Bronx Musings

Today the Bronx is muggy and unpredictable.

There's no rain today, for the first time in what seems like forever, but it's cloudy. If you strain your neck just right you can make out some hints of a blue sky, but that's it. Just hints and nothing more.

When I pass the church on the corner of Belmont and E. 187th, a church that looks more like it belongs in Italy than the Bronx, a man comes out of one of the basement doors, carrying a bag full of trash.

I'm going to the grocery store to buy a box of candy. I am all out and I like having something to munch on while I write, and normal, solid food doesn't always sit in my stomach. This is the catch-22 of life with a digestive disorder. I'd like to buy some American cheese or a gallon of milk or a tin of nuts, but I can't.

I pick up some shrimp and some baked potato chips as well; I feel to awkward paying only for candy.

I'm on the shortest line, but the woman working the register is so slow she'd probably be fired at a larger store. It takes me longer to pay for my groceries than it did to pick them out; when I tell her she doesn't need to double bag my items, she does so, anyway.


On my way back, there's a woman going through the recycling bins in front of my apartment, taking whatever cans she can find--in NY you get a reimbursement when you take cans to the supermarket for recycling.


This is life in the Bronx.

Unpredictable, unforgiving, and still, it goes on.

There is the cacophony of English, Spanish, Italian, Albanian and who knows what else.

There are the eyes, always preening, always looking for that little extra bit of cleavage.

There's the smell of fresh baked bread, fresh from the ocean seafood and fresh meat from the butcher's shop, all meshing together, and nearly forcing you to duck into one of the nearby restaurants to satiate your appetite.


Sometimes I wonder how the Yankees, with their $2500 luxury seats and $210 million payroll belong here and not, say, overlooking Central Park.

And yet, as I write this, the sun starts to peak out from behind the clouds. For the first time since Saturday, there's something akin to natural daylight.

This borough will surprise me yet.

Baseball's Gift

It was cold in the Bronx today.

It was like the cold I experienced in Syracuse, but, at the same time, it was different.

In Syracuse, you don't really talk about the weather a whole lot. It snows and snows and snows, it's dark, and it's cold. It's the type of cold that makes it hard to breathe, that physically hurts you when you're outside.

It was that type of cold today in the Bronx, but, strangely, awkwardly, unexpectedly, the sun showed up and stayed most of the day.

I'm not used to this, this reminder that yes, this, too shall pass, this hint that in half a month baseball will regale us yet again and in three days we'll see something many people thought that they would never see in our lifetimes.

Although this off-season for the Yankees has been longer than the 2007-2008 off-season, it feels shorter.

I don't know why. It just does. Maybe it's because it hasn't been this cold for weeks on end, maybe it's because it hasn't snowed for months on end, maybe it's because I know this year's not a leap year.

See, that's the thing about baseball. No matter how dark or cold the night in the dead of winter, you know that spring will come again.

It's a sport that's built on hope--it has to be, because otherwise the Chicago Cubs would have gone the way of the St. Louis Browns a long time ago.

Unlike basketball or football or hockey or soccer, there's no clock in baseball. A game can be played in two hour or five; it can be played in five innings due to rain, nine or go as long as twenty-two. A team can be up by six runs in the ninth and still lose the game, and it's not something that only happens once every ten years--it happens, almost without fail, every season.

There's a reason that Dodgers fans could always get away with "wait 'till next year!"--because they understood that next year would come. They never gave up hope, and in 1955, next year came.

It came for the Red Sox in 2004 (obligatory shudder, of course), and it will come for the Cubs.

Even when the temperature dips below 0, when I'm outside wearing four layers and two scarves, when it's so cold that it becomes exhausting just to walk three blocks, the sun can still come out and remind us that baseball will be back again. That the hope inherent in a baseball season will be back again, one more time.

This is baseball's gift to us, and why the issue of who you're a fan of isn't nearly as important as the fact that you are a fan.

Because if you're a baseball fan, you already know that there's nothing in the world more important than hope.

Viva La Bronx

By popular demand, the extended version of my guest post here.


*****

How do I write about this place??

I’ve been here for five months, and still I haven’t tried it — it seems a task too daunting for a graduate student, much less a baseball blogger. I'm a rich white girl from Jersey. What the hell do I know about the Bronx?

When I walk to the grocery store on Arthur Ave, and I pass the cathedral, bells ringing and all, I imagine I am somewhere in sixteenth century Spain or eighteenth century Mexico. When I can smell the freshly baked bread and I see the fresh seafood lying on display in front of the fish market, I may as well be in Florence.

The language of this place slowly filters in — a Puerto Rican/Dominican blend of Spanish spoken so fast that despite my years of study, I have to strain to understand it. I begin to spot the bodegas that are on every street corner, which sell the essentials: Agua, cerveza, galletas, dulces and the Daily News. More often than not, the News is flipped over so that the back page — the sports page — is what greets you. Every bodega I’ve been in sells the News; I’ve only found one that has the New York Times.

After all, things like the mortgage crisis and the credit default swap don’t mean much to a lot of the people here, not when they’re too busy making sure they have enough money to pay for a gallon of milk and a carton of eggs.

Most of the people I meet could never afford to go to a Yankee game even in the old Stadium. I almost have to wonder if the Yankees even belong here. How could the Yankees be a part of a neighborhood that seems so far off from the baseball team?

The Yankees are a symbol of rich America, right? A symbol of corporate-types and their excess, while the Bronx is a grind of poverty, right?

And then …

Then I remember that night in The Jolly Tinker, a dirty, dark, dank place that calls itself an Irish pub. I am sitting at a table with three classmates. We're discussing plans to submit to a conference--at this point in time I have no idea that I'll have to withdraw, after tripping over my computer cord and shattering the laptop's hard drive, thus losing my paper. There are two pitchers of beer, and J. is busy telling us his life story, something that involves parents in a rock band, Katrina, bartending in Ireland while speaking fluent Gaelic, and living homeless in Manhattan for three months. One of the pub regulars walks over to our table and points out his hat, one commemorating the 2008 All Star Game at Yankee Stadium. The same one I am wearing.

“You go to the game?” he asks. His manner betrays a lifetime in this borough, hard work while the world passes him by. In his FDNY fleece with his slurred speech, he is every bit the stereotype. A baseball fan from a generation that no longer matters, his opportunity spent.

“Nah,” I say. “Couldn’t afford the tickets.”

J., sighing because I am again talking about baseball and not medieval England, slams his beer on the table, and then, in his thick southern drawl, says, “All right, that’s it, I have to say it. I hate the Yankees.”

“You’re from the South,” I say. “You don’t get it.”

The man in the hat looks at me and smiles.

I've never seen this man before and I probably won't see him again, but for that brief second, we are as united as close kin.

And then I realize something.

The Yankees do belong here.

This is a neighborhood that teems with life. People stop into the bodegas to chat with the owners, restaurants are (still) packed with university students and even tourists, and old women sit and talk outside their doorman-less apartments on a warm summer day, with Italian accents so thick I can't even guess at their conversation.

This is a place where I can get freshly baked bread from Madonna Brothers, fish from the fish market next door and produce from the covered market in between, and then purchase my toothpaste and shampoo from the dollar store. I haven't been to the Modern grocery store in months. I don't need to go.

Other neighborhoods have their teams, other teams have their neighborhoods. The Red Sox have the University capital of the world in Boston, the Giants have the Bay, the Cubs have the North Shore...but only the Yankees have the Bronx.


And, as I look at the man in the hat and my other compatriots in the Tinker, only the Bronx deserves the Yankees.