Word: fenway
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Absent-minded on a summer afternoon, you could walk right by it without knowing. You might not have noticed the Fenway nun, black and in black habit, waiting with her radio till the game ends, when she'll get to her feet with the donation basket already full of quarters to make it look good. And you could miss the Fenway paraphernalia vendors--booths on a city street in Kenmore Square are nothing special. going left from Brookline Ave. to Lansdowne, you wouldn't know that the huge wall on your right, grimy the color of the warehouse and shop...
...modern stadium: the physical analog to the wide franchises and slick operations of the new corporate baseball. This is a neighborhood park--no gargantuan concrete egg laid in the center of a vast parkingscape, slabs for seats, plastic astrograss, and conveniently adjacent to the suburban expressway. No, Fenway is rickety and ripe with a sad history--a lot of Red Sox clubs winning hearts and losing still; heros now dead or in the insurance business. Fenway is outmoded and wonderful, decaying like baseball itself is decaying: slowly shedding off its crowds, its glamour, and its primacy in American life...
Halfway through the eighth, my third game out this year--I think the Sox were behind, but with a nice night and a couple of beers, maybe passing around a joint, even the Ford City sky-writing planes, let alone the Fenway Frank ones, can seem friendly and informal--these two kids ran out into right field, opposite the green wall dividing Fenway from the city. The wall's thinness is something else I can't get used to. You take the subway out to Shea, too, all right, the elevated IRT jammed with happy kids and determined teenagers...
Weird things go on at Fenway--not really weird. I guess, just if you think about them long enough. These drunks get into shouting matches and smart-ass college kids tell them to ennunciate, and when the drunks do the smart-ass college kids stare at the field in triumph and say. "Let's hear it for ennunciation!" "If this were some other country," someone asked me at my last game's seventh-inning stretch, "do you think the Bicentennial banner would seem okay...
Between the warehouses and the Fenway Franks, it seemed okay to me there at Fenway--where even under the skywriting planes' lights, they couldn't catch the kids...