pinstripes are flattering

events with dates associated with them - christmas, thanksgiving, weddings, big races, birthdays, anniversaries - have all grown somewhat more important to me in the past two years. it isn't necessarily the actual event that is happening, be it an excuse to buy presents for my family or skiing down a mountain, that is the important part. it is the mere act of seeing a date on a calendar, circling it, writing it down - somehow making that date stand out from the rest, somewhat ominously on the black and white of the grid. i can recount to you the dates of scans, tests, procedures, chemo cocktails - all meetings you would guess would fall by the wayside of my chemo-wasted brain and disappear with time. but there they are, indelibly etched, mile-markers on a journey where somehow, dates have become a strange preoccupation of mine, no matter how run-of-the-mill or mundane they sound. it is indeed important to live one day at a time, no matter what your lot in life. but under the surface, under my surface, i cannot help but breathe a small sigh of relief when i have passed yet another milepost along the way. i'm not really measuring my life or the quality therein. i am merely amazed by the passage of time and by my ability to sense seconds, minutes, hours, and days in a way i never imagined for myself before getting "sick".

tonight was the last home game at yankee stadium. i grew up playing t-ball, ragball, and softball. i was indoctrinated to these "base" games just after the snow melted in the spring. i remember twirling around in the infield watching the dirt stain my sneakers orange. the first professional games i ever saw were under the garish lights of the metrodome. i knew in my soul that baseball was not an indoor sport. but there it was, ball lost in the white of the dome, and there i was, cheering my heart out for kirrrrrby puckett and the twins. i grew older, we moved, but still, if i was lucky, each summer i would get to go to a twins game at the dome, if we were visiting at the right time. i remember one night seeing them play the texas rangers, in nolan ryan's last season. ryan pitched the night before we went to see them. i think the good news was that the twins actually won the night we went to the game, even though i missed out on seeing one of the greatest pitchers ever. in high school, i would have much rather seen a college basketball game than a baseball game, and really, in the summers, i was either working or playing basketball and not going to baseball games. college rolled around and i became a nittany lion. i watched football. in the summers i lived in a tent. the only thought of baseball was an occasional wiffle ball game. baseball still smoldered at the depth of my sports upbringing, though, and little did i know that i'd one day be so lucky to walk into yankee stadium, with tickets near the third base line, not for just one game but for a handful. i've gotten to see die-hard yankees fans taunt red sox players during warm-ups, seen the grounds crew do the "ymca" dance, and heard the notes of "new york, new york" crooned out as the stadium empties into a warm summer night. i've never claimed to be a fan of any team but the twins. but there's something tangible, exciting, amazing, breathtaking... about being there at yankee stadium, especially when the yankees have won (as they regularly do against my twins). walking to the seats and seeing the outfield's expanse in front of me for the first time is something i'll never forget. my first outdoor baseball game, right there in the center of it all.

so today, as i remembered it was the last game at yankee stadium, i realized it was another date on the calendar, another something that was on the books for a long time now and i've lived to speak about it in the past. the thing that's gotten me about yankee stadium when i've gotten to visit is that you're just surrounded by such an immense sampling of humanity, all kicking back for a few hours, some guys straight from wall street, others who scraped together enough to take all the kids to a game, people from all over the world who just want to see the yanks. i like being a part of that humanity, because for those hours it seems perfect - a game, some food, some friends - for everyone. an innocuous passage of time that somehow becomes more than a simple spot on the grid, no matter how simple it seemed at first.