bleachers

This is about not having a memory.   Here are the bleachers, piled up, in Donaldson Park, Highland Park, waiting for the new baseball season (they might, however, have to wait a long long time, since most of the park seems to have been plowed up and the soil mixed with sand and, one hopes, will soon be re-seeded).   They look, therefore, like a sign of spring: cue daffodils, willow trees bursting into bright green leaf, speedboats on the Raritan.   

But it's not quite my spring, at least not my memory prompt for spring.   I had an emotionally intense blast of that this morning, via Skype - courtesy of my father taking the computer round my parents' garden, and showing the - yes, daffodils, banks of them - and the magnolia, and the newly arrived roses that we gave them for Christmas, which they have planted up with spinach.   Spinach?   Is this the economy?   But the real nostalgic tug came not from the vegetation, but from the energetic birdsong.    

Bleachers, though.   It took me some years or decades to realize what this word signified - something must eventually have rubbed off via my reading, but somehow the Joni Mitchell song ("The blonde in the bleachers/She flips her hair for you/Above the loudspeakers...The girls and the bands/And the rocknroll man") had me very confused, possibly with another non-British concept, the boardwalk.   And baseball is a sport I haven't yet really got the hang of.   Nor softball.   I played a yet further sibling, rounders, in junior school, but that didn't particularly draw me to its transatlantic cousin (rather, what I remember most about heading off to the playing field - itself historical, since it was where the first Wimbledon Lawn Tennis championship was held before it moved to its current home - is the picnic lunches that my mother packed for me, which would invariably include some sausage rolls, cooked from frozen, with their warm pastry crumbling damply over the handful of cherries, and with a chunk of compressed dates thrown in for good measure, and a warm tomato).   Women's basketball, yes (I'm watching the Final Four with the other half of my head), and, indeed, and to my own surprise, football.   But baseball?   My sense of sporting spring involves the emergence of the heavy roller on the cricket pitch, not benches piled up alongside an extraordinarily high piece of triangular netting.