The Winter of My Content, Part 1

As I spent the long weekend in NYC with my brand new camera, I had my eye out for baseball photos. It was easy - baseball in New York is everywhere. Even now, as players stretch their muscles and go through monotonous drills and routine exercises under the Florida sunshine, baseball is alive in New York City, adorning the windows and walls of pubs, covering the heads of residents, hanging in window displays, muraled on subway tiles, and plastered on advertising.

From the empty, frozen ballfields in Central Park to the quiet Mecca of baseball itself - Yankee Stadium - the game is embedded in the soul of the city. Whether one's heritage is Hispanic, Asian, Arab, African, or European, a New Yorker seems just as likely to have a Yankees or Mets cap covering his head as he is a winter skull cap.

I spent a beautiful few hours in Central Park on a crisp, clear Saturday. Smiles abounded on the myriads of faces I encountered while wandering through Cedar Hill and Strawberry Fields and East Green, past the frozen lake and the dormant Sheep Meadow and the Heckscher Ballfields (shown here.)

The white teflon reflected the sun's brilliance and exclaimed to the world the beauty and wonder of life. The lonely ballfields were only identifiable by their backstops, for the cold white erased the line of distinction between the verdant outfield and the dirt of the infield. Despite their emptiness, there was no sense of desolation, only frozen anticipation, a waiting, time spent dormant but also in renewal, for when spring makes its descent upon this overburdened hemisphere, those wonderful fields, untrampled by human feet for the duration of a winter, will once again succumb to the glory and joy of baseball.

Part of a series of posts for this week based on my photos from my weekend in NYC.
___