You won't understand

Yankee Stadium will close for the final time on Sunday, 21 September. For those of you not familiar with the "Stadium" let me share some history with you. Yankee Stadium housed the likes of Ruth, Mantle, Maris, and Dimaggio, it has hosted 37 World Series, the 1958 NFL championship game between the Colts and Giants that catapulted the NFL into the national spotlight, 4 All Star games, three Popes who said mass to thousands of Catholics, and a memorial for 9/11. I grew up a Yankees fan. I saw first-hand Reggie Jackson's three homers in Game #6 of the 1977 World Series against the Dodgers and Dave Righetti's and Jim Abbott's no-hitters at Yankee Stadium. The "new" Yankee opens next year and the old one will be torn down. The new Yankee Stadium will be state-of-the-art and cost a billion dollars. The old stadium will soon be reduced to rubble. As I say good-bye to the old stadium I am reminded, yet again of how the place of my youth has changed irrevocably; first when the mighty towers came down on 9/11, then a couple of years later when the city demolished the apartment building where I grew up on the basement level, and now the closing of the place of some of my fondest childhood memories. Yankee Stadium will soon be a memory, but a memory I will always cherish. The world, for me, will be a little sadder on Sunday when Yankee Stadium goes silent for the last time.