I was gradually aware of the bright light streaming through my bedroom windows. It was only May, but already the heat was pervasive, penetrating, humid. A late spring New Jersey morning, laying in bed in my pajamas with just a sheet.

My dream was ending, I was starting to come to consciousness and awareness in the morning light and heat, and credits were rolling in my head. My dreams had begun to mimic the movies, and white titles on a black background heralded the end of my dream, culminating in a big bold “THE END.”

Finally my eyes opened to the light and the blinds barely moving in the faint morning breeze wafting through the open windows, and I wondered if everyone had credits at the end of their dreams or if it was just me.

I was still almost paralyzed and listless as I came to awakeness in the warm light of a New Jersey Saturday morning. My mother would soon be shrilly trying to get me out of bed and her shrillness only made me want to stay in bed longer, to pretend to be asleep, eyes closed but probably fluttering in that way they do when you’re pretending to sleep, giving it away that you’re really awake.

Saturday morning to a 7-year-old holds its own particular challenges and diversions. Rounding up old newspapers to take to the junkyard for money being one of them. My paper route was a reverse paper route – some kids delivered the papers to people’s doors. I went around and collected the stacks of old papers gathering in their garages and on their back porches, mostly old copies of The Newark News or, for the less literate among the neighbors, The Star-Ledger. And The Observer, the weekly paper published in our town.

I’d stack them in my red wagon and pull them home, later piling them into my father’s trunk and, when the trunk was filled with heavy old musty newspapers, we’d drive down to the scrap place out off Schuyler Avenue, down on the edge of the Meadows, and drive the car onto the big junkyard scale there. The junkyard guy would write down the weight of the car with the newspapers in the trunk and then we’d drive off the scale, unload all the newspapers from the trunk, and then my father would drive the car back on the scale and the guy would take the new weight of the car. The difference was the weight of the newspapers, and I’d get paid for them, thirty cents for a hundred pounds of papers, which was a lot of money for a 7-year-old kid in 1957.

We’d usually have a few hundred pounds or so and I’d come away with about a buck for my efforts going around the neighborhood with my little red wagon ringing the neighbors’ door bells every few weeks.

That was one way to spend a Saturday morning, or at least part of it. There was bike riding with my friends, pedaling my trusty Black Knight one-speed around the neighborhood, mostly with Ozzie and Richard. That was fun. And there were the dreaded Minor League baseball games which were a lot less fun, at least for me, but I was kind of expected to participate in them as any 7-year-old boy was. Certainly my Dad expected me to play – I think he was compensating for his own more sickly childhood spent on the city streets of Jersey City – and all my friends played. Problem was, I wasn’t very good at it, and not being very good at it I didn’t enjoy it very much. Or maybe I wasn’t any good at it because I didn’t much enjoy it. Dunno.

Usually I got to play that position the other kids called “Left Out.” I might have been banished to the far reaches of left field, but really they meant exactly what the words said, “left out.” I was afraid of getting hit by the ball, and I think that was part of why I was always fumbling the catch. And I daydreamed while out there on the pungent grass of far left field, waiting for that one errant hit that would come out my way, called back to attention by the yelling of the other kids and the fathers, not least of which was my own father.

“Wake up, Yacenda!” was the common call. “Wake up and get it!” And suddenly I’d surge into awareness, see the white ball high up against the blue sky, and go lunging for it, hands up, glove in the air as much to catch the ball as to keep from getting beaned in the head. And if I actually got it, which did sometimes happen, I’d be a minor hero for a few minutes. And if I missed it, I’d hear more of those groans I’d become used to hearing, and more yelling to stay awake and stop daydreaming and all out there on the outer reaches of the Minor League universe.

I never made it to the Little League, which was something of a disappointment if not a surprise, but in a way it was a relief, too, and it was just one more outcome of a New Jersey childhood spent playing Left Out.

I’m sure this was more of a disappointment to my father than it was to me. I was not living up to his expectations for me as his son, his alter-child self. It wasn’t the only disappointment for him, he seemed to find them regularly, but my crumby ball-playing was one that was most apparent on those late spring Saturdays that were game days down at the sand oval.

The sand oval where we had our games was down off Schuyler Avenue, too, carved out of the edge of the Meadows. The Meadows, I should explain, are the vast tracts of empty, marshy grasslands that punctuate the dense urban sprawl of Northeast New Jersey. We crossed them on the way to or from Jersey City or the tunnels into New York City, and they were just a part of life in Northeast New Jersey. The dumps were out there, too, the large depositories of the garbage and trash and refuse of surrounding towns and cities, and the smell from the dumps, with their ever-circling seagulls, became the hallmark of my town.

In Boy Scouts we had a song that went,

“We are the boys from Jersey,

Proud boys are we!

We are the boys from Jersey,

Jersey by the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea.

We are the boys from Kearny,

Proud boys are we!

We are the boys from Kearny,

Kearny by the dumps, the dumps, the dumps, the dumps.”

It was just a part of life, living by the dumps, though they stunk, and when the wind came from the east we’d smell them in town, even on the other side of the hill that divided the town, miles away. Of course there were other directions the wind blew that would bring the smell of the Congoleum-Nairn plant that made linoleum, and that smelled like what my parents said was spitting on a hot stove. I wouldn’t know that, not having spit on any hot stoves, but it smelled pretty bad, mostly in the summer. So it was kind of a toss-up which was worse, the dumps or the Congoleum-Nairn plant smell.

It came as something of a shock to me when I started high school in New York City and the New York kids would call the Meadows “the swamps.” Or even worse, “the Jersey swamps.” This was obviously meant as a put-down, but it was also an affront to my scientific mind.

“They’re not swamps, they’re meadows,” I’d say, over and over and over.

And actually they are remnants of large prehistoric lakes, Lake Hackensack and Lake Passaic, that used to lie in those low areas millions of years before garbage trucks roamed the earth, depositing their stinky loads over the earthen graves of dinosaurs and ancient Indians. But it didn’t matter to the stupid kids from New York, who showed their inferiority by their arrogant ignorance and pretense, as if New York with its crowds and dirt and slums and its own stinky garbage dumps out in Canarsie and wherever was any better.

“They’re meadows, not swamps,” I would say. And still they’d laugh and call them swamps, the Jersey swamps. But on those Saturday afternoons years before, it was one more hot, frustrating, humiliating day playing Left Out on the sand oval beside the empty tracts of the North Jersey Meadows, the smells of dry cut grass intermingling with the oiled leather of my all-too-unused baseball glove and the faint aroma of the rotting refuse of an industrial consumer society wafting on the nearly still air of a warm late spring afternoon.