Life & Place · A Decembers list

Every ballpark, arena, and stadium you walked into

You came up out of the tunnel and there it was — the green so bright it didn't look real, the whole bowl of it opening up at once, and for a second you just stopped on the steps.

This is the list for the places you made it inside. One line each, or more when a night earned it.

Add your first venue

Free to start. Private from the first word.

Where this list lives

This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.

Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.

Lists
A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
Timeline
Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
Inner Circle
Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
See a sample Timeline

Begin with one list. The rest follows.

One line is enough

Say "Tiger Stadium" out loud and the whole day comes with it — the hot dog wrapper, the sun on the third-base line, your father's hand on your shoulder steering you up the ramp.

The record books keep the scores and the box scores. They don't keep where you parked, or the guy who scalped you two seats behind the pole, or the way the concourse smelled like grilled onions and spilled beer before you ever saw the field. They don't keep who you went with, which is the part you actually remember. Half these places are gone now — torn down, renamed, replaced by something bigger with better parking and none of the ghosts.

You'll never sit down and write the book about all the games you've been to. But you can put down one line — the name of the place, the year, who was next to you — and the rest floods back on its own. One venue at a time, on an ordinary evening, is how the whole map of them gets kept, from the minor-league park with the wooden grandstand to the domed one you swore you'd never like.

How it works

  1. 01

    Pick this list

    It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.

  2. 02

    Fill in what comes

    A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.

  3. 03

    Invite who was there

    They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.

  4. 04

    Share it, or don’t

    One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.

The places that end up on this list

The ones that are gone now

The old parks with the obstructed-view seats and the hand-turned scoreboards. Tiger Stadium, the Astrodome when it was still "the Eighth Wonder," the arenas they imploded to build a parking garage. You were there before it came down, and that counts for something now.

The first-time-inside ones

The trip you saved up for, the away game in another city, the bucket-list ballpark you finally crossed off. You bought the program you didn't need and kept the ticket stub. Walking in cold to a place you'd only seen on television is a specific kind of thrill.

The home team's ground

The one you went back to year after year, until you knew which gate was fastest and which vendor to wave down. Season tickets or the same cheap seats every summer, it became less a building than a habit. The place where you taught your kids to keep score.

Sport by sport

Baseball
The green ones — Fenway's wall, Wrigley's ivy, the dome you argued about, and every minor-league park with a giveaway night and dollar hot dogs.
Football
The cold ones, the loud ones, the ones with a name like the Frozen Tundra where you tailgated three hours before kickoff in a parking lot full of grills.
Basketball
The old smoky Gardens where the balcony shook, and the new arenas with the video board the size of a house hanging over center court.
Hockey
The rinks where the cold came right up off the ice into the cheap seats, and the organ that started up the second the puck dropped.
College
The Saturday-afternoon stadiums, the marching band, the ninety thousand strangers who were your family for three hours in the fall.
Racing
The speedways and the mile ovals, where you felt the cars in your chest before you ever saw them come around turn four.

Other lists you may like

Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.

Begin

A record of every place you climbed the steps to see the field

Start with the one you remember best — the year, and who was sitting next to you. The rest will come up the tunnel behind it.

Add your first venue