scrape together. Came back with a tub of French onion dip like I was carrying a treasure. When I set it down up there in that dusty fort, it might as well have been a pot if gold.
That was it. That was the price of admission and just like that, I belonged. I was the guy who dropped a ball in right field, but I made up for it with the chips and dip.
We sat up there, legs hanging over the edge, passing around chips, talking about nothing and everything at the same time. Baseball scores, who made the best catch, who almost hit one over the fence that didn’t exist. No phones, no noise and no distractions. Just the sound of kids who thought the world was exactly as big as that alley and exactly as good as that moment.
We were kings up there. Kings with scraped knees, dirty hands, and a bag of chips between us.
Funny how something that simple can stay with me fifty years later. Not the score of the game. Not even who was there. Just the feeling of climbing up the ladder, the smell of that dip and the way a handful of kids could turn a garage into a kingdom.
Not a care in the world. Baseball, forts, Jay’s potato chips and Dean’s French dip. My parents never realized the box of chips was missing.
That garage was torn down years ago when a yuppie bought Timmy’s parent’s house. Our old baseball field has a playground in centerfield and potato chips don’t come in a box anymore.
The Cubs and Sox were both 75-87 in 1975, but the kids I hung out with that summer were undefeated. It was a good summer to be a kid.
It’s going to be a good Monday. I put a smile on the sun.
