By Sal Guarino
Please enjoy an excerpt from my book “SALutations!” about an impactful and perhaps relatable childhood memory…
I was seven years old and playing horseshoes with Eddie Patrillo, my summer neighbor in Sag Harbor, New York. Eddie was almost two years older than me and a pretty athletic kid, so I was always at a bit of a disadvantage as we filled summer days and early evenings with fevered games of horseshoes, badminton, frisbee, catch, and whatever else we conjured up to fill about 12 hours a day, winding down with the magical sound of the ice cream man, whose musical truck might as well have been a chariot from heaven. Its harmonious chimes signaled the final prize at the end of an already fun-filled day. These were the innocent, carefree days of childhood, where a sense of warmth and well-being was the baseline of emotion, amplified even further by icing on the cake in its actual and figurative forms. Years later, my brother Gerard and I would coin such warm-spirited, serendipitous moments as “sacred time,” a delightful concept I have always treasured.
The way we played horseshoes then, the closest shoe would get a point, two points if it were a hanger, and three points for a ringer. We set victory at 21. This one morning I was losing 20-18, and we prepared to toss the next two shoes each. After Eddie threw his set, and I had one left to go, we could easily see from the other end that he had the closer shoe. He was poised to tally another win in what became a summer sports-training league for me.
As I prepared to throw my last shoe, my two oldest brothers, Gerard and Joseph, came walking up to the edge of the wood fence dividing our yards. The horseshoe pits were set up in Eddie’s yard, which, now that I think about it, gave him an additional edge, a home-field advantage.
As big brothers do when their little brother is involved in some head-on competition with a neighbor, they waltzed up to the fence with a cocky and cool indifference. They were, after all, too smooth at 17 and 16 to admit that they were interested in their kid brother’s horseshoe match.
“What’s the score?” Gerard said, without forsaking his coolness.
“Twenty to 18,” Eddie chirped in response, gleaming in anticipation that he would claim victory after my final toss. My brothers saw his shoe sat in a winning position, only a few inches from the pole. Their body language suggested I was poised to lose the match, even though they pretended not to care.
“All you need to do is throw a ringer on this toss, and you’ll win,” Gerard said, likely driven by a sense of older-brother, obligatory encouragement.
Secretly, I wished that just this once, the horseshoe gods would concur with Gerard’s directive, and I’d pull off a miracle. I also felt a palpable sense of annoyance with Eddie’s face shining with premature pride, which was amplified by the powerful fact that Gerard and Joseph were watching. Let’s face it: even winning the next five games (after their brief interest waned) wouldn’t stack up against doing so in this moment, which felt like watching Monday Night Baseball in our living room on WABC. I couldn’t allow myself to resent Eddie, though, or to ponder how magnificent a miraculous toss would be. To do so would distract me from focusing on my final shot.
I locked in mentally, stood slightly to the right of the pole on our end, and focused on the distant pole with a stare as intense as Superman’s X-ray vision. Everyone was quiet as they paid homage to my rite of sportsmanship—an understanding that all boys inherently seem to know. My little arm swung back with the shoe, and with bated breath and the hopes of a million kids wishing for their older brothers to see them make their mark, I lunged forward and threw my horseshoe, along with my desperate hopes, into the summer wind and blue Sag Harbor sky.
And would you believe it? In what seemed like three hours of desperate and improbable longing, the horseshoe came angling in from the right, spinning with divine radar. It whipped around the pole. A ringer! It stuck in the dirt with violence and improbability only matched in degree by the skipping beat of Eddie Patrillo’s humbled, broken heart. None of us could believe it at first, so we ran down to the far end to make sure that the horseshoe held its place in the sandy ground. And it had! Even Gerard and Joseph were shocked by my throw’s accuracy. They tried to play it off like they weren’t hustling to the other end of the pit to see my winning toss, but we all were.
On that glistening, sunny Sag Harbor morning, I beat Eddie Patrillo in horseshoes 21–20. I shut out his game-winning point with the shot of my 7-year-old life. And most importantly, my big brothers saw it, sealing my place in the Little Brother Hall of Fame. I think I jumped up and down in celebration for half an hour. Eddie’s premature gloats were reduced to silence and frowns. And that was OK with me. As my brothers strolled away, after my victory parade of one began, Eddie frantically insisted on several rematches, all of which he probably won that morning. It didn’t matter. I won the biggest game, the one that Gerard and Joseph came to watch, and Sal threw the ringer of his life. It doesn’t get more sacred than that.
Sal Guarino
Born in Brooklyn, NY, now settled in Centro with his Mexican wife, Sal brings a rich set of life experiences to the table. “SALudos de San Miguel!” shares his joy for living through a lens of gratitude and positivity here in San Miguel. Contact: salguarino@gmail.com.
