What did a kid do when there was nothing to do on a summer day in Fulda, Minn. in the mid-1950s?
There were two main options: You would throw a baseball against the steps in the front of the house, or you would toss a baseball in the air, get two hands on a bat and attempt to give it a whack.
These options were not always available, since we resided in the upstairs of the large house, and the downstairs was my father's funeral home.
If a family in the area had suffered a loss, you had to check the schedule to make sure you wouldn't be throwing a baseball against the steps when those folks arrived to pick out a casket for a loved one.
And if there was a wake taking place, you were encouraged to be quiet if anywhere in the vicinity of the house.
I was probably 9 or 10 one afternoon when I tossed up the baseball, took the whack, lost my grip on the bat and it went flying through a window. The wake would be starting in a couple hours, and even with my father's love for baseball, a bat through a window of a sitting room in the funeral home was an inexcusable blunder.
Somehow, I started thinking about this on Wednesday night, while watching Bartolo Colon work innings 4 through 7 in a 4-0 victory over the Brewers in Milwaukee.
Colon went seven scoreless innings for the Twins, and he put those on top of a complete game in his last outing for the Twins.