We went to the Bog (Foggy Notions) restaurant and bar to have our weekly dinner with our friends Kim and Jack Macmillan. I always bring my camera, the bog is a photogenic place. I was rewarded by the sight of two beautiful women, Kelly and her two-year-old daughter Riley, who was visiting briefly. Two beautiful faces, two beautiful smiles, an evocation of pure love.
Maria said Fate was on a rampage Wednesday, running into the woods, demolishing flowers in pots, knocking candles off of desk tops, dumping in my office while I was away (she was housebroken from the first). We cracked down today – lots of exercise, obedience training, ball-throwing, sheepherding. Of course, no border collie would consider any of this cracking down. She behaved beautifully in Maria’s studio, herding the sheep well, behaved in the house, and when I told her I was upset to hear of this, she gave me a great Fate look. What are talking about?
It is a great thing to never get angry at a dog, you will accomplish so much more with love and clarity and understanding. In Brooklyn, I met a woman who told me a dozen times how abused her dog was, how afraid, how much he had suffered. Let it go, I wanted to say, he doesn’t need for you to make excuses for him, to apologize for him. Imagine him to be healthy and healed, and he will be. I wondered why she was telling me that he was abused, or why she had such a need to say it. The dog doesn’t look at himself that way, doesn’t even know what the word means.
I don’t know why Fate had such a bad day, yesterday, or why she had such a good one today. Maria and I accept that we have a very active, strong, instinctual animal and it is our challenge to make sense of it. We will. In the meantime, I can’t look at this dog without smiling or laughing. I can’t even pretend to be mad at her.
I went back to Yankee Stadium Wednesday night with my daughter Emma, it was my first visit to the new stadium, my first baseball game in more than a decade, my first substantial time alone with Em in years. I was a lifelong baseball fan, I had a partial season ticket to the Yankees, I took Emma there when she was 14 and it ignited a spark in her that burns today, she is a Senior Editor for baseball at Sports Illustrated magazine. She got very good seats for us in the upper level by the third base line.
I failed to charge the batteries for my sweet camera, so no photos in New York City – a message there – but I did have my Iphone and you can take pretty nice photos with an Iphone these days.
We walked all over Brooklyn and Manhattan and some of the Bronx. We went to the new and quite spectacular Whitney Museum, walked the High Line – the re-imagined elevated train tracks in the meatpacking district of Manhattan, soon to vanish, along with much of the borough, under another wave of condos and office towers. Ordinary humans and things that are not rich or corporate are losing the struggle for survival in New York City, it is becoming the land of the developed and entitled. The New York I knew and loved is disappearing rapidly, another victim of the Corporate Nation.
But the Whitney is a jewel in the landscape, a very bold architectural triumph, at least to me. I love architecture that makes strong and powerful statements to the world.
The new Yankee Stadium is not as charismatic or atmospheric as the old, it could have been bold, like the Whitney, but they went for money and caution instead.
It is very pleasant, very safe, very corporate, tailored to selling caps and shirts and $7 hot dogs. All kinds of staffers in blue T-shirts walk around with wooden paddles that say “How Can I Help You?,” but then, how much help do you need buying an overpriced hot dog, a $5 bag of peanuts you can fit in your fist, and finding a clearly labeled seat?
I bought Em two hot dogs and fries and got two hot dogs for myself, and that was $40. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio did not play in this very manicured place, there is no real history or feeling in the place. The old stadium is a green park across the street, a ghostly reminder of feeling and emotion. The new stadium is is pleasant enough, and comfortable, it has about as much character as a corporate board room.
Why do we tear down and throw away all the things of meaning in this country?
The crowd, perhaps deafened by the new and relentlessly loud and grating music and noise from the giant video screens, seemed almost too stunned or deafened or blinded or overpowered to get excited. Baseball was once the quietest of games, you could hear the ball snap in the catcher’s mitt when the pitcher threw. Now it is the loudest game, you cannot hear yourself think, you can not even speak to the people next to you over all the noise.
The seats around home plate were all sold to corporations for more than $1,000 apiece, and the companies never use them, or their customers leave after the first couple of innings, so the best seats in the stadium are empty night after night. Guards keep the masses out, even after it is clear the fat cats aren’t coming or have left. This sort of thing is what Lenin got his panties in a knot about.
Baseball has moved beyond me, or I have moved beyond it. It is such a big-time money thing. The new stadium was all about those corporate boxes that ring the upper decks. The fans are window dressing. The Yankees won the game, it was a close and good game. When I lived in Baltimore, I rooted hard for the Orioles. But I can’t really tell one team from another any longer, and does it matter?
The day was personal though, it was not about sports. Wednesday was the first day Em and I had spent this much time alone together in years, and it was valuable and sweet for me, and I hope for her. I think no man is a hero to his wife and children, they just know too much. Emma and I have come a long way towards reconnecting, and we have a ways to go. She is happily entrenched in her new life, I can only really watch it from the sidelines, a curious transition for a father.
Emma was especially considerate and thoughtful about the day, she worried about my welfare and took good care of me. I guess she sees me getting older, she never used to do that. Oddly enough, I am in better shape than ever.
I loved spending that much time with her. We both agreed to do it again. It has been too long. Given the time that has elapsed since my last visit, and all that has happened to me – and her – I got a rich perspective on time. She was the teacher this time, I was the pupil. She knew how New York worked, I didn’t. She knew the ins and outs of the subway, I don’t know which end of the Metrocard to stick in the machine. Emma knew the names and averages of all the players, I recognized one or two names. She understood how to navigate the new stadium, it was strange and unfamiliar to me.
At times, she forgot that I lived in New York City for many years in my life, she told me where the train station was and how to get there. I surrendered to that, she does know a lot more than me now, I accept it. The last time we were there, she was an adolescent, wide-eyed at the mysteries of baseball, the stadium seem immense and impenetrable to her. I I got to tell some of the mysteries to her. Soon, she will take her own child to the stadium, and do her own rituals of inauguration. Life is relentless. In the subway, she took my MetroCard and swiped it for me. The crowds can get impatient, she said. She kept asking me if I was tired.
I kept wanting to apologize to her. For moving away, for the divorce, for all of the things that sometimes make her impatient and angry with me. For all of the things I think I failed to do. I wonder if she can ever accept me in the way that I am learning to accept her. We are working on it, there is a lot of love and connection there. And she is in a job she likes very much, living with a partner she loves very much in a city she is very happy living in. That is neat.
My work at the gym has paid off, I walked for seven or eight hours without any trouble or too much fatigue. Could not have done that a year ago at this time or before.
Emma is on a different path than me, she has chosen a life of security and coherence, a good choice for her, and that choice is her right and gift. She is tired of switching jobs, scrambling for money, the creative life was not fun for her. Her way is the natural way, I do not love her for being in my image, but for being in her own. Parents, I believe, are ultimately judged not for how the kids do when they are there, but for how their children do when they are not. I did not do as badly as I sometimes think.
I was glad to be there, glad to come home. I used to love working and scrambling in New York, I am out of my element there, it it’s not just a question of age. That life has no real appeal for me. Maria was waiting for me at the train station, her smile lit up the platform. How lucky to be loved by someone with such a big heart, to have that smile waiting for me, happy to see me. Fate tore up the house yesterday, she dumped in my study, ate some beautiful plants and flowers, knocked over a lit candle in Maria’s studio, ran off in the woods, ate a dead thing, and threw it up all day. Maria said she was a hell-beast, all day long.
I said hello to Red and the donkeys and the horse, and got Red out with the sheep and ran her until her tongue was hanging off the ground. Fate has never had accidents in the house, I imagine she ate too much of a bad, or perhaps, rotting thing. She is asleep by my desk now, learning to be still. She is tired. Me too. We were glad to see one another.
I want to write more about family later, but I think I need a nap myself. The trip was lovely, but exhausting too, in more ways than one. Healing and recovery are both work that never ends. For the first time, I wore my spanking new old man sneakers, a wide-bottom pair of New Balance running shoes. I have resisted this for years, but you know what? They work on concrete. For the first time in recent memory visiting New York, I got no blisters.
