Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack
Jun. 22nd, 2002 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhI love baseball. So it makes me an ugly American. So sue me. I was planning on posting this yesterday, when we lost at the World Cup, in that "bummer, back to my first love" sense. However, recent events have made me a smidge defensive about waxing rhapsodic about the national pastime. Hence this opener—I was going to talk about it anyway. Honest. (Defensive? No. Not me.)
This could spiral me off into an essay about patriotism amongst the American intelligentsia and the "chattering classes"; my good friends who feel the need to make sure they are not stateside on the 4th of July and when they do travel tend to lie and say they're Canadian; the attitude that American patriotism is somehow declassé and that being American and actually liking anything that is purely American (like, say, baseball) is not the done thing. What will I do is tell a story:
Last month I was in London visiting my good friend W___ and we went out for drinks in Notting Hill, where she lives, with another American friend who also lives there, and we were sitting at a table talking for two drinks, and then we decided to move on, and as we were walking out, the people at the table next to us said, 'Well, I'm glad they're leaving; they were so loud.' Now, this is a fairly bitchy thing to say, whether we were being annoying or not, as we were leaving anyway. But we did look at each other, perplexed, and thought, we were loud? And W___ said, you know, no matter how good you think you're being, Americans are always louder than Brits.
But I think most of my shock over this incident was that W___ could not be more of a proper Anglophile if she tried. Living in London is a long-time dream for her. She grew up outside Philadelphia--she's a Quaker, for Christ's sake. She spent her summers in one of those eastern PA communities that were settled in the early 1900s by robber barons that erected summer "cottages" that are really seven bedroom mansions in the country. I mean, if she can't pass, who can?
Then I realized, all of a sudden and with some regret, that there is nothing I can do about the fact that I was raised by lower middle class white people (it's part of the point; I'm not white) in a very small town in southern Maine. That I have my A.B. from Harvard-Radcliffe and my M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, that I live in Manhattan and work in the media industry, that I am in general intelligent and intellectual and cultured and belong to my public radio station and MoMA and read The New Yorker—none of that matters, not really, when you're sitting in a bar in Notting Hill. There, to certain bitchy people, you're just another loud, stupid American of uncertain ethnic descent. (I don't know what I've been thinking; if it didn't work for Jay Gatsby I don't know why I thought it would work for me). I say "certain bitchy people" because the next night, we went out with a vast crowd of Brits and a couple of Aussies and danced and laughed and got pissed and were all loud together and it was enormous fun and that is the image that I will carry with me.
This is all to say that, at this moment, I do feel a little defensive and self conscious about writing some effusive tribute to something as quintessentially American as baseball. Yet, it is the most literary of sports, the memories of it more words than images: Tinker to Evers to Chance. There is no joy in Mudville. Say it ain't so, Joe. The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball? It-could-go-all-the-way! Even the pedestrian rhythms of the play-by-play are like poetry: The count is two-and-one as Piazza steps back into the box, a swing and a miss, two strikes. I could tell you, even now, the roster of Charlie Brown's little league team.
And so tomorrow I will be sitting in box seats at Shea, watching the mediocre Mets play the horrid Royals (13 1/2 games out in the AL Central), a game that will have no effect whatsoever on the pennant race. (I would point out that my own beloved team is in first place in the AL East, but they always collapse after the All Star break and like all long-time Red Sox freaks, I am more than a little superstitious.) If I get there early enough, I will stand and sing the national anthem (all baseball fans know that the last two words are not "the brave" but "play ball") and if I stay late enough, I will stand at the seventh inning stretch and sing again. The sun will shine, and the grass will be green, and the boys of summer will be put through their paces, and it will be a good day indeed.
This could spiral me off into an essay about patriotism amongst the American intelligentsia and the "chattering classes"; my good friends who feel the need to make sure they are not stateside on the 4th of July and when they do travel tend to lie and say they're Canadian; the attitude that American patriotism is somehow declassé and that being American and actually liking anything that is purely American (like, say, baseball) is not the done thing. What will I do is tell a story:
Last month I was in London visiting my good friend W___ and we went out for drinks in Notting Hill, where she lives, with another American friend who also lives there, and we were sitting at a table talking for two drinks, and then we decided to move on, and as we were walking out, the people at the table next to us said, 'Well, I'm glad they're leaving; they were so loud.' Now, this is a fairly bitchy thing to say, whether we were being annoying or not, as we were leaving anyway. But we did look at each other, perplexed, and thought, we were loud? And W___ said, you know, no matter how good you think you're being, Americans are always louder than Brits.
But I think most of my shock over this incident was that W___ could not be more of a proper Anglophile if she tried. Living in London is a long-time dream for her. She grew up outside Philadelphia--she's a Quaker, for Christ's sake. She spent her summers in one of those eastern PA communities that were settled in the early 1900s by robber barons that erected summer "cottages" that are really seven bedroom mansions in the country. I mean, if she can't pass, who can?
Then I realized, all of a sudden and with some regret, that there is nothing I can do about the fact that I was raised by lower middle class white people (it's part of the point; I'm not white) in a very small town in southern Maine. That I have my A.B. from Harvard-Radcliffe and my M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, that I live in Manhattan and work in the media industry, that I am in general intelligent and intellectual and cultured and belong to my public radio station and MoMA and read The New Yorker—none of that matters, not really, when you're sitting in a bar in Notting Hill. There, to certain bitchy people, you're just another loud, stupid American of uncertain ethnic descent. (I don't know what I've been thinking; if it didn't work for Jay Gatsby I don't know why I thought it would work for me). I say "certain bitchy people" because the next night, we went out with a vast crowd of Brits and a couple of Aussies and danced and laughed and got pissed and were all loud together and it was enormous fun and that is the image that I will carry with me.
This is all to say that, at this moment, I do feel a little defensive and self conscious about writing some effusive tribute to something as quintessentially American as baseball. Yet, it is the most literary of sports, the memories of it more words than images: Tinker to Evers to Chance. There is no joy in Mudville. Say it ain't so, Joe. The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball? It-could-go-all-the-way! Even the pedestrian rhythms of the play-by-play are like poetry: The count is two-and-one as Piazza steps back into the box, a swing and a miss, two strikes. I could tell you, even now, the roster of Charlie Brown's little league team.
And so tomorrow I will be sitting in box seats at Shea, watching the mediocre Mets play the horrid Royals (13 1/2 games out in the AL Central), a game that will have no effect whatsoever on the pennant race. (I would point out that my own beloved team is in first place in the AL East, but they always collapse after the All Star break and like all long-time Red Sox freaks, I am more than a little superstitious.) If I get there early enough, I will stand and sing the national anthem (all baseball fans know that the last two words are not "the brave" but "play ball") and if I stay late enough, I will stand at the seventh inning stretch and sing again. The sun will shine, and the grass will be green, and the boys of summer will be put through their paces, and it will be a good day indeed.
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no subject
Date: 2002-06-22 11:04 am (UTC)Like I said, wonderful essay.