Ode to… the Hot Dog Guy
There is a hot dog guy in my parents’ neighborhood who has been there since we were little street rats running around our block. He’s been there for every baseball game we had in North Meadow, before gentrification institutionalized the fields so that only corporate softball teams and those with money, means and planners can use them. And that’s before they erected tight fences around our fields so that you can no longer enjoy the wonder of an open field at dusk where the skyscrapers of our city break.
Hot dog guy (he does have a name which we call him by, and the picture to the left is NOT hot dog guy) packed our dogs before heading to double-headers at Yankee stadium. And every day at 5pm as he rolled his cart to his van to head home he’d call for us as we played bottom’s up, chinese handball and man hunt along the entrance of our building and once-upon-a-time concrete backyard (until gentrification closed that play space too). We’d race over for our sodas, but more so for the fifteen cent gum balls encased in crinkly plastic. They had a sour taste, and their sugar lasted all of five seconds, but they reminded me of rainbow beads, or a candied caterpillar.
Hot dog guy is still there. He still gives me a hot dog, soda and pack of gum for a dollar, refusing to take any more than that. I’ll forget for now that hot dog guy might be a bit fresh. Things change when you leave girlhood and become a woman, that part of our odyssey I know. Hot dog guy might very well deserve a place in Dante’s Inferno. But right now I say Ode to you, Hot Dog Guy, for giving us some fond childhood memories to look back on.
