Baseball and Ballantine
It’s been over fifty years since I listened to a baseball game on the radio, local broadcasts from the Stadium even though my dad, a lifelong NY/SF Giants fan, hated the Yankees.
Mel Allen, part of my childhood’s soundtrack, selling Ballantine beer between innings, the same brand my dad drank, sweaty brown cans with a three ring logo linked like a pretzel.
Dad’s gone now and so is Mel Allen, Ballantine, one of the oldest brands of beer, founded in 1840, swallowed by Pabst. Yankee Stadium torn down, a new stadium built in 2009.
Some summer afternoons, I still turn on the radio and search in vain for a baseball game, but no one broadcasts on local radio anymore. Even televised games tough to find.
So, I sit at the kitchen table and drink a Corona, pretend I’m listening to a game on radio. Once in a while, a curious neighbor might peer in the window or knock on the door, wondering about the crowd noise or thwack of a bat hitting a fastball.
Don’t Ask for Help
Our house across the street
from the cemetery is haunted.
Dinner guests, fleshless
and grim, arrive after dark,
scaring our kids and sending
the cat to hide under
the basement stairs.
Once in a while a ghost
catcher appears,
rounding up the dead
with a butterfly net
and dark incantations.
My uncle came too,
quite drunk, to help
with stray souls,
then overstayed
his welcome, along
with his imaginary pet,
a male Bengal tiger,
who left a mess
of gnawed bones,
shredded carpet,
and a torn couch.
When my uncle
passed out, a bottle
of Chablis in his hand,
we let the tiger out
the front door;
now it too roams
the cemetery,
chasing ghosts
up onto our lawn,
afraid and full of malice.