by Nils Peterson
I
This is how it felt.
Yankee Stadium Gone – Impossible. It’s like going to your old hometown and finding your house – No! the neighborhood tarmacked over. Yes, we live in the world of Heraclitus, “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” Flux is all.
The first time I went to Yankee Stadium, I lived in New Jersey and I went with Bunny Reid, a neighborhood friend who lived in a strange house filled mostly with aunts. It had a big, big yard, and in the fall we’d play football on the long open side yard. In the spring and summer we’d play catch with mitts too big for our hands or we’d throw a pink rubber ball against the side of a garage that had been a carriage house keeping careful track of balls and strikes. We were Yankee fans. His father wasn’t around much. I think he had something to do with the railroad, but he took us to see a real game at Yankee Stadium.
I guess we drove up there through the Tunnel or over the George Washington Bridge, but memory isn’t certain here, because it was wartime and gas rationed and difficult to find, the speed limit 45 as I recall. I think I would remember train or bus. The great players were off playing for Uncle Sam, so likely this is 1944 or maybe ’45 before VE and VJ Days. However we got there, I was thrilled at being in that marvelous, seemingly eternal Coliseum, the House That Ruth Built.
Bunny’s father got the tickets, gave me mine – and, all of a sudden they were gone, Bunny and his father were nowhere in sight. There I was, 10 years old, 11 at most, 50 miles from home, maybe 50 cents in my pocket for a hot dog and a drink. Maybe there was a moment of panic. Maybe not. I took my ticket, asked an usher where my seat was, and went to it.
The field was the brightest green I had ever seen, and its proportions satisfied some inner longing for perfection. Everything was order and delight and satisfaction. When I got to my good seat (I almost said orchestra seat) the teams were warming up with a little hot pepper, a lot of infield chatter, and a few fungos to the outfielders. I sat down, an enchanted boy who’d reached the Promised Land. Soon the game began and I got caught up in the perfection of play, even with this wartime bunch. “They’re either too old or too young,” went the song of a girl’s lamenting over the supply of dates, but on this day, these guys were just fine. Pitchers pitched, batters came and went, yet time did not exist. Nor did Bunny and his father except when I would come around to a bit of wondering where were they, how could they miss all of this good stuff. At last they huffed down the aisle in the third inning, Bunny’s father relieved and angry in equal portions, he having wasted three innings searching for me.
Later, when my family moved to Mt. Vernon, NY, a town just above the city, its border touching the Bronx, I’d go to the games with Joe Mosca and his father. Joe and I didn’t like each other very much, yet I was the one his father asked out of the neighborhood boy rabble to go to the games. Not sure why. We’d take the trolley and then walk a couple of blocks to the 241st St. subway station, an elevated, really, and we’d catch the local and ride in the air past mile after mile of tenement, peering into windows of what seemed like dark lives till we got to the Stadium. 1948 now, and the heroes back from war. Joe DiMaggio again in center field. We sat in the cheap seats so we could afford to come again, a couple of bucks, maybe less for the bleachers. The subway had just gone up to a dime. But from there we could really see the way he covered the field, a glide rather than a run, moving to where the ball was going seemingly before the bat had struck it. And when he was up, his swing, level and sweet, long arms wrapping about his shoulder s with incredible torque when he missed, but when he struck the ball, such a sweet sweet sound filled the place.
Now, the whole stadium is “going, going, gone,” as Mel Allen used to say when the Yankee Clipper got the good wood on the ball. Yes I know it’s risen, but it’s not the same. Heraclitus.
II
Now I’m thinking of sandlot baseball, of my boyhood sandlot – not long before a Victory Garden – the ground uneven with the ghosts of furrows past. The outfield tilted up to the street. No level playing field here. There were those who could play and those who played anyway.
Over the fence was a home run at first, then, a double – and, when most of us could clear the fence, an out. In truth, it was a pain, the left fielder scrambling over the railing to chase the ball before it started rolling down the hill. If you didn’t get it quick, it could go a quarter of a mile. We learned to swing level, to try to meet the center of the ball for a line drive, or a little above for a sharp grounder made mean by the hard-packed, lumpy earth. It was nothing but Zen. At last the playing field felt as tight as last year’s sports jacket, and we set out into the great world to find a larger.
But now I’m thinking of life, of my life, of the fact there are no sandlots anymore and what it means to try for singles instead of swinging for the fences. I’m thinking of the Vossler brothers, of Joe Mosca and his father who would take me to Yankee Stadium on the subway, I’m thinking of Joe DiMaggio, his lovely long stride along the plate into the ball and the whip crack of his arms as they swung around, thinking now of Tommy Heinrich, “Old Reliable,” whom the Yankees could count on for a single when there were runners on base, thinking of my first curve ball when I dropped to the plate as the umpire called strike.
III
That’s the Ball Game
A single – but Russ, knees high, pumping hard, leaned round first with never a stop thought as the right fielder overran then fumbled the ball, and when the whole body sings with moving why drop anchor at second, so by the time the short stop caught, wheeled, and heaved it wide, Russ was hell-bent for the home plate port ready to barrel into the catcher who simply stepped aside when no throw came.
Wrapped in a warm summer cocoon of stadium light, the three of us cheered from the bleachers, my friends halfway between me and Russ in years, beginning to mourn their distance from the carelessness of the young body, from the confidence that this day’s bruise will be gone by tomorrow, from the understanding that life would offer no hurt more than a bruise, from the conclusion: Why not run heedless – breath comes easy, flesh is immortal, the last obstacle will step aside, there’ll be friends to cheer.