The asphalt turned soft beneath our sneakered feet. We heard of withered old women found dead on tenement floors. We heard many tales about how the sun could be murderous.

But we lived in a state of joy. The war was over, and school was behind us, and here came the first spaldeens, pink and pure, stacked on candy store counters.

The first game started at 8 in the morning, on streets washed by the water wagon, and the last one ended in darkness. We wiped sweat on undershirts. We drained thick bottles of Frank's orange sodas. We drowned ourselves in the water of open fire hydrants.

Longest Days of Our Lives

Then, bouncing a spaldeen, swinging broom handles, we played another game. Those sweltering days would prove to be the longest of our lives.

The sun beat down: and old Italian men finished puttering in the gardens of Brooklyn, their fig trees shorn of winter wrappings and safe for another season, and drifted toward each other in the streets. They wore cloth caps, their hands leathery from decades of building New York, and they greeted each other in the words of Sicily and Calabria.

Then they went to the lots together and played boccie. The war was over, and the great DiMaggio was back, but here, under the brutal sun, it was time again to play a game of intelligence and finesse. Forget the heat wave. They had learned the high art of boccie under a Mediterranean sun.

The sun beat down: and other older people moved slowly through the bright, dazzled streets, embracing the heat of noon.

They had come from places where there was never enough sun, from drizzly towns in the west of Ireland, from frigid shtetls in Poland and Russia. They smiled in the heat wave, making small jokes about whether it was hot enough for you. They never complained. After all, they had crossed oceans to get to the sun. They would warm themselves in its summer rays until they died.

There was no air conditioning then, except in movie theaters, and the only telephones were in candy stores, and nobody had yet seen television.

Radios Always Playing

The street was our free theater. The tenement windows were always wide open, curtains drooping, old women plopped upon the window sills to watch the great show beneath them. The cast was made of cops and hoodlums, street fighters and drunks, workingmen and exhausted women, all still playing their roles under the fierce sun.

Radios were always playing, and you could hear Crosby from one tenement and Sinatra from another and walk 10 blocks without missing a single pitch in a Dodger game.

The sun beat down: and on some weekend days we rose early and boarded trolley cars and traveled to Coney Island. Our beach.

Sometimes we were a tiny part of crowds as large as 3 million. Each small group established a blanket or towel on the sand, held in place with shoes, clothes, an occasional portable radio. "Mind the blanket," someone would say, and then a patrol moved from sand to Boardwalk and back again.

That world was a dizzying riot of color, oiled flesh, carousel music, shooting galleries, freak shows and Nathan's Famous. It was not free of menace.

The street gangs were there, too, ready to fight over women, turf, change on a bar. Once, down Surf Ave. from Nathan's, I saw a wide-eyed man slash three young hoodlums with a knife before being brought down with a baseball bat. The blood was redder than the morning sun.

My father's friends all went to a place called Scoville's, on the Boardwalk near 16th St., where they could drink beer under umbrellas and sing the old songs.

Billy Hamill had lost a leg in the 1920s, playing soccer in the immigrant leagues, but my mother had sewn him a special bathing suit, one that covered the stump of his left leg. In summer, that stump was often blistered and raw from long shifts in the heat-thick factory where he worked.

But on Sundays he would go to Scoville's, and his friends would take him to the water's edge, and then, one leg and all, he would swim in the healing sea.

The Depression Vanished

On the dark-blue edge of the sea, the New York millions could sometimes see troopships on the horizon, heading for the Narrows, the great harbor and the North River piers, carrying young men home from the war.

They surely couldn't see us from the decks. But there would be a sudden building roar of welcome and triumphant fists thrust towards the sun, the sound of 60 ballpark crowds, the loudest sound I've ever heard. In the sea that bore those young men, the grime of cold-water flats vanished, the Depression vanished, and for an hour or a day, so did memories of the films out of Buchenwald.

The sun, our sun, its blaze carried into the darkness by our tough young men, had burned away the night and fog of the Nazis, too.

Later, on other sweltering Sundays, you would see young men, their eyes as dark as catacombs, come tentatively down the stairs from the boardwalk. Most were with friends or brothers or young women; a few arrived in the immense crowd alone, as if engaged in a private pilgrimage.

My father wasn't the only man on the beach who had lost a leg, but others carried more terrible wounds. Those aged young men had lived through the Hurtgen Forest or Iwo Jima or a thousand other terrible places, carrying in their minds the secret symbols of home.

Now it was the summer of 1946. The men would move tentatively on the paths between the blankets, get about halfway to the water's edge, and then begin to run.

I saw one of them running fully clothed, his face coursing with tears, until he crashed deliriously into the water. For such men, the war finally ended in that sea.

The sun beat down: and we said go ahead, take your best shot. As we say it now. Above us is the punishing sun, but here, too, toward evening, is a breeze off the harbor. And out there, beyond the harbor, lies the sea that healed my father and so many others.

Take your best shot, distant star. We'll be back on the court in the morning.