Angie has become my Proxy
In my sunrise time, there were days and nights when I would
subway-elevate to the original, the real Yankee Stadium to ingest
the heroes of the 1950’s-’60’s – Joltin’ Joe, the Commerce Comet,
Yogi, Whitey – and breathe the atmosphere of Victory with my
Bronx-reared soul. There were the times my elementary teachers
chaperoned us to afternoon delights, an evening when I plunked down
ten bucks for a second-row box seat near the visitors’ dugout while many
miles away Sonny Liston humiliated Floyd Paterson. There was the 60-
cent bleacher seat from which I saw the Yanks defeat the Tigers, with a
close-up view of Di Maggio in center and of Mantle in right – a Hall of
Famer in his final year next to his eventual replacement, a Hall of Famer
in his rookie season.
Then, in a surprising switch of loyalty – actually, more of a division than
a conversion – there were my visits to the Met Polo Grounds and Shea to
view the fledgling Metropolitans. Many memories. But Time is a hammer
that has no feeling but bashes away at the physical being even as the
heart continues to beat for the home team, and now that I am 85, my
stadium sojourns are severely limited and restricted … but there is
no denying family faithfulness, and in my stead, my granddaughter
roots with passion from the stands of Citi Field. She knows the players
and the strategies, the quirks of the fielders, the strengths of the hitters,
the nuances of the pitchers – and so a tradition continues, encompassing
generations. There are times she’s joined by siblings. But most often, she
attends with friends, and spreads her youthful loyalty until it blankets
neighboring home-grown loyalists. She feels the agony of defeat and
lost opportunities and ecstasy of hot streaks and team accomplishments.
She has become the true and faithful fan, eyewitness to baseball history
with a spirit that breathes life into misplaced doldrums. She has become
the fanatic that I once was, and thus bears within her being the gleeful
tradition of Victory of the heart and soul over the ordinary and non-committal.
And she’s quite conscious that the baton has been passed on from me to her
with pride and more than a touch of gratitude. She has become in deed and
thought my proxy. She attends games as I once did and holds back nothing
of her team loyalty. I am so deeply proud of her for many reasons (as I am
for all my grandkids) but for her devotion to the sport and the team I love,
let this poem be a monument as strong and poignant as those which once
graced center field in the true House that Ruth Built.