Shea, Nostalgia, friends and facebook

I posted in my status on facebook this afternoon about watching the last standing piece of Shea come down today, and my friend Dave (one of the many fantastic people who have re-entered my life as a result of facebook, and as devoted as fan as one will find in this city) commented on the staus update. This is one of my favorite things about facebook: the ability to connect with other people on exactly the level that is right for the relationship you have with that person.

Here's the text of our status-commenting:

Dave at 7:41pm February 18

it really just hit me that shea is gone, and i have very mixed feelings about citifield (starting with the name, the color of the seats, etc.). i can vividly recall coming to shea as a kid, seeing the last game of the '88 season there, chanting "darrrrryyyyyl". perhaps it's just nostalgia taking hold and i'll get over it. although putting it in perspective, i feel for the yankee fans (dare i say it), especially the older ones.

This Fan at 2:56am February 19

it still hasn't really hit me that Shea is gone. I don't think it will until my first trip to Citi this year and I see with my own eyes that Shea is no longer standing. I also have such a hard time thinking of the "Shea Faithful" being referred to as the "Citi Faithful" that my brain shuts down when I consider it.

and, wrt nostalgia, I just don't think there's a baseball fan in the world who doesn't feel its pull. I mean, as much as I love the Mets (and I don't think I have to convince anyone of how much I love the Mets), I would be so happy if Robert Moses hadn't fucked it all up and we still had major league baseball in Brooklyn. Nostalgia for something you've never actually experienced?! now THAT'S the kind of magical shit only baseball can pull.

I'm trying to have the long-view on this one: I'm thinking about how I'll tell my kids about Shea, about my experiences there, about how I acquired one of the true loves of my life there. Still, it's not real yet to me that she's gone, and I know I'm gonna feel it hard when it finally does hit.

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In truth, I'm sure it will hit me hard when I go to Citi Field for the first time and Shea is a parking lot. I'm sure of it because I'm a nostalgia addict, and I'm sure of it because despite all its many faults, Shea has been my baseball home my whole life. But the fact is, no matter how many pictures and videos I see of Shea's destruction, it doesn't yet feel real to me that it's gone. This reminds me, interestingly enough, that I felt similarly (though obviously of different emotional impact) that I needed to see the remains of the World Trade Center before I could really believe it was gone (and this after seeing the second tower fall with my own eyes, out a window, not on TV). Until I'm there and can see it, until it's tangible, very little is real to me. And that's definitely the head-space I'm in with regard to the absence of Shea; it won't be real until I get off the train for the first time to go to Citi Field.

I'm sure I'll have a whole post about that when it happens, but until then? In my mind, there are still two stadia in Flushing, standing next to each other, and I go to see my team play in the old, decrepit, inferior of the two parks. It's going to take lived experience, I think, to change that vision.