Opening Day

As much as we like to think we wander through a world that is fresh and new for us, we are forever walking through the streets of the cities of the dead.

This idea seems fairly easy to grasp in a city like Detroit, where I live. You can see the layers of earlier people, earlier lives, and the present they built for us, today, without having to look too very far.

In a larger sense, we all follow the old traditions, the old celebrations, and possess the old fears and failings of those before us, here, where we live, in the cities of the dead. I often feel a presence of those that walked these streets before me, as though they were still among us. Sometimes they seem to me to have aura of undying spirits.

Today I suppose I am revealing a little of my complexity and indulging myself by diverging from my favorite subject, sex, to pay respect to one of those great spirits.

Old timers often tell me they consider him second only to Dr. King in their pantheon. He wasn't a great seer, a philosopher, or an activist. He was never trained to change the world, but he did. He was a baseball player, just a baseball player, but not, of course, just a baseball player. The poet Sean Pamphilon reminds us that, "Pioneers pass before their time. Sometimes they wear a boys' uniform in a cowards world, a world that reluctantly looked in him in they eye on April 15, 1947."

Opening day, April 15, 1947.

Long before my time. Still I think, like the old-timers I talk to, that somehow our world is, in fact divided into "Before Jackie" and "After Jackie." He had the courage to take the field alone, and we now know how great a burden that was for this baseball player. He carried the world on his shoulders, and living the life of Jackie Robinson, being Jackie Robinson, it brought his life to an early close, but I think not his spirit. Not the fire.

I see this photograph of Jackie Robinson, at the age of 28, just about my age, on Opening Day in 1947 and I see the powerful spirit.

I see.