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The Simple Things Tobin's Blogs By Tobin Bell on 7/30/2006 6:15 PM When I was a kid in Massachusetts, playgrounds and sports saved me from what was going on at home and from myself. I was never happier than afternoons at VFW Clapp Memorial, an old brick building next to a shoe factory, playing basketball. We'd play in the old wood gym that stunk of sneakers, a suspended track high above echoing footfalls of joggers. After the game, it was glass-bottled coke, salted peanuts and fighting for a game at the beat-up pool table. At dusk, I’d start a two-mile walk home, stopping (if I had a nickle) at the Coffee Cup Diner for a game of pin ball, where the trick was to shake the machine just enough to win, but not enough to make it "tilt". Sometimes it’s simple things, details, (the steel-gray light in a late-afternoon New England winter sky) that resonate longest and brightest in our memory.