Bronx Banter: Leavy: Seven Layer Chocolate Cake

Do yourself a favor and read Jane Leavy’s bit for Alex’s “Lasting Yankee Stadium Memory” series.

My father took me back to the Stadium six years later to say goodbye to The Mick. It was 1968. God was dead; Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been murdered; my grandmother had been buried in a family plot in Queens, hard by the Long Island Expressway; and Mickey was getting ready to retire.

I don’t remember the date, the opponent, the score. The Senators, perhaps? A Sunday double-header, maybe? I remember that my father drove me past my grandmother’s front window, that he purchased the best seats available, which weren’t very good, behind an old steel pillar just to the left of home plate, field level but tucked back beneath the deck above.

I remember how my feet stuck to the unguent concrete suffused with decades of soda pop and cotton candy. I remember how the temperature rose-seemed like 20 degrees-when we stepped into the sun.

I don’t remember anything that Mickey might or might not have done that day. A methodical search of newspaper clipping files and Retrosheet’s database has yielded no clues. Memory refuses to give up its secrets.

It doesn’t matter. He was there and so was I.