Member-only story
Meet Me in Macombs Dam Park
I could have been a Yankees fan if only a few things had been different. But I digress.
During a cleaning frenzy a few years back, my mother handed over my birth certificate. I’d been born in the Bronx but now I could use Google Maps to determine exactly where we had lived. To my surprise, it was less than half a mile from Yankee Stadium.
“Mom,” I asked sometime later at a family gathering, “I didn’t realize we lived so close to the stadium.”
“Oh yes,” she recounted. “We would go to the playground during games and the players’ wives would be there with their children.”
We swapped the crumbling Bronx for suburban New Jersey when I was four. I had a younger brother and our mother was pregnant with her third child, so the growing family needed more space. My apartment-dwelling memories soon faded, overwritten by humdrum, typical “learning to ride a bike” anxieties.
I didn’t fault my father for never taking me to a baseball game. Over the years, I’ve witnessed tantrums and diaper-changing in the aisles as well as lost kids and frantic parents, thus I could appreciate his discretion. Then again, my cousin brought his infant son to Shea Stadium when he was less than a year old (and to one game every season after that), so he could say his child went to a Mets game every year of his life.
