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.