Tag Archives: new york

Pointless Nostalgia

Official Outrage Meets the Belt-Whipping Klansman of Route 208

I belonged to the first generation of kids who were taught racism was bad. By that I mean taught formally, officially, in school. By the time I began kindergarten, the civil rights battles of 1960s had entered the realm of Settled History, with clear victors and losers, heroes and villains. There was once a time, we were told, where discrimination based on the color of one’s skin ran rampant, but now racism had been vanquished thanks to Martin Luther King Jr. and Bill Cosby.

Around the time when the first MLK Day was celebrated, my elementary school hosted a presentation wherein someone who bore a remarkable likeness to the man himself reenacted the I Have A Dream speech, and led an entire cafetorium in the singing of “We Shall Overcome.” As a budding history nerd and self-righteous soul, this presentation genuinely moved me. In a fit of Lisa Simpson-esque civic earnestness, I felt compelled to write a letter to the White House, asking the president what I could or should do for the cause of civil rights. Because the president at the time was Ronald Reagan, I received a photo of The Gipper and a form letter that made no mention whatsoever of Civil Rights.

This setback notwithstanding, the message that Racism = Bad was constantly reinforced throughout my childhood, both in school and in kid-aimed PSAs like One To Grow On, wherein the ethical quandaries of the age were resolved by Nancy McKeon and Soleil Moon-Frye. The belief of the inherent equality of all humans seemed less a belief that needed to be held, but a fact that I acknowledged. I never encountered anyone who felt otherwise.

And then I met my bully.

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Literary Endeavors, NYC

Excerpts From the Only New York Novel Ever Published

The bees are in full voice today, Jim thought to himself as he tended to his rooftop apiary. The customers at Freyja, the café he owned in Ridgewood, would soon be clamoring for more of the bounty of these hives. It came from a special breed, Apis laboriosa, native to the Himalayas, who produced a honey less sweet than store bought, with strong notes of tartness. How like life itself, Jim thought. How like his life.

When he first opened Freyja, there was nothing around it for miles. They told him he was foolish to quit his job at Goldman Sachs and open a café where no one lived. Back then, the café’s only neighbors were a check cashing business, a down-in-the-mouth community center, and a hospital that would soon close down. Now people lined up at dawn on days when the honey was available. Jim could produce more of it, but the bees were sensitive. You could only ask so much of them. Also, he had received  complaints when some of the oversized bees broke away from his colony and built their own hive in the jungle gym at the local playground.

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Stories

Citi Field, 4:12pm

citifield3Citi Field has a bad rap, I think, because people confuse the stadium with the mediocre (at best) team that’s played there for five seasons, and the hated ownership that pushed for the stadium’s construction. As far as I’m concerned, however, there are a few things to recommend the place.

I like that when I go to Citi Field, I see a New York that I recognize, and one I don’t see or hear about anywhere else. What this New York is, exactly, is difficult to express, which is part of the reason why you don’t hear about it. Another part comes from the fact that most people who write about New York are either transplants or move in lofty circles, and so they barely come into contact with this New York. And it would never occur to most of the people who are part of this New York to express what they are. As far as they’re concerned, there’s nothing to express. It would be like asking a fish to tell you about the ocean.

I see a New York I recognize at Citi Field because the crowd there has diversity, an overused word but one for which I can find no suitable substitute. But that diversity is only a very small part of what I mean. For all these surface differences they possess, there is something shared among those who make up the crowds at Citi Field. You saw it at Shea once upon a time, too. It’s not Mets fandom, really. That’s part of it, sure, but fandom is only a reflection of something deeper.

There is a feeling that I get when I go to Citi Field, surrounded by the kind of people who choose to go to Citi Field, the kind of people I come from. I get this feeling nowhere else. It is an odd mix of nostalgia for the past and a jaundiced eye at the present. In those stands, you hear grumbling when The Opposition goes deep, or a shortstop lets a grounder zip through his legs, but the grumbles are accompanied by smirks. It has the unspoken undercurrent of, Did you really think this would work out?

And yet, all you need to do is run a video of Piazza or Gooden or Seaver on the scoreboard and the fans begin to nod reverently. And they’ll tell each other, I was at that game, even if the guy next to you was with you at that game. They must speak these words aloud because they can scarcely believe that they of all people were allowed to witness such things. They are people who are willing to allow that great, impossible things can happen in their lives. They just don’t expect them to happen any time soon.

I attended the first Mets game ever played at Citi Field, an exhibition against the Red Sox. I wandered into the Caesar’s Club that night, an enclosed bar/restaurant area behind home plate. There I saw people who got what they thought they wanted, a first class modern facility to replace outmoded, crumbling Shea Stadium, only to feel immensely confused. They were people uncomfortable with comfort. One man lowered himself into a lounge chair slowly, as if he was afraid it would disappear if he moved too fast.

Some say the iconic phrase coined by Tug McGraw in 1973, Ya gotta believe!, was originally said in jest to mock an exec making a lame clubhouse pep talk, that it only became a rallying cry when the Mets went from worst to first at the tail end of that season. I’d like to think this is true. It says so much about the people who choose to follow the Mets. It is a joke always threatening to become serious.

I like that when I left Citi Field on Sunday, the last game of the season, readying myself for a long winter, I caught a brief glimpse of something over the Promenade roof. I could see the relics of the World’s Fair in the distance, the Unisphere and the NY State Pavilion and the cone of a spaceship that once circled this earth and came back again. Those structures rose alongside Shea Stadium, at a time when people—in Queens of all places—still believed in the future.