The Stadium

Tonight, I went to a Dodgers/Mets game with a friend/baseball fan who is visiting from out of town. Young men and women in army fatigues were handing out small, free American flags at the entrance. For waving? To the television cameras? How could I not refuse the offer? I found the crowd at the game terrifying. I do not understand the choosing of sides, the release of aggression, the repetitive chant that “New York sucks” or the filthy masses gnashing on hotdogs, spilling beer and doing the “wave”. The wave is particularly troubling to me, with its group think choreography generated from the same neurological dark matter that gave rise to goose stepping--though admittedly executed in a lighter tone.

While looking at these trashy people, some drunk, one thin-angry man holding his three week old baby, Hispanic men chanting something about being Americano, I could only think of the Nazi Parade grounds outside of Nurnberg. This led me, naturally, to thinking of shards of words from the Sylvia Plath Nazi poems. I thought of the “Peanut-crunching crowd” from Lady Lazarus and the “Luftwaffe” from Daddy.

Being outside of the experience and finding it so unappealing, I felt like a small boy. Not unlike the small boy in the row in front of me who got his leg stuck between two of the hard plastic retractable seats, and unable to figure out how to dislodge his leg, he began to cry. His father, the thin-angry one holding the three week old baby, noticed his son crying after the mother pulled his leg out from its pinching entrapment. The mother asked her small son in reference to his leg, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

And the father quickly replied, dismissively, “He doesn’t say anything, he just cries.”

I looked at these people and thought, “If there was a tragedy in this stadium and I was the only one who knew how to get them out of there, would they listen to me? Or would they just swirl their uninformed thoughts in a prideful rage and remain paralyzed in non-action until they and their children died?”

Alienated, but not grim, and even light hearted with the recognition of my outsider status, I fell in love with what is fine on earth. I admired the diamond shaped mower markings in the outfield. The cement ground of the stands was truly covered with peanut shells. And like Sylvia, I wanted to rise up and eat men like air.

Daddy



Lady Lazarus