Perhaps your God has a name: Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, or whatever else the kids are calling it these days. As a product of a relatively religion-free upbringing, I was entrusted with developing my own set of beliefs. Like a fledgling infielder from the Florida Grapefruit League, I swung and missed. Swung and missed. Swung and missed. I’ve donned a clown costume with the Lutherans, eaten Jesus wafers with the Catholics, and sang my heart out with the Baptists. Nothing felt quite right to me. Nothing felt like home.
As a child, people often called me “an Old Soul.” At first, it didn’t make sense: isn’t your soul as old as you are? And if not, where did it find the time for all of the extra-curricular activities? If life is a test, I decided, your soul has the Cheat Sheet. For me, the answers have always pointed toward reincarnation.
Reincarnation feels logical to me. That is to say it just fits right, like a well-worn cap with the brim bent just so. Reincarnation also explains why my earliest memories were of an inexplicable love for New York City and a profound hatred of Los Angeles. As a slip of white trash from South Dakota, I hadn’t been to either, and yet I was as disdainful of LA as I was ardent about New York. This irrational polarity could not have just appeared out of left field. In my mind, reincarnation allows for the most compelling possibility: I was a New Yorker in another life. This wasn’t the only thing that led me to believe in my soul’s rebirth. There were other strange occurrences, like the first time I boarded a plane to go visit my grandma in Tampa, Florida when I was nine. I was loving flying until I got on the connecting flight in New Orleans. As soon as we took off over the Gulf of Mexico I went into a panic. I felt water clog my lungs—felt myself drowning. I knew I had died this way before. This realization definitely dampened my enjoyment of the in-flight peanuts.
None of these beliefs were cemented for me until the fall of 2012. A full-fledged New York City resident of fourteen years, I stood at the apex of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in front of Barclays Center, a new arena built to house the Brooklyn Nets- just another intent shopper looking for a fresh pair of kicks, waiting for the walk sign to coax me towards another fine purchase. My eyes rose to scan the monstrosity. It looked more like a rusted out multi-level parking garage, not a cathedral of professional sports.
The Barclays Center was a sore subject, one that I took way too personally. As far as I was concerned, Ebbets Field, the hallowed grounds of the Brooklyn Dodgers, should have still been standing there, not that hunk of oxidized metal. But history is made up of the things that didn’t happen just as much as the ones that did.
Many decades ago, long before I was born and many more before I moved to New York, this corner, this place, was the intended location of a new stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers. If baseball were to be considered a religion, then the Brooklyn Dodgers were apostles in these parts. They represented an everlasting hope—a faith— that renewed with each and every spring. That is, until greed and the acumen of business led to the franchise’s untimely death. The players didn’t actually die per se, but when the team moved to the hellhole that is Los Angeles they might as well have excommunicated a borough of millions from the holiest of sports.
In 1950, a businessman by the name of Walter O’Malley became the majority owner and looked to move the then crumbling Ebbets Field from its location on Bedford Avenue, which was in the Brooklyn neighborhood now known as Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Not too lucky for him, the NYC construction coordinator at the time, Robert Moses, was hellbent on the ballpark relocating to the more spacious area of Flushing, Queens. O’Malley decided to play hardball and instead began to buy up property around the Atlantic Railroad Yards in downtown Brooklyn. Cheapskate that he was, O’Malley didn’t want to purchase it all outright, and insisted that Moses use Title 1 authority to condemn some of the property so he could get it at a fraction of the price. Robert Moses, the stubborn bastard that he was, refused. Greedy ole’ Walter struck a deal with the city of Los Angeles, where officials were eager to secure a reputable franchise, and laid out the red carpet. On September 24th, 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers played their last game at Ebbets Field. It was demolished a few years later and has since been replaced with apartment buildings. No matter what supplanted the venerated Ebbets Field, when the Dodgers departed for Los Angeles, they left a gaping hole in the souls of fans in Brooklyn. Many would never cross baseball’s altar again.
***
Sixty-five years later, basketball fans ascend from the catacombs of Atlantic Terminal to worship the Nets. I want nothing to do with it. No longer able to stand the offense of looking in its direction, I turn away from Barclays Center when the flutter of a flag, high up on its pole, catches my eye. I follow the pole down to a plaque mounted on a granite base, only a few feet away. As I read the plaque, for the briefest of moments, another life flashes before me. My shopping bags fall from my hands. Tears spill from my eyes. The plaque reads: “This flagpole stood in Ebbets Field until Brooklyn’s famed ballpark was torn down in 1960…”
The rest of it doesn’t matter. I stand amongst the throngs of shoppers and commuters and hold that flagpole like a long-lost loved one returned home. I know right then that even if I don’t have a god with a proper name, baseball is a part of my soul. The scent of a well oiled leather mitt on my hand, the shouts of vendors as they squeeze through the crowd to sell their wares, the players on the field hurling themselves in the dirt to make a catch, and the sight of 30,000 people all staring into the sky at a single solitary ball, all willing it over the outfield fence: it lives inside me. I become certain in that moment. In another life, I ate, slept, and shit the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Aubrey Benmark is a sophomore at The New School pursuing a BA in media studies with a minor in creative writing. As a recipient of the Riggio Honors Scholarship, he is working on his first novel.