Buffalo '07 (continued)

Walking to a recent appointment here on a block of Main Street at the heart of downtown Buffalo, I was reminded of downtown San Jose, the city where I was born and raised. During those years, the Seventies, San Jose was a city that was dying if not already dead at its center, yet it was thriving at its edges. The last patches of farmland in the suburbs was sold off to developers and turned into residential or commercial real estate. The city built out rather than up, but because San Jose is enclosed by hills and water and other communities capable of stopping runaway construction, its outward expansion eventually reached various limits. Before that happened, however, the city’s old, historic core was discovered by individual investors and development companies interested in its empty buildings and blocks. Downtown San Jose’s decline slowed during the Eighties and with the economic boom of the Nineties, especially in the dot.com industries, was more or less stopped and even to some extent reversed. It will never be a city in the European sense, and will never be a city again as it was before suburbanization. It will, however, always be my hometown.

Speaking of hometowns, in my new one I did two unusual things yesterday. First, in the afternoon, I visited a Dominican nuns’ monastery courtesy of a friend of a friend. On Doat Street near Schiller Park there is a monastery of nuns in the Dominican Order of the Perpetual Rosary. Most of the nuns are cloistered, and I got to meet one of them through the visitors’ grille. Later, in the priests’ dining room, I met another one, Sister Maureen. She was an extern, which means she can go out and about in the world. About sixty, sixty-five, she accepted her vocation later in life, after years of marriage and motherhood. I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing that her husband may have passed away after their children were grown. Sister had beautiful blue eyes and a lively manner; she taught English literature in her previous life. Later I was shown the church attached to the monastery. It was beautiful as only a Catholic church can be, and behind a large grille, in a chapel off to one side of the altar, a postulant was meditating on the Blessed Sacrament. When I was young I took Catholicism seriously, with the fervor of a child and a young, young man, and though I did not hold onto the Church and do not make regular contact with it for purposes of religious or spiritual practice, it is still a part of me and always will be. The monastery had a particular kind of spiritual power, perhaps the kind of energy others find at Dharamshala or Machu Picchu or Stonehenge; perhaps others find it in their own local parish. I have found my own spiritual practice, but was not at all sorry to have had the chance to touch base with the stillness and serenity of that monastery.

As if to demonstrate how dizzying reality can be, a few hours later, in complete contrast to the Monastery of the Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary, I was in Ralph Wilson Stadium for the home opener of the Buffalo Bills’ preseason. They were playing the Atlanta Falcons, and my brothers’ friends had box seats and two extra tickets. The only other professional game I ever attended was back in 1978, a San Francisco 49ers match at Candlestick Park. I don’t remember who the other team was, but I do remember that I got to see O.J. Simpson play. I wasn’t a fan by any means, but I did eventually become a diehard ‘Niners’ fan over the course of the Montana-to-Clark Cinderella season. I might not have become a football fan at all, but surgery on my Achilles’ tendon left me in a full-leg cast for the three months which coincided with the last three months of that season. I haven’t followed football much lately; the ‘Niners have fallen far from those glory days (R.I.P., Bill Walsh) and I could never really get behind the Jets or the Giants during my years in New York City.
Due to traffic and his characteristic reluctance to hurry when he isn’t in the mood to, my brother and I didn’t get to the game until halftime. I’m sure that if he had paid for the seats and/or if it had been a regular season game, we would have gotten to the stadium sooner. Our box was in the end zone, but I didn’t care. I was just happy to be there and I felt like a kid again. Of course, it was a treat to be in a box seat. The weird thing is how far away the game looks even from that close, odd angles aside. We left before the final gun, but did get to see one great interception and one touchdown by the hometeam. Oh…and we got to see a fan thrown out of the stadium. (Someone else in the box said, “Imagine getting thrown out during preseason.”) We did the Wave, and ate kettle chips with onion dip, pizza, and I finally had my first Buffalo chicken wing since arriving in Buffalo. Because Marshawn Lynch went to Cal, my alma mater, I got to keep the souvenir photo that they gave out. And since I have already been to a box seat in Ralph Wilson Stadium, maybe I’ve arrived in Buffalo for real. I even saved my wristband.