06 October 2003

Baseball in Arlington

It is Monday, and if that wasn't enough, there is more bad news from the Middle East.

But that is an oxymoron.

I got up to sleepwalk through the latest accusations against Gropemeister Arnold, riding on his Terminator bus toward the California election tomorrow. Then the tit-for-tat exchange, the suicide bombing in Haifa and the retaliatory airstrike on Syria. It just keeps getting more intense. This suicide attack was carried out by a woman with a law degree. She murdered 19 people, blowing herself up in one of those nice places with tables on the sidewalk as the people of Haifa got ready to celebrate Yom Kippur. I hope it wasn't one of those places I went to when we visited the town in 1990, though I suppose ti doesn't matter. I just hate hearing about massacres in places I know. It was peaceful then, six months after the Soviet Union began to disintegrate and everyone seemed to be feeling pretty good. Haifa was a town that felt a lot like Santa Barbara. Perfect weather. Lovely ocean view with palms.

Attorneys with belt-bombs.

It was a lousy football weekend, and it is a comfort that baseball is entering into the only interesting part of the season. On the gridiron, Michigan and the Redskins went down. To avoid concentrating on that, I tuned into the baseball game. The Yankee have locked up the AL East, and last night the Cubs sent the Atlanta Braves packing. There is a lot of interest in baseball around here. There may be a franchise available, probably the one in Montreal, and there are some diehards here with signs on their lawns that cry "Bring baseball to Arlington!"

Like what we need is another attraction to snarl the roads laid out a century ago. You know as well as I do what should be done. They should just fix RFK Stadium and bring baseball back to the district. And they should also build another bridge across the Anacostia River and punch I-395 through to connect with I-295 on the other side. It is crazy that you cannot drive across Washington, or at least crazy that there is an eight lane highway that drives majestically past the Capitol Dome and abruptly ends in the middle of SE. But neighborhood politics of diversity make that course of action impossible. The story of how local activists stopped the Interstate System in its tracks is sort of inspirational. Baseball should be at the heart of this place, and that is the District. The idea that the Skins play somewhere an hour east of here in Maryland and claim to be the "Washington Redskins" is as ridiculous as claiming that the Baltimore Orioles are close enough to be our home team, too.

The fevered Arlingtonians seem to be the ones who still have their kids in the baseball track: T-Ball, Little League, Babe Ruth and on to College. No soccer for them. They keep putting up their signs, reminding us all that this used to be the District, too, and bringing baseball back to DC is the same thing as putting up one of those retro-stadiums right in our little county, intimate setting for 40,000 or so, access to the Metro. I have no idea where they think they will put the cars, but I am willing to listen. You should hear the fanatics on both sides. The anti's start to foam at the mouth, just like the ones in the District that stopped the highway.

I was listening to the news over the weekend as I went into denial about the football games. I left a crowded sports bar at the halftime of the Michigan game because I can read a trend as well as anyone. Things were going south for the Wolverines and I needed to get my mind off it. I turned to the news in denial as an escape from the bad news from Iowa and Philadelphia. The weekend marked the anniversary of the birth of Ray A. Kroc, the California businessman who built the McDonald's fast food empire. Think of billions and billions of Big Mac and Lake Erie filled with special sauce encased in Styrofoam. Ray took over the hamburger business from the owners of the little stand with the golden arches and he nailed something right at the heart of the American soul, fast food and wheels, catsup and French Fries. A business genius. He was born in 1902 and died at the ripe old age of 82. When Ray was 45, President Truman used the first televised White House address to ask Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays, and chicken on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe.

Incredible notion that, akin to President Bush asking us to individually do something to help the people of Baghdad or Kabul. I would be interested to see him ask us to cut out the Big Macs. But the Golden Arches are in trouble anyway. People are trying to eat lighter and that trend is cutting into growth and profits. I am curious about that, since diet clearly is related to longevity. David Porter of the AP caught me up on events from the gerontology front. The electrifying news came from Trenton, NJ, where the oldest living American ceased to be that.

Elena Slough died yesterday in a nursing home. Pictures show her as a wizened creature swathed in cite, almost translucent.. Her daughter Wanda lived in the same home and had passed away three days ago at the age of ninety. I expect Elena knew, and tossed in the towel. There is no known connection to the Cubs victory over the Braves last night, and there is absolutely no evidence that Elena was a Braves fan. She was 114 or 115, according to different sources.

Informed sources say that Elena was born on July 8, 1889, making her 114 years old at the time of her death. Elena's son has a document that indicates she might have been 115, but there is no disputing that Elena had reigned as the oldest person in the United States since April, when 113-year-old Mary Dorothy Christian died in San Pablo, Calif. Perhaps in part due to Ray Kroc's diet revolution, the U.S. did not get higher than the bronze medal for long life. Elena was the third-oldest living person in the world. Kamato Hongo turned 116 last month, and Mitoyo Kawate turned 114 in May. Both are Japanese who eat a lot of fish and rice and are fans of the Yokohama Giants.

I have had my share of Big Macs in my life, though I have improved. I struggle to remember the last time I was under the Golden Arches; I think it was a couple months ago, in Minnesota. There is one just down the block from me but I have never been in it. I figure I can have a fast food burger when I am on the road, since it isn't that often. So in moderation al things are possible, though moderation seems to be the hardest virtue to practice. We certainly are not very good at the concept as a nation. There is nothing moderate about the struggle to bring baseball to Arlington.

But I am comforted, though, that the oldest person on record was a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment. She was reported to be 122 when she died in 1997. Being French, though, the dates are suspect and might have started as a pension scam. I imagine her clutching a Galoise cigarette in yellow fingers and enjoying a glass of red wine with her beouf grande all the way to the end.