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GOING TO THE GAME WITH MY DAUGHTER
Whenever I go to a Mets game with my daughter, we arrive an hour and a half
before the scheduled first pitch. Not an hour. Not two hours. An hour and a half.
It's funny how, with every person with whom you go to a game, there are specific
rituals and specific rules. When I meet other people to go to a game, it’s not an hour
and a half. With my daughter it is always an hour and a half.
Arriving an hour and a half before a game, we can choose where to park our car.
The stadium lot has more cars in it than you might think, but it is not too crowded
yet. We park in a space that is close enough to an exit that will lead us easily back
to the Whitestone Bridge, that doesn’t have any visible signs of glass, broken or
otherwise, that is not too close to some guys playing catch, and not too close to
anyone cooking hot dogs on a hibachi. We park so that we can just drive forward
and don’t have to back up to get out.
We get out of the car and walk to our entrance. We usually enter through gate “B”
because although our seats are normally closest to “C,” we get to “B” first and we
like to get into the stadium as soon as we can, because as long as we are outside of
the stadium, we are outside of the stadium. I always buy my tickets online now and
we always get Loge Reserved as close to home plate as possible.
My daughter offers her bag to be searched and we do the thing where the cheerful
stadium security people wave the wands around us. I don’t understand why my
watch, wallet, keys, and shoes will always make a metal detector at an airport go off
but they never make one of those wands do anything different. So be it.
We present our printed-out tickets to the old guys who take the tickets. They look
like the same old guys who took the tickets when I was a kid, but they’re not. We go
into the stadium, and then depending upon what we have negotiated in advance, we
either visit the Mets store or we do not. If we don’t, and we normally don’t, we go
right to the kosher hot dog stand near section 9. We’re not kosher, but these are the
best hot dogs you can get in the stadium. They are absolutely incredible, real, all-
beef, kosher deli hot dogs. I get two hot dogs with sauerkraut and a potato knish.
She gets a hot dog with nothing on it and a knish. We get one of those big Diet
Pepsis to share. Then we go and get ketchup and napkins. She likes ketchup on her
hot dogs, to my infinite chagrin. I should mention that my daughter is now a
vegetarian, and she’s rather strict about it. But this ritual of us getting kosher hot
dogs at the Met game goes back many years. It is the only exception my daughter
makes to her vegetarianism, and she makes it with a real seriousness. Many things
are important in life, but some things must take precedence over other things.
We take our food to our seat, and set up the Diet Pepsi in a place of honor so that it
will not spill. She handles the delicate business of getting the ketchup on her hot dog
without getting it all over her. I transfer the sauerkraut from the little plastic bowls
to my hot dog. And once we have everything where it should be, where it will not spill
and make a mess, we start to eat and we watch and we enjoy being in the stadium an
hour before the game will start.
We talk. And we always have things to talk about even though we have just spent an
hour and a half talking in the car as we drove down. Our talks on the drive down are
wonderful. We expect to talk, as we’ve always talked on these rides, about serious
things. As soon as we get into the car in Connecticut, we are ready for our serious
conversation and we have it and it lasts until we get within sight of Shea. As soon as
we see the stadium from the Whitestone Expressway, we are there, and that
conversation we were having reaches a natural end. When we get inside the stadium,
the topic shifts to baseball. As we eat our kosher baseball lunch or supper in the
stands, we talk about how much we love baseball and how much we love the Mets
and how cool and bright the stadium looks. We usually go at night, because both my
daughter and I are complete and total suckers for the way the stadium looks at
night. We watch the crowd come in. We watch the opposing team finish up batting
practice. We make comments about people. We see and hear the planes overhead.
We pay a kind of desultory attention to whatever pre-game ceremonies or awards or
performances or events they have. And when we’re long done with the food, with
the unfinished gigantic Diet Pepsi tucked way back under my seat so that it will not
get knocked over if I have to suddenly jump up, it is finally time for the National
Anthem. We enjoy our sense of being Americans at a baseball game. She always
comments on how the anthem has been performed. She takes voice lessons and her
great dream is to someday sing the Star Spangled Banner before a game at Shea.
We sit down and the game begins.
My daughter welcomes each Met to the plate with a genuinely loud high-pitched non-
verbal holler, that you also hear a magnified version of any time a Met does
something really good. She is totally into the game and she knows all the players
and has her own very positive sense of their skills and their character. Don’t tell
her I told you this, but she really isn’t that much of a fan. At least not in the way I
was at her age and still am. She is completely indifferent to statistics and she never
watches or listens to a game unless I am. If there’s a game on and there’s a rerun of
“Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” she will choose “Queer Eye” every time. But
when she is watching the game with me, she is totally into it. I think she thinks that
paying attention to the Mets is an important link she has with me. She is already
very sentimental about the fact that we’ve gone to all of these games together. I
can't help but think of how she is in ninth grade and how the number of games I will
go to with just her, when she’s still at home in our house, is pretty small. It can
probably be counted on the fingers of two hands. This makes all the time we share at
the stadium enormously valuable and meaningful. But it happens in real time and it
is such a fun thing to do, you don’t want to get too maudlin about it. It would ruin the
experience.
I also think my daughter does baseball on her own terms. Fine. She’s really into
drama and it seems to me as if she experiences the game as if it were a dramatic
production. She likes the tense moments, the amazing things that are done, the way
the individual players’ characters show through in what they do. She loves to cheer
and applaud. She loves the stuff on the Diamond Vision. She always cheers wildly
for our section color in the plane or car race, even though she knows that I think it is
stupid. She has an uncanny ability to actually pick which hat has the baseball under
it at the end of the shell game. She stands and waves her hands for the t-shirts. She
wishes there were more human waves. I wish there were less. She looks for and is
very happy when she sees Cow Bell Man. She always shouts “Lets Go Mets” when
she is prompted to do so. In the fifth inning, she gets Cracker Jacks and I get
peanuts and so when we sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh-
inning stretch, it's more meaningful.
We have so much fun. Even when they lose. Even if the game is absolutely terrible.
Don’t tell the Mets, but normally when my daughter and I go to a game at Shea, they
lose, and often something really disastrous happens. When they win, though, and we
get to go down the ramps in a really happy crowd, there’s nothing like it. We get to
the car as soon as we can. We nose out slowly, letting people walk by us, being
charitable to cars trying to get into our line. We get onto the Whitestone
Expressway. She knows and I know that we now have another memory and that
nothing lasts forever. If she has energy we’ll make up stupid songs and do the kind
of dumb and repetitive improvised comic routines that my wife is glad to know we
share with each other but definitely doesn’t want to be around to hear. If she’s tired,
she’ll sleep. And I’ll just sit and soak in my happiness, coming back from a ballgame
with my wonderful daughter on a quiet highway with the dashboard lights and the hum
of the car.
©Dana Brand 2006
