Skip to main content

For what might have been . . .

The Minnesota Twins first played baseball in Minnesota
where the Mall of America does business now. 
As now, they shared Metropolitan Stadium with the Vikings.
It was a miserable place to enjoy Minnesota weather,
but after about twenty years of playing inside the
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Dome--a big flattened
bubble of air in downtown Minneapolis, some people
have romanticized how fine it will be to get outside,
again, to a new ballpark that is almost ready, a few blocks
away.  The new ballpark does not have a dome.



All this season, we have heard how fine it will be
to get outside and play baseball where baseball is meant
to be played:  in the sun, on real grass, where the light rail
lines come together, next to the garbage incinerator.
















Had we been outside this year, our extra regular league game
with the Detroit Tigers, which gave the Twins a great come-
from-way-back American League Central division title,
would have been rained out, and miserably cold. 
Had we been in the new stadium this year, our game with
the Yankees, tomorrow, would probably be played
in some of the snow that is beginning to fall. 

It is a glorious little stadium, and it will be expensive fun
for people who do not have television sets, who can make
a last-minute dash to the commuter train on those days
when it does not look like it will freeze or snow or rain. 
It is not even possible to add a retractable roof later.
No one wanted to pay for thatpossibility, either.  No new taxes!

The football team--the Vikings--has quietly announced
that it will not be renewing its lease on the Humphrey Dome,
either, when it expires in a couple of years.  They have
proposed to to help pay for a new, retractable-roofed
football field in downtown Minnepolis, next to the old dome.
The Vikings, at least, have not been pretending how nice it was
to play outside down where the Mall is, all winter long. 
They would rather sell the team to someone who wants it,
where permafrost is not considered an asset than continue
to play in the gas bubble they have lived in these years.

Tiny Tim Polenty and his cohorts cannot think of a way
to build a new stadium without paying for it.  No new taxes!

Blowing off a few snow flakes, I put our boat in storage today.
We are caught in a transition from a nondescript autumn
to what we cannot really believe is the onset of winter.











Whether to use public money to support sports teams
is not a simple decision.  Voting against a sports stadium
does not mean the people will send the money to schools,
instead.  It usually means they will not, nor to anything else,
either.  Voting for sports franchises does not mean
the people will not support parks and roads and housing.

Maybe we get what we do not think about, very clearly.
Maybe we just make rich people richer; poor people poorer.
Maybe we are willing, sometimes, to pay for things
to talk about, which provide symbols for what we
might have been, had everything been different.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more