Hey look! October baseball

I am trying not to get too excited.  I've been this way before.  1984.  1989.  1998.  2003.  All ended badly.  Gut-wrenchingly badly.

Geez, for as long as I have been following this team you'd think they would have made the playoffs more than five times.  I've invested a lot of my time in this team.  I'm due.  But see, I'm not going to get sucked into this.

The Cubs are in the playoffs, and I'm thrilled, because they don't belong.  If they were in any of the other five divisions, they would have been an also-ran.  They have the blessing this season of being in the worst division in the game, by far.

This is a team that lost 96 games last year.  They won 85 (and lost 77) this year.  A Nineteen game improvement in a single season is a fairly dubious accomplishment-no one else accomplished that this year.  The Cub also finished first in their division one year after finishing last.

Zip-a-dee Do-dah.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy as hell.  There's nothing like playoff baseball when the Cubs are involved.  It's like a solar eclipse-better to see it now because you don't really know when it will happen again.  Perhaps that's a little dramatic.

For me, this season was all about scrubbing away the residue from the Dusty Baker years.  Last year was the worst year ever for being a Cubs fan because they had a manager that didn't give a damn.  He knew he was going to get paid, and he let his team lay down and die after one of their best players suffered a long-term injury in May.  They should have fired him in June and started the rebuilding process then, but for whatever reason, they waited.  And I hated every second of it.

Putting this in a Mr. Retail perspective, there were plenty of stores that I was transferred into that were dumps, where people just didn't care and the prior managers were either lousy, lazy or both.  On that first day, I'd get the urge to just walk out, because I knew it was going to take a lot of unpleasant work to get things into shape.  I hated that feeling, but I always stuckit out, and eventually things turned out all right.  Sometimes it took more than six months, but it was always worth it.

I expected the 2007 Cubs to be around a .500 team, finish ten games or so out of the lead, and get my hopes peaked for 2008.  I would have been happy with that.  I was happy just seeing someone else besides Baker in that dugout.

The trap is this: no matter what happens in the playoffs, this Cubs team is one that should be built to last.  There are no major free agents to worry about losing, no old, broken down players on their last legs, no albatrosses of any kind.  They should win consistently for the next few season at least.

And I'm going to get sucked in, of course, because I always do.  I'd hate to ever not feel the anticipation that I always feel towards the end of March, when baseball season is starting up again.

There is this moment that comes along every season, the moment where I realize that again, the Cubs are not going to win the World Series, and that I have to wait at least another year to see if it will happen, and that I might die an old man having never seen the Cubs win it all, etc. etc. etc.

Last year that moment came in May.  The earlier it comes makes it worse.  Last year I had to resign myself that it would be a minimum of seventeen months to see if they could do it.  On average, I'd say that feeling comes every year just before July 4th.

Obviously, I haven't had it yet this year.  The clock just went past midnight.  It's October 1st, and I still think that the Cubs have a chance to win the World Series THIS SEASON.

The games start Wednesday in Arizona, against a team that has only been around for ten years and has already won a World Series.  If they get past them either the Phillies, Padres or Rockies await.  The Mets?  The were eliminated today, in a meltdown greater than the Cubs meltdown of 1969.  Serves 'em right.

If the boys make it to the World Series they'd face either Boston, Cleveland, the Yankees or the Angels--all teams that posted much better records this season.  I'll worry about that if they get this far.

It's impossible to convey what all this means to me.  If you're not the type to follow sports I probably sound insane, but the Cubs are as much a part of my life as my family.  They are the only thing that have been around as much.

I close my eyes and I can imagine bringing home my newborn son in a Cubs championship sleeper in December.

A Thousand Napkins a Day Keeps the Brewers Away

I went to the Cubs-Reds game Monday night, tickets I got after the Sunday night game between the Cubs and Cardinals were rained out in August.  Meaningful baseball in September-not something I am particularly used to around here.  It was probably my last trip to Wrigley Field this season.  If it was, I picked a great game to end with.

The Reds are the last team I want to see playing the Cubs towards the conclusion of the pennant race, because they seem to play well come September.  They killed the Cubs Wild Card hopes in 2004, and almost knocked them out in 1998 as well.  Monday was the start of six games in two weeks between the Reds and the Cubs, and going into Monday, the Cubs held a one game lead over the Milwaukee Brewers.

Milwaukee, playing in Houston, were crushing the Astros early and by the second inning we knew that to stay in first, the Cubs would have to win.

We were sitting in the upper deck boxes, all the way down the right field line, fourth row.  There was a strong wind, blowing from the south/southeast; the breeze blew in from right beside us, through the opening between the bleachers and the right field line.  Every once in a while we'd see a load of smoke from the bbq's on the Sheffield rooftops wander into the park.

The crowd around us was pretty rowdy and by the third inning, when the Reds scored the first run of the game, the guys in front of us were looking for ways to turn the tide.  I'm not sure how it came about, but one of them decided that if he could drop a napkin off the upper deck and get it to blow onto the field, it would be a good omen.  He crouched down at the rail and dropped a napkin.  We watched it float down and up, being carried by the breeze, before it made it over the red brick wall and ended up a few feet in fair territory in right field, just as the Reds were making the last out of the third.

In the bottom of the third, the Cubs scored three runs to take the lead.  After the end of that inning, a security guard walked out onto the field and picked the napkin up.  The Reds re-took the lead.  More napkins were dropped, but none made it onto the field.

With the score 6-4 Reds in the bottom of the eighth, I left to go to the bathroom, and on my way out of the men's room, I noticed a hot dog stand off to the side of the pedestrian ramp, closed for the night, a dispenser of napkins visible in the corner.  I grabbed as many as I could and shoved them in my pocket.  And then I really got busy.

I walked over to the concession area underneath the press box, but all the napkin dispensers were empty.  I headed down to the patio that looks west with a lot of individual vending stands and found the same-no napkins.  Finally, I managed to spot two that still had napkins, all the way over to the right, where the park overlooks the players' parking lot.  I took as many as I could fit into my pockets.

When I got back to my seat, everyone roared as I took hundreds of napkins out and gave them to the designated dropper.  By this time it was the top of the ninth, Cubs still trailing by two.  He held all the napkins in his hands in front of me and said "Pick a napkin, any napkin."  I chose one from the middle of the pack.  He had all of us rub it, and then he dropped it over the side.  We watched as it fell, and about ten feet before it would have landed in the stands it turned up, caught by a breeze, and danced for about thirty seconds, before it slipped over the wall and landed in right field, about ten feet from the corner and only a foot or so in front of the warning track.

The Reds made the final out of the ninth at about the same time.  The bottom of the ninth went like this: Theriot leads off with a walk; Lee singles him to second; Ramirez hits a gapper to right-center that Reds center fielder Nick Hopper just missed making a great diving catch on (would have been a double play at least-earlier he had gone into the vines to take a hit away from Ramirez, going in so hard he left an impression of himself on the vines), the ball going to the wall and tying the game-he ended up with a triple; after an intentional walk to Ward, the Reds brought in Hopper from center to be a fifth infielder, but it didn't matter, DeRosa singled and the game was over.  Cubs win 7-6, and stay in first place for at least one more day.

We hung around for a few minutes and celebrated before all of us in 438 went our separate ways.  Just before we started down the ramp to leave the upper deck, I turned back.  The napkin was still on the field.

Fear the magic that is the napkin.  Do not taunt the napkin.

How to be a nuisance

Walk in the middle of the street.  Talk to the actors while sitting in a crowded movie theater.  Smoke 'em if you got 'em.  Spit in a drinking fountain.  Sing along with your i-pod on the train.  Say "it is what it is." Answer your  cell phone in the library.   Tell a friend you'll give them a ride to the airport and forget to show up.  Leave the copy machine out of paper.  Sit on someone's eyeglasses.  Say "baby needs a new pair of shoes" at a craps table.  Yell "bingo" when you get blackjack.  Eat the last Twinkie and leave the box in the cabinet.  Root for the Cardinals.  Poke holes in bicycle tires.  Tell your nephews that there is no Santa Claus.  Wear baseball caps sideways.  Answer "What?" to every question asked you.  Swipe your neighbor's Sunday paper.  Talk about your bowels. Turn the bass way up.  Yodel.  Don't replace your divots.  Drink milk from the carton.  Buy the wrong flavor ice cream.  Pick your toenails.  Be that person in the group that never makes a decision.  Write in library books.   Leave your clothes in the washing machine.  Belch in church.  Take pennies out of fountains.  Burn the toast.  Hide the remote.  Carve obscenities into pumpkins.  Don't squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom.  Never use turn signals.  Be late for everything.  Lick envelopes right after finishing an Oreo.  Cite Oprah.  Scoff at the idea of global warming.  Sell products door-to-door.  Forget to pay the electric bill.  Talk down to waiters.   Call yourself a rebel.  Ask people how much they weigh.  Don't use coasters.  Interrupt.  Sneeze on the neck of the person in front of you.  Throw snowballs at moving cars.  Leave the windows open when it rains.  Vote Republican.

Holy Toledo

In honor of our friends' new son, who I shall refer to as "Klinger," I present a random eleven:

1. "Follow Your Bliss"-The B-52s.  Sage advice, even for those less than two days old.  Unfortunately the Weather Channel used this for background music for its local updates one summer when I was in Iowa and I can't help but see radar images of huge thunderstorms whenever I hear it.

2. "Departure"-REM.  Certainly it would be better if this song were called "arrival" (which is what it's about, so go figure), but you'll be departing a hospital for home soon, so there you go.

3. "Bargain"-The Who.  It wouldn't be a shame if this were the first song you ever heard (though I'm guessing in reality it's going to be something by The Replacements, ZZ Top or Elvis-TCBY).  And as Mr. Townsend says: "In life, one and one don't make two.  One and one make one."

4. "Wake Up and Smell the Coffee"-The Cranberries.  Well, almost.  For the next few years I'm sure your folks will wake up and smell something...

5. "So Alive"-Love and Rockets.  I am not altering the playlist, I swear.  This is random.  Besides, whenever I hear this song I think about dropping someone on their face the night before they had a job interview.

6. "More Than This"-Roxy Music.  Hmm, if this is taken as a question then you've got a good fifteen years or so before this makes any sense.  I don't have"Teen Angst" by Cracker on my 'pod, but if I did, it would make a heck of a segue.  Go for a Bryan Ferry hairstyle someday.  The ladies love it.

7. "Out of My Head"-Fastball.  Forget the title and let's focus on the group name here.  You're destined to be encaptivated by a certain baseball team (though not for a second do I believe it will be forced upon you) and take it from me, go for it.  Don't pay attention to anything anyone says about it.  Deep, deep down, they are all just jealous.  Follow your destiny.  Just look for the ivy.

8. "Inside Out"-Phil Collins.  Hmm, I'm thinking of an event that occurred at a house on Hale a long time ago that could fit in here, but we'll just move past that.  As it turns out, I don't have a song in my collection called "Don't Be So Tight."  I certainly wish that I did.

9. "Arc of a Diver"-Steve Winwood.  He seems to come up in every one of these.  I am patiently listening to the lyrics trying to find something that fits here, but so far no good.

10. "When You Dream"-The Barenaked Ladies.  I've got 560 songs on my 'pod, and this is the one that fits best, since it's a song about a guy watching his newborn son sleep.  A little less than a 2% chance that it would come up.  This might bold well for future trips to Vegas.  I'm just saying.  Plus you've already won the Parent Lottery.

11. "Into the Mystic"-Van Morrison.  And we end perfectly.  I couldn't come up with a better list for when my own son comes along in December.  Maybe we'll call him "Hawkeye."

Summer o' death, part 2

Back in June I christened this season to be the "summer of death."  Morbid, yes, but I think I had other things affecting my thought process at the time.  Looking back, I should have referred to it as "the summer which I feel like I am surrounded by death."

I wonder if it was this hard for Ecclesiastes?

There have been no further swarms of insects dying off or rotting rodent carcasses behind my air conditioning unit.  Still, I find myself wandering all over my mortal landscape.  I can't help it.  I spend just about every second of every day waiting for December, when our son will be born.  We're bringing this new life into the world, and it makes me question the point of mine.

(And yours.)

This has nothing to do with religion.  Rather, it's all about destiny.  Why am I here?  What am I supposed to be doing?  There's a song by Poi Dog Pondering called "God's Gallipoli" and one of the final lyrics goes like this:

"it's hard to think, that this is how it ends/stretched out on a bedsheet, sorting through a wreckage of regrets." 

I really don't want to be that guy.

Circumstances in my life have rendered me as someone who is highly aware of their mortality.  I assume there are many others like me, but no one likes to talk about these types of things.  I don't think that it is ever going to change.  There isn't going to be this moment where everything suddenly makes sense and the prospects of my extremely long-term future brighten.  Perhaps I am wrong.  I'd rather be surprised than disappointed.

And any time that I think I am deflecting this process, a few things happen that place me back in the focus.  Two weekends go, I was in Minneapolis on a short golfing trip with some friends.  One afternoon after we finished our round, we found ourselves on a highway heading right into downtown.  Eventually we drove past the site of the I-35W bridge collapse.  We didn't gawk; we never stopped, we just drove down the road that leads to it.  You couldn't see much but you could see enough.  I imagined it looked like what several bridges over the Thames River in London did after World War II.  The pieces of the bridge that collapsed but did not separate from the rest of the bridge are still in place, making the road looking like a frozen roller coaster.

Shortly after that, we found ourselves on a different bridge going over the Mississippi, and to our left were piles and heaps of twisted metal.  This is where they will eventually reconstruct the bridge as they attempt to figure out what caused it to collapse.  Together, these were awesome sights, not in a "wow that's cool" sense but in an "I had no idea it was this level of devastation" sense.  I knew it was prolific, but I had no idea the destruction was so complete.  I can't believe that only thirteen people died on that bridge. 

Shortly after that, I found out that my hometown was blitzed by a huge thunderstorm and that there was significant damage-trees mostly-but for a while it seemed like they had been hit by a tornado. 

It wasn't, but when I got a look at the neighborhood where I grew up in a few days later, I was stunned.  There were trees down all over the place, some older than me.  It's odd looking at a tree that you once wished you could climb thirty years ago, when it seemed like a seventy story building, and now you can step over it because it's been split down the middle by eighty mile an hour winds.

Just something more that always seemed to be "around" since the day that I was born that isn't anymore.  That, in a nutshell, is what this summer seems to be telling me, not to get too comfortable.  You never know what's around that next bend.

Perhaps this is all impending baby stuff, these thoughts of destiny, the idea of making the time that I have worth it.  I am pretty sure that it is.  This is a huge step, a life-changing event.  And I wouldn't trade it for anything.

This too shall pass.  Which is sort of the point I am making anyway.

 

 

 

Shaking, baking and leaking

August has been, shall we say, challenging.  Not all bad, not all good.  Lots and lots of challenges.

First, it's raining perpetually.  Chicago's rainiest month is August, has been for a while, apparently, and August 2007 isn't going to do anything to change that.  When it's not raining, it feels like it's just about to or has just stopped.  Since August 1 I've felt like I've always just stepped out of the shower.

Vanity, thy name is humidity.

I bought tickets to this past weekend's Cubs-Cardinals games at Wrigley back in February, visualizing two teams battling in a pennant race under a blazing hot August sun.  Fortunately, I got the part about the pennant race right.  Saturday's game felt like it was being played in Dublin-low, dark clouds coming in off the lake, a chilling wind best described as "raw" and a steady drizzle; the type of day that I got married.  In April.

I wore shorts (to the game, not my wedding) and spent four hours in denial (there were two rain delays).  I don't think I have ever shivered before in August.

But it was worth it.  The Cubs won 5-3, and they stayed in first place.  And yes, that is sort of a big deal.  I know I'm 40; humor me.

Sunday was a lot worse.  It rained all day but for some (ahem, it was scheduled to be televised on ESPN) reason the game (starting at 7 PM) was not postponed.  Every more surprising was that it stopped raining long enough for the game to start on time.  And of course we went, because well, why not?  It would be too sensible to just stay home.

It started raining in the bottom of the third inning.  And I think it still is.  Yeah, I know it's been raining a lot more in a lot of other places, but this is all about vanity remember?  So what I thought six months ago would be a memorable summer weekend was mostly a buzz kill.  Except for Saturday's result.  Did I mention that the Cubs beat the Cardinals?  That the Cubs are in first?  That the Cardinals are in third?

Another challenge came in trying to get the heck out of here for a spell.  My wife had a couple of weeks off before starting a new job and we came up with an exceptionally bold plan: go to Hawaii.  She has a friend who moved to the Big Island last summer and has been dying to have company ever since.  My brother works for a major airline and has the ability to provide us with reduced airfare with one caveat-flying standby-and after looking at the projected cost of such a trip, we decided that we could go and not feel like we were blowing the baby's first few months of essentials.

We knew the risk going in that we could get bumped from the flight, but we never got that far.  The major airline has a policy restricting our type of travel to Hawaii in August because it's "high season."  Yep, everyone goes to Hawaii in August it seems. 

Except that the flight we were supposed to leave on (we found out three hours prior that we could not go) might have had a few empty seats.  One would think that a business that is struggling to make money would do anything possible to ensure that it was making money by putting rear ends in as many seats as possible.  That's Mr. Retail talking there, sorry. Been a while since we heard from him.

So going to Hawaii?  A-No-ha.  A perfect storm of complications.  Speaking of which, about a billion people let me know that right after we were supposed to be there, a hurricane skirted the Big Island.  Seems there was an earthquake too.

We thought about going to LA instead, but those flights didn't look so hot either.  Hot?  We decided to drive to Kansas City for a few days to visit close friends.  It was 300 degrees.  We had a good time, though.  I lost about fifty pounds.

There's more going on this month, stuff that gunks up the gears of my life, but that is life, isn't it?  We move on.

Eleven days until September.  I am counting the seconds.

Writing from high atop the stratosphere

You'll excuse me if I'm a little too up today.  Today is D-Day, or FOIWAHABOAG-Day: "Find Out If We Are Having a Boy or a Girl." 

And indeed, we have found.  In a little over four months, we are having a son!

I would have been fine waiting until the birth to know if we had a son or daughter, but Kristen wanted to know, and she's carrying the little bugger, so why not?  So now we know: a boy it is, and we couldn't be happier. 

And now that the revelation has been made, I have to admit that I really, really, really, really wanted a boy.  I would have been absolutely fine with a girl, of course.  I like girls.  I know a lot of outstanding females and I am confident that if we were having a daughter that she would be so as well.  I would not be disappointed if there had been "nothing" where instead there was "something" this morning.

I was on top of the world before.  Now I am above even that.

I wanted a boy because now I can look upon my life and say that I have (and will) shared the same experiences as my father.  I think if he were still alive I would not be as caught up in the gender of our baby, but since his death I tend to examine my life in terms of his.  It's not that I want to be him; it's that I want the chance to have what he had, so that I can be what he taught me to be.  I learned from my father how to be everything: a student, an adult, a friend, career-oriented (fell of fthat track, yes, but I'm in the process of getting back on), a husband, etc.; all that is missing is a father.  And since I am his son, I only know the father-son experience from that perspective, and that is what I want to experience now from the opposite view.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I will know what my son is experiencing as we go through his life, at least from what I remember.  I know things change and it is much more different being a child than it was three decades ago, but I had a bond with my father that through everything, good and bad, only grew stronger, and it is as strong today as it has ever been.  Death cannot break what is meant to last forever.  My son and my father have a bond now through me.

I am my father's son, and I get to be my son's father.  I feel the circle beginning to complete.  This is what I had hoped for. 

Of course, I make this sound like it is me and only me who will go through this.  My son is lucky because he has a great mother.  He's not even born and he's already won the mommy lottery (would they call that winning the "mother lode"?  BA-ZING!).  I don't mean to sound selfish, like the gender of the baby affects only me.

The oddest thing about this whole pregnancy experience has been wondering when that feeling would hit, that "oh-wow-we-are-really-going-to-be-parents" shot across the bow.  Well, it took four and one-half months for it to arrive.

It's here now.  Oh boy, is it ever.  It was a direct hit that has sent us flying higher than we ever thought was possible.  And I'm pretty sure we will never come down.