"Orioles Play to Empty Stadium"

    The headline was as inconceivable as the photos and play-by-play announcing the game to a stadium empty of fans.  And yet, there it was, "Orioles play to Empty Stadium." In an atmosphere usually characterized by noise, the emptiness and quiet was nothing short of eerie.  Over the past few months, Baltimore, like Ferguson and even my beloved New York City, has been the subject of racial unrest following police incidents.  Relatively speaking, New York's protests were the mildest, and arose from a grossly overweight man named Eric Garner resisting an arrest that probably never should have happened.  He was put in a choke-hold, and wrestled to the ground, only to die shortly thereafter from asphyxiation.  His crime: selling loose cigarettes (not joints, just bootlegged cigarettes).  Ferguson, of course, became infamous, and the subject of round-the-clock coverage on CNN.  The police officer in question had stopped Michael Brown, a young man under suspicion of having roughed up an older and much smaller employee while stealing $45 worth of cigarillos from a a convenience store.  Some sort of struggle ensued with the policeman, including a possible struggle for his gun, and Brown was shot in the back while running from the officer.  The reaction in Ferguson was ferocious, often unruly, and sometimes criminal.  The police officer, initially hidden from the public, though not indicted, is off the force and both disgraced and in seclusion.
  Lest we forget, shortly thereafter,  two New York City police officers--themselves both minorities-- were assassinated in their patrol car, guilty of nothing other than their color: blue. The assassin had blogged about his desire to "avenge Michael Brown and Eric Garner."  Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Lieu both received "Inspector's Funerals," and their deaths exacerbated the already existing tensions between the NY Police Department and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who was viewed as having encouraged protests in the wake of Garner's death. These murders were sad, and senseless beyond measure.       Baltimore's case is also sad; a arrested man suffering a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody.  The man, Freddie Gray, was allegedly fleeing the police.  When picked up, he was carrying a switchblade knife.  How that fatal injury came to pass is not clear.  It has been a winter (now spring) of discontent throughout the land, and fears of a "long, hot, summer" to come burn bright in the memories of those of us old enough to remember the riotous (not in the funny sense) '60's.
  The country is undergoing a national examination of the relationship between police departments and the inner-city communities they police.  Back in the 60's, it was said (by some) that the police's job was to prevent the residents of the inner-city from escaping--the prison metaphor implicit. (Remember Bob Dylan's rarity, "George Jackson?"  In it, our generation's bard says, "Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard; some of us are prisoners, the rest of us are guards."  The metaphor, however false, endures.)
  That all this could happen more than sixty years after Brown vs. Board of Education outlawed segregation in our schools is hard for this unreconstructed civil rights liberal to imagine.  After all, we are living in a time of unprecedented racial representation at the highest offices of not only government, but many of our leading corporations.  Think of it; not only is our president and attorney general African-American, but so are the Mayor and Police Commissioner of Baltimore.  When the president and Baltimore police commissioner excoriated the rioters and looters as "criminals and thugs," they found themselves assailed for having used a word--"thug"--as something deemed equivalent to the N-word.  Hitler's brownshirts and the KKK were thugs, and was Stalin's KGB.  Thuggish behavior knows no race, nationality or (even) gender.  When you engage in thuggish behavior, don't take offense when someone calls you on it.
   I've never gotten used to the burnings and lootings that have (sometimes) accompanied instances of protest arising from perceived racial wrongs.  The rationalizing is remarkable.  As someone who has taken great pride in his ability to rationalize just about anything, I'm especially sensitive when it is done by others.  One could even argue that once the social contract is breached (by, say, police brutality) anything goes.  During the Columbia student protests in the late 60's, (having more to do with the war in Vietnam than race) a law professor of mine inquired whether the students who trashed and occupied the Dean's office had to have had "Criminal" tattooed on their foreheads in order to be treated as having committed crimes or having their behavior considered thuggish.  The students, of course, were overwhelmingly white and children of privilege, and--as such-- enjoyed an implicit immunity from their crimes against property.  In Baltimore, too, the looting and vandalism has largely been overlooked.  In New York, this was known as "venting" during the Dinkens' administration.  Signs proudly waved in Baltimore, proclaim "No shooting, no looting."
  But I've drifted too far from what this blog was supposed to be about, and that is the empty stadium which is part of the beautiful complex at Camden Yards and down the hill from some of Maryland's state office buildings.  Baseball is (or was) our national pastime, as, as such, meant to be a wondrous distraction from had jobs and hard times.  Baseball games, to be sure, have appropriately been canceled in times of national tragedy or local calamity.  I remember when opening day was postponed following Martin Luther King's assassination.  Playing baseball then just didn't seem right.  Similarly, baseball was put off for a week following the terror attacks of 9/11.  When it resumed, seeing Yankee and Mets players like Jeter and Piazza (among many others) wearing NYPD and NYFD caps brought tears to my eyes then--and still does now.  I was in California during the 3rd game of the1989 World Series, and remember experiencing the aftershocks of the earthquake that put the Series on hold for twelve days.  (Interesting, as I write this how far away the Kathmandu earthquake and related avalanche that has claimed so many innocent lives.  Something like that is so overwhelmingly devastating that it seems to recede from our public consciousness, as networks have quickly replaced it with 24/7 coverage of the miseries that are Baltimore.
  The symbolism of the empty ballpark at Camden Yards will remain with me long after peace and public confidence is restored in Baltimore, and the fans re-enter and the cheering resumes.  Baseball has been canceled due to rain, war, natural disasters, assassinations,  and terror attacks.  This is the first time it has been been played--yet closed to spectators--out of fear.  As the apocryphal teary-faced kid was said to have exclaimed to Shoeless Joe Jackson in the wake of the "Back-Sox" scandal,    "Say it ain't so, Joe."

"'Tis better to have lost and found..."

    Remember the old riddle "why did the moron bang his head against the wall?"  Answer: because it felt so good when he stopped.  Here's a variant: "'Tis better to have lost and found than never to have lost at all."
   Think about it.  Let's say you (unintentionally) misplace your wedding ring.  After years of taking it off every night and putting it on the dresser with your house keys, it is gone.  This once happened to me.  My wife, truth to tell, was skeptical.  "How could you lose your wedding band?"  Easy for her to say; she always wears hers, even to bed.  Well, one day it turned up (reappeared, I like to think) and I haven't lost it since.  But here's the thing; bad as I felt having lost it (stupid, too), I felt better after I found it than if I'd never lost it at all.
   Last week involved an additional loss, the third in a series of scatterbrained mishaps spanning three days.  On Wednesday, I took my gloves off to open my apartment mailbox.  No sooner did I arrive upstairs, when the trusty doorman arrived at my door with said gloves.  If that wasn't bad enough, the same thing happened on Thursday with a small package that had arrived for me--once again the doorman came to my rescue, my mental stock no doubt diminished.  Were these "senior moments?"  God, I hoped not.  When, on Saturday, my wife and I were leaving for New Jersey where we would be spending the night with my older son and his family, I couldn't find my car keys.  Come on, I thought; this is getting serious.  They were not where they should have been; right there on my dresser, next to my house keys and (yeah) wedding ring.  Okay, I thought, retrace your steps. I knew I had them the day before (a Friday).   I had played indoor tennis and remember as I was getting into--or out of--the car noticing that the key was sticking out of my pocket on my warm-up suit.  Be careful, I said to myself.  With the key (I thought) safely back in my pocket, I used the back-up (or valet) key that I leave with the car in the parking garage in my building.  When I got home, I remember having draped the pants of the warm-up suit over a chair before later hanging them up.  Maybe the keys were in there, or perhaps on the floor near where I had left the pants.   No luck there, nor in the warm-up jacket.  They were not in my tennis bag, or in either pocket of my jacket. A further search would have to await my return from my son's.
   Once out at my son's house, I searched the trunk of the car, under the front seat, even the floor of the back-seat.  Nada.  When I came back home the next day, I searched the entire apartment (with flashlight yet), not even sparing my wife's  pocketbooks (just in case).  Little boxes on the dresser and chests of drawers were not immune.  Still nothing.  I had but three (long)  shots left that day.  I would re-search the car (fat chance, that), survey the area where I had parked in Brooklyn near the tennis facility (even slimmer), and check with the front desk of Prospect Park Tennis to see if I had left them there (yeah, right).  After asking the parking garage attendant if my keys had turned up (he said "no," but helpfully brought a flashlight over to the car).  Just as he arrived with the longest flashlight I've ever seen, I found the elusive "smart" key lodged between the driver's seat and the hand brake.  Boy, was I happy.  When I arrived at my destination, I told the first person I encountered on the street my good news.  He took it amiably.  What, I hear you ask, is my point?
   Simply this. As I told a tennis chum of mine named Ron (with whom I usually discuss more weighty issues, such as the existence vel non of God), that I was happier having found the keys I had so despaired of as having lost than I would have been had I never lost them.  He took exception to this, wondering how the joy of having found them could have possibly offset the three days of fruitless search and frustration over the loss.   While I guess there is a genuine philosophical issue here--as only a masochist (or the above-cited moron) would have enjoyed losing things so he could even more relish their recovery, my take is a bit different.  Not only did I not enjoy losing the keys, I was angry at myself, frustrated, disappointed,  and anxious over their loss.  In addition, such keys cost $300 to replace (I know, because I had called the dealer).  But all these things said, the joy of having found them consisted of not only the savings of the replacement cost, but the reassurance that the loss itself was understandable.  They had fallen out of my pocket either while I was driving or entering/exiting the car.  This was not stupid, neglectful, or a sign of encroaching senescence--it was just something that happened.  Add to that my perseverance in leaving no stone unturned in my search, and actually finding them bespoke some sort of skill.  After all, I had already searched the car.  Doesn't it take a special kind of guy--obsessive-compulsive say some--to conduct a third (and hitherto fruitless) search of the very car that contained the keys?  Hence my joy, which, for all these reasons outweighed the (temporary) pain of loss.
   Okay, now for the denouement. Remember my friend Ron and our philosophical discussions?  As an ever-questioning theist, I want to, for the moment, set aside issues of the afterlife.  I don't know whether or not there is a heaven or hell, but this much I do know.   If you have lived a good life, when you die, you are given access to a special room.  This celestial lost-and-found room contains all the things you have ever lost, but never found.  In it is the vanished left pig-skin glove which disappeared one day while riding the IRT to South Ferry; the photograph you were taking to the camera store to have it digitally enlarged and fell out of its envelope en route (a photo in which you and your wife looked impossibly young and attractive); the autographed postcard singed by Rocky Marciano ("keep punching, Johnny"), the first edition of Alastair Cooke's "A Generation on Trial," and (for some, but not me) a wedding ring.  I believe the keys were in that room, patiently awaiting my posthumous visit.  I further believe that (to alleviate my misery) the big fella decided to spare me this one indignity, and allowed them to reappear in the one spot I had failed to look.  Forgive me, Ron, but "thank you, Lord."