It could be worse...

I love the movies, as friends of the blog know. One of my favorites is "Young Frankenstein", from the mid '70s. I love Mel Brooks' zany and offbeat humor, his uncanny ability to puncture human foibles and find humor in anything. When my smart, funny and beautiful daughter Stephanie was only a twinkle in my eye, Stephanie's mother and I saw another Mel Brooks movie, "Blazing Saddles", on our first date. A risky choice for a first date, but it turned out all right.

Remember the graveyard scene? Dr. Frankenstein and Igor, covered with mud and filth, nearly finished digging up a fresh corpse for their reanimation experiment. They heave the coffin up over their heads from the bowels of the freshly undug grave. The doctor spits a chunk of mud out of his mouth. "What a filthy job," he says, disgusted by the course of his own destiny. And his ever-sunny assistant Igor, one eye cocked archly, looks up over his hump (what hump?) and says, "It could be worse." "How?" the professor demands. "It could be raining," Igor opines. An instant later, a bolt of lightning flashes and a downpore ensues. The doctor gives Igor a withering look. "Why did you have to say that!" It's never a good idea to invite disaster, or look for trouble. It will find you all on its own.

We can put ourselves in terrible peril or a terrible stew, thinking about what could be worse. Things are never quite as bad as they seem, or as bad as they could be, or as rosy as we want to believe when things are good. It's best to accept them, and trust, and finish today's job without digging up trouble for tomorrow.

I woke up this morning before my alarm went off and realized I had 20 more minutes to snooze, and we didn't have a meeting this morning and I took a shower last night, so I could turn it in to 45. It felt good to be warm and in bed, knowing I had a decent job to go to, clean clothes to wear and a last piece of blueberry pie in the refrigerator. I always keep some essentials at work because I hate to pack lunch: a jar of peanut butter, oatmeal, brown sugar and cinnamon, a half gallon of milk, a couple of cans of black beans and a bag of brown rice. I took my rice cooker to work last winter. Everyone thinks I'm a little weird but I don't have to scramble out every day for a seven dollar lunch from a drive thru window.

When I got up I checked online and I'm a couple of dollars overdrawn in my checking account, so the bank will probably charge me thirty five, or seventy if both small debits arrive at the same time. That's how they work it. The fees are a major source of profit for the bank, a way they overcome the effects of bad mortgages and the CEO's bonus. I haven't bounced a check in quite a while; I just forgot about one of the debits I had, a breakfast at McGillicudies at Saturday. $35. An expensive plate of scrambled eggs, biscuits and bacon. But my own damn fault. It could be worse. It could be raining.

They played the last game in Yankee Stadium over the weekend, The House That Ruth Built, the ballfield where Lou Gehrig gave his famous speech ("Today, I'm the luckiest guy on earth.") even as ALS ravaged his body and took his life; the ballfield where Dimaggio and Mantle patrolled centerfield, where Don Larsen threw the only perfect game in over 100 years of the World Series, the lockerroom where Yogi Berra uttered so many of his marvelous non sequiturs ("Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."): it will all be torn down in a few days. They're building a spanking new stadium across the street, a 1.3 billion dollar palace with gourmet restaurants and lavish skyboxes, a martini bar and steakhouse and an art gallery and $2500 seats.

The monuments in centerfield of the old ballpark will be transferred, and architectural details of vintage Yankee stadium will be duplicated or preserved. But it is a passing of a rich history and worth mourning, a piece of American Myth and folklore lost. 26 world championships. The Babe mugging and tugging on his cap in a grainy piece of film are all that is left of its marvelous unveiling, on the day it was the grand new ballpark. Once home of The Mick and the Yankee Clipper and The Sultan of the Swat, it will soon be reduced to rubble, carted away in a thousand truckloads, like the debris from World Trade Center and yesterday's news.

The theater where we saw Young Frankenstein is empty now. The Southgate closed down several years ago, a victim of multimegaplexes and the VHS, which are now a victim of DVDs and the Redbox and computer downloads. The old gives way to the new. It always has. And in a few short years, they will be digging a grave for me. If it rains that day, taste it on your tongue, and think how many good days we passed together.