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September 24, 2008

Farewell Yankee Stadium

My father was an unabashed, lifelong Yankees fan. He was born at the very dawn of the depression and lived in a one room tenement with his father and mother (and, later, with a beauty of a little sister) on Coney Island in Brooklyn. By all rights, he should have been a Dodgers fan, but he had a slew of beloved aunties in the Bronx who knew a thing or two about where a very poor young boy could go to get a bit of relief from the larger world about. He would take the train up to see his mother's sisters and they would give him a quarter to go sit in the bleachers and watch Lou Gehrig, Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, and Charlie Keller swing in one frame and Red Ruffing and Lefty Gomez hurl in the other. It was there on July 4th, 1939, that my 9 year old father watched a graceful Lou Gehrig tell a weeping audience that he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Even as a man leaning into twilight, my father could not recount that day without shaking hands and a breaking voice.

It's not surprising that my father spent his career at a hospital in the South Bronx, a mile and a half from the House That Ruth Built. In the hot summers, during a particularly good homestand, my father would often take me to work with him, bundling me into the backseat of his car at six in the morning, so that we could go straight to a Yankee game in the evening. I slept unaware as he listened to Johnny Mathis on the tape deck, starting and stopping and starting and stopping on the Long Island Expressway and the Cross Island. He would wake me up to look at the sky when we crossed the Whitestone Bridge, flying above the western tip of the Long Island Sound, before launching onto the insanity that is the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Once parked, he would hold my hand tightly and guide me through the Emergency Room, past stab wounds and gsw's, screaming loved ones and jittering addicts handcuffed to green metal chairs, past hulking police officers and afro coiffed case workers, all while various members of law enforcement and hospital staff would wave their salutations and call out, "Good Morning, Dr. Amsel," in accents like song.

Up the ancient service elevator we slowly ascended, in the potent cocktail of lysol, bleach, and the metal tint of blood. My father's suite of offices was located at the end of an institutional green tiled hall. Behind a thick wood and leather padded door sat a huge oak desk with a soft felt ink blotter covering the center of its surface and plush arm chair that seemed to take up the entire room to this seven year old. There I was left to draw, write, doctor to imaginary patients, and browse through his incomprehensible medical books and journals (no wonder I was obsessed with his PDR years down the line) while he went about his day. I would memorize six syllable medical terms to regurgitate later in the evening, pretending I knew their precise meaning, in hope of impressing him with my impossibly advanced vocabulary (all it did was give his false hope that I would one day be a lawyer, of all things).

I was doted on by the nursing staff, who came into my father's office through out the day to rub my cheeks and sing my name, pull their fingers through my course and curl matted hair, slip me stuffed creatures from the hospital gift store, and check to see if I wanted a ginger and sugar cane candy brought from home. Of everyone, Saundra, my father's office manager and the woman who made his day run as smoothly as a clock, was my favorite. She had an animated speaking voice shot through with laughter and exasperation and soft hands that held mine when I needed to go to the bathroom. She put up with this little girl who often sat beside her desk and put her head next to her typewriter, begging for just one more sheet of paper.

By the time my father was through with his patients, his med students, and his residents, I imagine the Yankee game must have been a sweet reward. He wore his wallet in his back pocket attached to his bell bottom jean belt loops by a chain (he was so ahead of the hipster cool curve), and I would latch my hand to the chain as he held me tightly to his side for the return journey through the hall, down the elevator, and across the ER. In the Bronx, in the 70's, in the summer, in the early evening, the ER moved from simmer to boil and my father hustled me through the chaos, often lifting me off my feet and squeezing me like a mouse in his haste. It was something akin to the mommy arm in the car (which he did as well), just a little bit more protection from the world.

That car smelled like an old coffee filter, the one you're shocked to discover is still in the drip machine when you get home from vacation. Spilled on the carpet, spilled on the seat upholstery, affixed like shellack to the door handles, splattered up onto the inside of the windshield, thinly coating the radio display, coffee was the olfactory soundtrack to my father's life. This was an era before cup holders had been invented ("Genius!") and my father was worthless without a pot in him, so the car was, thanks to Dunkin Donuts, ground zero. To this day, I am never as happy or heartbroken than that first second after breaking the seal on a vacuum pack of coffee beans. That is my father entering the room to devastate me in his absence.

If I thought I would be crushed when my father was escorting me out of the hospital, that was incomparable to the seething mass at Yankee Stadium. 57,546 New Yorkers at the end of a hot day, all pressed in close proximity. Under any other circumstances, tempers would be like dry kindling next to track, but all discomfort was forgotten in the rush of anticipation keen on the coming game. This was a Yankee game! Every hard ass transformed into a giddy kid (well, a giddy kid with a 16 ounce beer in tow). My father would grip my tiny hand so tightly, the fingernails turned blue, my arm extended practically out of the socket. Up, up, up the raucous crowd wound toward their place in the stands, every so often the hooting and shouting and laughing punctuated by a loud, "MOOOOOOOO!" followed by more laughter. On one such migration up to our seats, I actually lost a mary jane and in the crush my father made the executive decision to save our lives and abandon it to the thousands of feet behind us. "Leave it," he ordered in his most stern, scary dad voice. He carried me for the rest of the night, something I thought was royal at the time, but now, with the eyes of an adult (who carries alcohol gel in her pocket), I can see that he was simply terrified I would contract typhus, antibiotic resistant staph, or some other fierce, mutated germ swimming in the perfect growth medium of beer, soda and cotton candy coating the cement floors.

I remember very little of the games themselves. What I am left with are vivid, childhood snapshots that are just now beginning to curl at the edges. My father jumping to his feet with every dramatic swing or play or strike out (something I have inherited, which scares the living shit out of Stella). The first time I ever saw a grown up projectile vomit (across three boxes, I might add). The pink tiles in the women's bathrooms. The bright, bright sodium lights that collected moths by the millions. The first time I ever saw a grown man cry (to the National Anthem). The Red Sox and The Yankees clearing the benches to duke it out on the infield (which then led to the first time I ever saw a grown man, in the adjacent seats, throw a punch). Thurman Munson's tragic death and Reggie Jackson's impossible swing. My grandfather cursing Billy Martin and occasionally attending a game with us in his own world, listening to the radio broadcast commentary through the single ear piece attached to his transistor radio (the one with the flesh colored, curly cord). Goose Gossage's and, later, Dave Mattingly's mustache (or for that matter, any and all of the '70's porn staches). The sweetly grotesque pastiche of beer, hot dogs, mustard, soft pretzels, spun sugar cotton candy, popcorn, cracker jacks, peanuts, soda, and ketchup. My father, happy.

I haven't yet been able to watch the last game played at Yankee Stadium or the ceremonial tributes broadcast on ESPN prior to the game. The six or so hours are still sitting on our TiVO, waiting for a day when I have the energy to mourn and cheer and weep, when I am ready to say goodbye. I know, I know, it's not the original Yankee Stadium, but it's my Yankee Stadium and within it rest the ghosts of my father through all the stages of his life, from an immigrant's son in short pants and no coat, to a poor city college student, to the beloved father, grandfather, and doctor that he became. Within it rest the ghosts of a youngest daughter, precocious and precious, as unblemished as an unlit taper, and as full of potential as a seed. And as I round the bend into my late thirties, I am beginning to glimpse exactly how often we each leave those ghosts like silk tendrils trailing out behind us to occupy not just our own memories but those whose lives we transverse.

Posted by bethamsel at September 24, 2008 4:45 PM