rm | LJ Idol, week 1: Saying Goodbye

I tend to show up at the end of all things. I was born to it really, this jumping on the bandwagon late and then sticking around until the music is shut off and the lights come up and you can see just how nasty that floor we've all been dancing on actually is. It's what happens when you're a lonely kid -- you never want to go to sleep, you never want to go home, because maybe, just maybe the miracle is coming and god help you if you miss it. Which is probably why I should have made more of an effort to get to Yankee Stadium this season. The last season.

Now, to be honest, I've never been much of a baseball person, not really. I had a Pete Rose jersey I wore when I was a kid when my dad was teaching me to hit a wiffle ball straight as I could in the hallway of our apartment building. It had to be straight or else the ball would bounce off the walls of the hall, echoing through the neighbors living rooms and eliciting complaint calls to the doorman downstairs.

For the record, I can hit a wiffle ball very, very straight. I know all about how to compensate for being left-handed, just as I know all about how damn weird this story is. Look, it was New York in the 1970s and everything was dangerous in very plausible fiction if not in fact, and so playing outside, at least in my family, just wasn't done.

Eventually, the 70s ended and we did play outside. I was older, and my dad was starting to hate me for being a girl, but he still bought me a glove and taught me how to play catch, although he never taught me to throw like a boy because I had small shoulders like my mother, and he said it just wouldn't work. I tried once or twice and pretty much buried the ball in the ground and decided it was best to let him be right, even if it shamed me.

When we saw The Natural in the theater I remember my dad whispered to me that _this_ was a fairytale, while my mother explained that Robert Redford was handsome. Like taking notes on the songs on the radio so I would know what to talk about at school, I did everything I could to keep track of those facts too. If I learned enough things like how to hit a ball straight and what to say to children vs. what to say to adults and the secrets in the numbering system of the lampposts in the park, It would all be be okay. I'd know how to be a person, and no one would really notice how utterly unnerved and consistently late to the party I always was.

My parents never took me to a ball game. Not baseball. Not basketball. Not football. We went to tennis, because my rich uncle had a box at the Virginia Slims tournament (remember when cigarettes sponsored sporting events?), but that was really it, so I never saw a ball game until I was in my twenties. Michael took me, and I fell in love, and what I didn't say sitting beside him was how it made everything my parents had ever said to me suddenly make sense.

We went to a few games that season. On our own. With friends of his, and once in a shivering October night where I thought I'd positively die of the cold, I realized I liked our cheap seats better than what we'd gotten that occasion. We drank beer and ate hot dogs which I was happy to fetch for us because the most perfect moment was always walking back into the seating area, watching the vault of the tunnel open onto that stadium view and hearing the roar. For five seconds I could pretend the glory was mine, even with fists full of junk food, and I gladly did it over and over again.

"You just like anything that's new," Michael said.

And while I acquiesced to that -- it was true and human nature besides -- I assured him that no, I would always love ballgames now. Because it was perfect. It was brilliant. I grinned at him, and he told me how baseball players were mythology. Were knights. Were a modern King Arthur story, at least if you squinted real hard, and I was happy to be young and a bit clueless and definitively a girl beside him at those games, the way I wasn't in most of the other time we spent together, although I tried. Let me tell you, I tried.

After we stopped talking I went to one more game with my friend Soren who had stumbled on tickets. And every year after I told myself I'd score some seats, get some friends together, get back in the habit of it or at least do it just one more time. But I never got there. It was never as important as the twenty-three billion other things I had to do, all the new ones especially.

With Patty, I made noises a couple of times about getting tickets for her family next time they visited. "You can stay home," I offered, as she's not really a sports person, but then again, let's remember, neither am I.

I just like the roar. And the adulation, even from next door. But you know, time moves fast, and Patty and I have enough to do just trying to keep track of what city or country either of us are in any given week. For the record, that sounds way more fucking glamorous than it is.

So I didn't get to Yankee Stadium before the end, which was, in case you too are not a sports person, last night. Didn't write Michael about it now that we're cordial, probably because I'm still pissed at him for not telling me when our favorite bar closed a decade ago. Just didn't bother with it, which is sort of funny, because as much as I love a new thing, I love mourning an old one.

But saying goodbye? Apparently not so much.