Family reunion

How can you lose at home? How can you show up and do your best and try to help and serve, and stay awake and make your contributions, and avoid all the dangers and disasters, and give it everything you’ve got — at home — and lose? How can that happen?

I’m going to take a risk here of sounding romantic, or ridiculous, or just plain wrong, and say that you can’t. You can’t lose at home if you’ve really tried your best. Or, you can lose in some ways, but you’ll win in others. Or, you might lose a battle, but you won’t lose the war, necessarily. Er, you can lose a game and still win the series, or the season?

This is a big season for the Los Angeles Dodgers for a number of reasons, one of which happens to be that I actually attended a game at Dodger Stadium for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-many years. Last weekend, in fact, on Sunday — the agonizing, 11-inning shutout loss to the Giants. And I was there with a friend from the Bay Area, an exuberant Giants fan who disgruntled everyone sitting in our section, including a large contingent of deaf or hearing-impaired visitors who were attending as part of Deaf Awareness Day. He also riled up a well-schooled 4-year-old fan sitting next to me, and by well-schooled I mean that Chairman Mao would have been impressed with this little man’s whole-hearted, full-throttle indoctrination into the creed (of blue, not red). When the kid wasn’t pounding on the armrest or standing on his seat and screaming at the umpires, he was glaring at my companion with the heat of the sun, which was blazing by midafternoon.

So anyway, when I mention losing at home, I’m not really talking about losing in a domestic or a residential sense. I didn’t grow up in California, and while I do love the game of baseball, I’m not a particularly ardent Dodger fan or anything, but something about heading into Elysian Park to attend a Sunday afternoon ballgame at Dodger Stadium just feels like going home. Win or lose.

My friend and I made the pilgrimage from Union Station downtown, riding the Dodgers Trolley up through Chavez Ravine and the deep, rich colors of early autumn to the ballpark. We were surrounded by hard-core true-blue believers. Our closest bus-companions included an old skinny guy wearing what looked like a genuine Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt; a bald dude with a white goatee, chunky Think Blue chain-link bracelet and biker boots; a teenager sheathed in a Dodgers cap and headphones; a well-fed middle class couple with a teen in tow and a home-team blanket; and a pale-faced businessman tucked into a corner with a well-worn glove on his knee. Then there was me in my miniskirt and flip-flops and Marilyn Monroe rhinestone sunglasses, and my companion, wearing Bermuda shorts, Pumas and a T-shirt that said, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

I don’t think the stadium has changed much since it was completed in 1962. I mean, I know they’ve experimented with a few different seating arrangements and so on, but in general passing under the welcome sign feels like time travel. Instead of saying “Welcome to Dodger Stadium,” it might as well say “Welcome to Jellystone Park.”

It was a tight, exciting game, a classic pitcher’s duel. Just a single run was scored. It’s so surreal, this SoCal setting, overlooking the city, surrounded by green fields and the Mother Earth-toned San Gabriel Mountains, with the boys in blue playing their hearts out on the diamond below. Way below, in our case. We bought our nosebleed tickets at the last minute, and I had to strain to follow the ball.

But it was beautiful. Even with a Giants fan, even with beer and popcorn under my feet, even with a fanatical Hitlerian youth by my side, even though the home team lost, I did feel as if I were at a gigantic family reunion of sorts.

We walked afterwards, toward Chinatown, and I recalled the original Elysian Fields from Greek mythology: the resting place for virtuous and heroic souls, filled with flowering trees, warmed by its own sun, and lit by its own stars at night.

Contact Joanna Dehn Beresford at truewrite@yahoo.com.