|
DAY 6: Toddling with Brad and Carol.
It's Sunday morning. Before heading south I'd like to see the University of Wisconsin campus in the light. Joyce and Brian went to school here. I picture them walking down the street, his head slightly cocked to the side in inexorable optimism as he spins his political organization logic, she chuckling gently as she listens with measured, infinite patience.
My daughter spent a summer here, living with an old friend and working in a restaurant. She hung out around the university and was sad to leave. Her life is as peripatetic as mine.
The campus sits at the southern end of Lake Mendota. From the stone-faced Union I drive up a wooded hill by the observatory, and then up and down a few streets, past the library and some of the departmental buildings. The setting is impressive, and the university fits it.
The campus leads me to State Street and Madison, at its edge. Here's the stretch where I was lost last night, a run of bookstores, restaurants, student things. This is Madison's Harvard Square, tucked between the university and the Capital.
This was the city of reference for my gramma as she grew up a few miles south in Stoughton. This is where her old friends and her older sister came to die, in nursing homes, after lives spent elsewhere. I visited (Great) Aunt Sadie and (Great) Uncle Julius here once when I was driving through with Mitzi. They were in their eighties, but in an apartment, still able to function. Later on in this trip I would look for the apartment building they lived in on West Lake Street in Chicago, where for many years they worked for the Feds, he as an accountant, she a clerk. The building is gone, part of the rubble of that part of the city.
When I was really young, we used to come in from Elmhurst to visit, to a set of rooms whose smell I have never found the words to describe--midwest apartment smell--but which I will carry to my grave. Every so often I come across it and am immediately beamed back to Aunt Sadie's hall.
Uncle Julius--I used to call him "Uncle DooDoo," since I couldn't pronounce "J"--was the dullest man I've ever known, dull and stingy. He used to tip waitresses five percent, personally handing the tip to them so that no one would steal it off the table. I liked him okay, but he drove Grampa nuts.
Aunt Sadie was about 4 foot 10, a tiny, vaguely jolly, proper person, not much given to metaphor. She taught me to read when I was three. I found out later that she had ridden a train out to Montana by herself sometime around WWI, to be a school teacher in the wild west. Given the autocracy of her father, this was a good-sized revolt. By the time I knew her, such antics had been long buried in the concrete habits of her marital bureaucracy.
Sadie and Julius were sick in the nursing home long enough to use up all the savings that were supposed to go to Gramma, their little sister and best friend. They died within weeks of each other at 96.
Gramma and Sadie grew up in Stoughton, a little town some seventeen miles south of Madison. Another sister, Birdie, stayed there, married to Uncle Charles, who owned the movie theater. Brother Joel was a veterenarian nearby in Verona.
We would come up in the summer for a week or so, and I would get free entry to the theater. Stoughton was full of Norwegians. One of Gramma's grandfathers had come from Lillesand, a little fishing village on Norway's south coast. Another had come from Oslo in the 1870s. One or the other was the town civil engineer.
Driving south on Stoughton Road, I pass Lake Kegonsa. We spent a month there the year I was sixteen. My new stepfather was with us, as was my little brother Hank. That was the summer I fell in love with Carol, whose family lived across the street. I sang to her, that first night, from one dock to another. She didn't much care for the music, but was bored and liked the talk that followed.
At the County Fair that summer, Gramma went from booth to booth winning stuffed animals, salt and pepper shakers, whatever was available. She was on the run of her life. I caught up with her at one point and noticed Walter, my new stepfather, standing behind her, all 6 foot 5 of him, wearing the sheriff's badge from Hank's cowboy suit and a benign smile. The carny guys were letting the sweet old lady in front win a prize or two to show The Law that everything was on the up and up.
Stoughton now has 7589 people in it. The downtown has been redone, tastefully keeping a woody look to it. I find Uncle Charles's house on Prospect Street. It really does look just like I remember it--stone facing, white board front--although I'd seen it on a previous trip. I've tried to go through here every fifteen years or so. I remember the back yard, ending in a steep slope down to the river. At the end of the street the train trestle still stands, beckoning the intrepid. I wonder what ever happened to Brenda, who lived just down the street. I had a crush on her once, too.
I drive back down Page Street to Riverside Cemetery. I need to see Grampa Marshall's grave. It is there, in front of the Lillesand stone. It flanks an open space, next to which is Grampa Ted's. Beyond their stones are those for Aunt Sadie and Uncle Julius. In the middle is Gramma's gravestone, waiting, Grampa Marshall's last name gouged out, replaced in the stone by Grampa Ted's. Dona Gladys and her two husbands. When she dies, my Lutheran Gramma will be polyandrous for eternity. For the first time in my journey, just as now in this writing of it, I cry like a lost soul, alone and rootless.
In time I return to Main Street. The theater is now the Cinema Caf‚. It is showing "Dances with Wolves." Next door, the drug store--apothecary, I guess, in those days--where people used to get hot, buttered popcorn to take into the theater, is now a Norwegian bakery.
I go in for a cup of coffee to go. At the back, pouring my coffee, I hear two women, maybe in their fifties, talking about someone they know cohabiting before marriage. One shrugs, "Well, that's how it is. I guess it makes a certain sense." Times change in Stoughton.
I buy a Berlinerkranser to take along from the sweet high school kid behind the counter. I tell her my great uncle used to own the theater and the bakery used to be a drug store where I got popcorn. I have a huge need to tell somebody, to proclaim my connection to this little town. She says, "Wow, that's neat," but I know it doesn't compute. She's probably trying to figure a way out of Stoughton. Just another dreamy geezer.
In the ride down the Mississippi to Stoughton, I forgot about baseball. I stepped into a time warp, followed the signals where they led, finally to the gravestones by a littler river. No roots for me here. I am a Stoughton Sansei--two generations away.
A chapter will soon close. They go faster at the end. If I come back, it will be much closer to the end of my own drift through random space. Maybe the Cubs will have won by then, and Gramma's soul will be free.
South, now, past Janesville and Beloit to the Illinois line. I'm 2600 miles into the trip. For the next four days I will be in and around Illinois, passing three times through Chicago, as I shift the center of the journey's gravity to second base. Maybe roots can be found in culture patterns, if not necessarily in particular places.
Baseball has returned. I think about the Midwest League. Can I squeeze in a game at Kenosha, Beloit, Rockford, or Kane County? It is Spring again, after the graves. I am headed for another rebirth. The new Comiskey Park has just opened, full of its own two-faced messages about rebirth in Corporate America. Today is an afternoon game with the Yankees.
I drive down the toll road--marked by half-mile signs--into the tooth-plaque air of Chicago. I smell the city long before I see it, the smell of power plants and industrial gunk. Over the potholes, along the meandering lane markers, past the Loop and into the Projects I go. On the radio is an ad for Lot, the Polish airline. I am looking for the old, the new, and, in Pudge Fisk, the forever.
Here's the new park, like the old, sitting near a thick cluster of railroad tracks. Across the street sits the old Comiskey. Only a week or two ago, sports shows had pictures of the wrecking ball making its first assault. Demolition proceeds slowly. There are a couple of well-guarded places in the new park where I can get a good view of Old Comiskey.
Once, in the spirit of fair play, Gramma and Aunt Sadie took me on the El to a Sox game. We sat in the outfield, among oi polloi. Early in the game a small, small fight "erupted" below us. Beer was thrown. Swear words were yelled. I was packed up and hauled out of there. Gramma's legendary fears of the White Sox world were more than underscored, and Comiskey entered the list right next to Calcutta.
Hoping to get past the third inning this time, I buy my ticket. This is the big city, so the prices are higher than the regional hinterlands. At first sight, the park is spectacular. Three tiers of dark blue seats, vertiginously steep I will discover, spread from home down the foul lines. Bleacher seats cross the outfield under a huge scoreboard in dead center. An auxiliary scoreboard, with out-of-town scores, rises in right center. The grass is real.
The concourse is open, circling the whole field behind the lower seats. Food stalls and souvenir shops look out on the game. Television monitors hang above the promenade, so that the broadcast is constant. Skyboxes and fancy-schmancy restaurants for the rich sit under the upper deck.
Beyond center field is a special area for kids, with peanut butter sandwiches and entertainment. This is user-friendly baseball, built for the new breed of TV fan. The only things that connect this place to Fenway are the grass and the spirits of Fisk and Steve Lyons, who changes his Sox every few years.
Before the game I learn about Bill and Sue's Excellent Adventure. They, too, are travelling around the country seeing games. Their plan is to see all the professional ballparks in America in one summer, documenting their trip on videotape. This Week in Baseball shows snippets of their trip each week.
I have now been to three Major League parks, enough to begin to see patterns. One of them is the packaging of video entertainment. The parks seem to have bought packages of TV shows, games, music, and such, from the same kind of distributor that franchises the pap and patter of Top 40 radio.
Today, as in other parks on other days, I'll enjoy Disney music before the game, This Week in Baseball, a cartoon race around the bases--here Chicago Transit Authority buses, elsewhere tires, racing cars--a "Guess Today's Attendance" contest, electronic arcade game sound effects, and other parts of the package.
It's not like Muzak, for the sound systems in these new stadiums are so loud that I can barely hear myself think. And they are constant. There are no silences at the ballpark. We have become a people constantly stimulated. As Neil Postman writes, we are "Amusing Ourselves to Death". Major League baseball is now ENTERTAINMENT--a carnival with three, four hours of movement, food, and constant noise.
The new Comiskey is a perfect symbol for the commercialization of baseball. It is a stadium extorted out of the City of Chicago by Jerry Reinsdorf's threats to move the team to St. Petersburg, Florida. In doing so, he joined Al Davis, Robert Irsay, Joe Robbie, and the other Captains of the sports industry, getting rich on blackmail, or following the buck elsewhere. As I will discover, Sox season ticket holders despise three things--the Cubs, Cubs Fans, and Reinsdorf.
Up the many ramps I go, to the upper stadium entrance. As I walk through the tunnel, my heart starts to pound. The upper deck is stairwell steep. As I look out, trying to find a rail to grab, I feel like I'm in the outside elevator, climbing the CNB Tower in Toronto. I am in complete, momentary panic. Vertigo! When I find my seat, I will huddle into it, catching my breath until I can function. From my seat halfway up the line to third, I can see over the left field wall to the projects. A racist rumor had it that snipers were shooting into the stadium as it was being constructed.
The seats are piled straight up. Like cheap airplanes, there is little knee room. There is, fortunately, no one in front of me. My kneecap would be about foramen magnum-high, and damage could be done. During the game, I overhear a fan behind me explaining that every square foot of the park was designed to maximize profit. Brad points to the space over the outfield walls, covered with ads. He asks, rhetorically, why didn't management use that space for some Sox memorabilia, retired numbers, famous names, and such--something for the fans to see and talk about. Instead, when the Sox Hall of Fame opens up, people will have to pay extra to get in. Listening to the fans around me, who will probably be around long after management is gone, I start to see Comiskey as an advertisement for Royals Stadium.
Next to me Carol says, "I hate it!" when I ask her about the new park. She and Brad are season ticket holders. They are real White Sox fans. They have the passion. Brad's been to Spring Training, to the Sox minor league affiliates parks. Carol is the daughter of fans. She spent many younger days at the ballpark. With no consuming interest in the Bears, Black Hawks, or Bulls, Brad and Carol suffer through the winter, taking part in every off-season promotion available until spring training starts. They are pregnant, and Carol clearly intends to have the baby while the Sox are on the road. She is not going to miss a game.
Clusters of season ticket holders become kind of a community over time. They bring their kids, even the just-born. Children are no excuse to miss the games. The change of stadiums has disrupted many of these quasi-communities. People have been redistributed to new seats in the move. It'll take a while for things to reform.
Once in a while, Cubs fans apparently show up. Carol and Brad live on the north side, but they are not Cubs fans. They drive to the south side instead. They see Cubs fans as spoiled yuppie-types who don't really understand the game--the kind who try to start the Wave. Sox fans root against the Cubs with some energy.
Carol and Brad got married in part because of their joint feeling for the Sox. It is too important, making it next to impossible to be with someone who didn't share it. I am deeply jealous, of him, her, them. At the end of the game, I want to be invited over for dinner, to talk life and baseball.
I, too, have had my passions, my interests in life of transcendent import. Baseball is among them; so are Disney World, historical parks, and the absurd kitsch of American popular culture. Social theory and music and community politics have spurred my life--and, of course, travel, being on the move. The loves of my life have, except for politics, shared few of these, so I have mostly done them alone. The best co-traveler is my daughter, the only one willing to go light and fast enough. Up here in the stratosphere, clinging to my seat, I realize suddenly that I am too old to be with anybody any more who doesn't love baseball and travel.
The game moves apace. A seven person choir, whose name I wish I'd noted, sings one of the best and quickest versions of the National anthem I've heard. The soprano goes for the high fourth at the end and nails it. The information glut on the scoreboards is incessant.
The Sox are in their Sunday black shirts. The Yankees are delightfully inept. I feel sorry for Mattingly, Sax, and Barfield, playing with these clowns. There's no Bucky Dent here--I'll find him tomorrow in St. Louis--to hit one down the line and break a region's hearts. As long as I shall live, the Yankees will not lose enough.
Fisk's home run is called back as a foul ball, but not before the scoreboard pinwheels spin and the fireworks go off. Otherwise, the game itself is not particularly frought with interest. When the attendance is announced at 36,000 plus, the Fan-o-meter measures the amount of crowd noise made, noise made celebrating the Fan-o-meter.
Chicago wins the game, 4-1. It never seems to be in doubt.
I am of two minds as the game ends. The plastic-loving part of me, the part that loves Disney, has thoroughly enjoyed the commercial spectacle here at Comiskey. Baseball in these new stadiums, covered or otherwise, is arena-ball. It's entertaining, like going to a waterside festival marketplace. Major League attendance is growing, so the noise must be bringing in a new kind of fan. The downside is that this television-driven commercialism has opened up space for would-be celebrities, jerks like Ricky Henderson, Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, who think that their juvenile narcissism is justified.
On the other hand, I feel that the game has been a little bit defaced by all this hoopla. The trip is teaching me that I probably want to see a whole lot more of the minor leagues, less of the majors. Yet Carlton Fisk was here today, the Commander, teaching others by example the deep meaning of the game. Nolan Ryan and Ozzie Smith are still around, and Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. There are new guys with a feeling for the diamond, wonderful players like Chris Sabo and Harold Reynolds, who see that they are not bigger than the game.
Other than Herb and Martha's chili, the game is about as close as we can get to Plato's universal essences. Baseball is a head cleaner for the spirit. It will survive the marketplace.
* * * * *
The Cubs return to Wrigley Tuesday night, so my trip will take me on a 600-mile round-trip jog to St. Louis to see the Cardinals. There are a number of ways to go. What I'm going to do is make a kind of loop, so that I'll come back a different way. I'll mosey down I-57 to Champaign-Urbana and take a look at the University of Illinois. Then I'll head across I-72 to Decatur and Springfield, where I'll pick up I-55 into St. Louis. I'll come straight back on I-55, so I'll have some time to stop in Elmhurst Tuesday afternoon. What an irony--a day game at Comiskey and a night game at Wrigley!
I have some time now, though. The Sox game moved right along. So I drive south to Hyde Park to see one of the world's great universities, the University of Chicago. Countless friends have passed through here, so there are many threads. They have told me how beautiful it is, sitting in the south side between Washington Park and the Lake. They have pulled their punches.
The campus is stunning, white stone gothic, just like Yale, Oxford, Cambridge. Green lawns and quadrangles hide behind arches. Trees are in bloom. Ivy climbs the walls. A bagpipe band practices on a lawn, inexorably drawing an audience. People smile in the breeze and sun, as if this were not unexpected. Nearby, others in Medieval costumes wearily call whatever they have been doing quits for the day. How can people not want to live around universities?
The Chicago industrial smell claws at me as I pass the city's southern borders on the way to Kankakee. The land is flat, the soil dark as I race sunset. I lose. I can't tell Champaign from Urbana from a hole in the ground. The Illini will have to wait until morning.
I stop to ask my way at a gas station and am reminded that I am in midwest grid country. Directions are given in absolute cartographic terms. "Go east X lights, then turn south." None of this gray, relativistic "turn left three blocks, then right." People here want their moorings clear. They want to know where they are on the map. These are rooted people, many place-bound by choice. None of this left, right stuff. What happens if you get turned around? You'll left, right yourself straight into iniquity.
My ex-mother-in-law (number 1) grew up in Kansas. She can never remember which of her hands is left, which right; but she knows which one is north, which south.
I have become soft. For the second night in a row I succumb to a motel. No Tom Bodette special, this, just a cheap hotel for the businessman. I wheedle my way into a salesman's rate and pack it in.
The trip is about half over, this evening of the sixth day.
DAY 7: Meet me in St. Louis, Ozzie.
The morning is drizzly, an ill bode for the Cards; but I guess I have to get up anyway. In the mist I hunt the university. Tree-lined back streets are named for states. These are big trees, with BIG leaves, just as I remember them; none of those silly little southern things, trying to pass for real leaves. These are healthy, corn-fed, midwest leaves.
In many towns in America, especially university towns, street names are pedagogical. People name them after states, colleges, or American presidents. People who grew up in these towns are the only folks other than historians or geographers who know the names. The town map in kids' heads recapitulates history.
You can tell, more or less, when the bulk of the town was settled by the last presidential name in line. Your recent names are found elsewhere, at the edge of town, on a new school, or renaming something downtown, obliterating history, like the Massachusetts Cambridge wiping out Boylston with JFK Street.
In fourth grade I went to the Abbey Lane School. I thought it was named for Abbe Lane, Xavier Cugat's gorgeous pre-Charro wife and band-singer, sort of. The stupid school turned out to be named after a street, not a lady.
In the southern part of Champaign or Urbana or whatever, I bumble out of this middle west, middle-class residential cluster into the fields surrounding the University of Illinois School of Veterenarian Medicine. In the middle of what looks like farmland are parking spaces with meters. Visitors must park here for the Large Animal Obstetrics Building. This is a teaching hospital. It reminds me of childhood visits to Wisconsin barns with my Great Uncle Joel.
I drive down Florida Avenue, past the football stadium and the basketball arena, to the residential area and fraternity row. I park near the central central quad and the union.
I have a British friend, worldly beyond measure, who came once to the University for what I guess was a job interview. He flew to Chicago and made his way to Champaign/Urbana, through the farmlands. He tells of his visit with anthropological nuance, as if the intrepid traveller had gone to a far end of the earth, and since managed to return to his table at the Adventurer's Club.
So I guess I'm surprised at the size of the campus, the number of buildings, the attractiveness of the central campus. The grass on the quad is a little wild, unkempt, as if somebody were thinking of letting a bit of the old prairie grow here. It's a long rectangular space. Red brick buildings with white trim border the long axis. Near the south end, opposite the Illini Union at the far north, is an octagonal brick building with protruding square front room. Looks like the kind of church building or intimate concert room I've seen at small liberal arts colleges.
It's not quite eight o'clock. There are few students yet in the Union's wood-panelled rooms, but all of them are Asian, sitting by themselves turning pages, taking notes. The bowling alley is closed, the game arcade empty, the cafeteria and snack bars slowly filling.
I take my coffee outside, past the statue of Alma Mater, the campus bus service stop, and up along a stone building named for Illinois Governor Altgeld. This is the Governor who vainly tried to save from hanging those convicted in the so-called Haymarket Riot trial. This was a populist governor, one of my own heroes. The good citizens of Illinois surprise me, as they will again, with their public acknowledgement of just and humane political people.
Now comes a bit of serendipity, a little mutation in the Plan. I'm trying to get to Decatur, but in the mist I turn onto the wrong interstate, the one to Mattoon and Memphis, where I've been, and who knows where else. I exit onto a county road, heading straight as Nebraska for Monticello. This farming town reminds me of an Illinois version of Arcadia, Florida, through which I pass on the way home from mom's.
In the town square, a uniformed police officer walks about, marking car tires with a chalk stick. There are no parking meters here, but people oughtn't to overstay their two hour limit. All of North America needs those spaces. Imagine the municipal revenue accruing from the fines of countless miscreants. Probably more officers hiding near the slow school zone.
I leave Pax Monticello on Illinois 105, south to Bement. Musing on the water towers that dot the horizon, I suddenly see all of the heartland built over a huge basement of water pipes, heading from source to tower to street to house-- all hidden from view, sustaining life. Just under the surface of the land, just out of sight and out of mind, are water pipes, sewage lines, maybe electricity and telephone cables. What an x-ray it would make, all these hidden capillaries of modern life.
Just outside of Monticello there's a historic marker. On July 29, 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas met on this spot, heading in different directions, and agreed to meet in their famous debates. Later that night they would sit in Francis E. Bryant's parlor in Bement, into which I will shortly stumble, to work out the details. Then Lincoln would take the midnight train back to Springfield.
This is Lincoln country. Today and tomorrow I will wander on and off the Lincoln Heritage Trail. This is not Stephen A. Douglas country. People forget that, to many at the time, Douglas won the debates. He certainly won the senatorial election. But it all got swallowed up in Lincoln's presidential victory and the Civil War.
As the martyred Lincoln received secular sainthood, so Douglas became smaller and greasier. He becomes an important apologist for slavery. The American Adventure at EPCOT Center presents the "glib" Stephen A. Douglas. I waited for Randy Newman to mention him by name in "Short People." There are no Douglas fans, as far as I can tell, only Lincoln fans. I'd like to know how many people visit his tomb in Chicago. I didn't.
In Bement I see the sign for the Bryant Cottage State Historic Site. William Jennings Bryan, I think, forgetting how to spell. I didn't know he ever lived in Illinois. I park in front of this little white wooden house, utterly unpretentious. Elvis could have been born here, or "Give 'em Hell" Harry.
As I soon find out, this is the Bryant house, with a "t," built by Francis E. in 1856. He was a banker, storekeeper, politician, and friend of Douglas. The Bryants were with him when he ran into Lincoln in Monticello. This little four-room house is preserved partly because of its place in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and partly as an example of small-town Illinois life in the mid-1800s. You go along, living your life, minding your business, and then someone comes along and decides it's part of "history."
The guide is wonderfully chatty. Bement is off the well-trod path, so when someone comes by, there are a lot of things stored up to say. She tells me about the cottage, the furnishings, wallpaper, and carpet, and about the accidental fire that recently burned one corner. The fire department was extraordinarily speedy, as was the neighborhood fire brigade which instantly formed.
She tells me that one reason beds were so short in those days is that because of beliefs about health and sleeping position, many people slept half-sitting, propped up with pillows. When I get to Lincoln's house in Springfield, she says, never thinking for a moment that I won't, notice how short the bed is.
The guide has lived in Bement all her life. Her children are in Florida, working for the state Water and Game Commissions, doing environmental work. Thanks to her kids, she has become pretty conscious of the environment herself. I think she still eats meat, though.
From this farmland triangle between Champaign/Urbana, Mattoon, and Decatur come two of the important people in my life. Their presence sits with me as I wonder why someone named the next town Cerro Gordo.
Larry looked like Santa Claus, rotund, gray-white beard, almost always, unless lost in Bach or Brahms, a smile on his face. Years ago Larry left the land for the ministry. From soup kitchens in Chicago to a Presbyterian ministry in Boston, Larry expanded the world with his huge heart.
His twin passions were classical music and justice, neither of which paid enough to help out the family much, Joan and the kids. As a part-time, underpaid chaplain at Harvard, he counselled and supported his flock, especially those who risked themselves in the name of peace and equality. He always thought of Jesus as a kind of radical, working among the poor, touching the diseased and disfigured, telling pointed stories about eyes of needles and the rich.
Larry was also a conductor of musicians, professionally trained in Europe and America. He had helped found the Pro Arte Orchestra, one of the only cooperative orchestras in the land. To join them in choral music, he started the Back Bay Chorale, with which I have been privileged beyond my merit to sing. The music he taught us to make was, like most great music, liturgical music-- Messiahs, requiems, psalms.
He led us into the humanity of the stories, the suffering and glories, and away from the narrowly parochial readings. We were Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, all drawn into Larry's world of righteous commitment to human kindness. He was, as someone said at his funeral, a "collector"--a collector of people. He gathered them just like the man in whose memory he lived his life.
He had always chided me, in his firm but friendly way, about my drinking and my smoking. He had spent time with people dying of both. I quit. Then Larry died a couple of years ago, of brain cancer. He was fifty-two. We miss him greatly.
Byron, too, sang with us, a tenor to my bass. He still sings with the Chorale, carrying on as it gets musically better. Byron came from a farm not too far from Larry's, here in this eastern Illinois triangle, but his trip to Cambridge--through Nigeria, University of Chicago, Harvard Divinity School, and on into anthropology--was a bit different; for he started out a Mennonite, scheduled for suspenders and farm brogans.
I have known By and Mary Jo--an Italian-American sociologist from Stratford, no Mennonite she--for years. They are in the biz, teaching now at Harvard, where I once apprenticed.
These are good people, friends beyond the call in hard times. I feel their silken threads here, just east of Decatur.
The rain is gone now. I'm finally in Decatur, home of Milliken University, a couple of blocks of red brick buildings. Here also is Lincoln's Country Courthouse, one of the places on the circuit that he would visit to adjudicate cases. This is a small make-shift wooden building, like a log cabin, angled wood fence out in front. Inside are wooden benches and a wooden desk. There's a fireplace, but I hate to think about how cold this place must have been in the winter.
The drive down Illinois 48 to Taylorville and Litchfield is pretty uneventful. I have rediscovered Dairy Queen, and my daily "blizzard" makes the time go by. In Litchfield there's a house with signs in the yard. "Mr. Edgar, What ever happened to morality?" and "So long, Bobby." There's a crying face. Mysteries.
Savoring the ineffable, I reach I-55--which I had left days ago in Memphis--for the run to St. Louis. I'd like to see the Cahokia mounds before the game. I suppose I ought to do one archaeological thing on this trip. But there is another surprise awaiting.
A hand-made sign on the interstate directs me into Mt. Olive, where Mother Jones's grave lies in front of the monument for the Martyrs of the Virgin Massacre, October 12, 1898, in the National Union Miners' Cemetery. The monument was erected October 12, 1936 "in honor and to the everlasting memory of Mary 'Mother' Jones, General Alexander Bradley, and the Martyrs of the Virgin Riot of 1898 by the Progressive Miners of America and the Women's Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners of America."
Bronze statues of miners flank the stela. Another stone honors Gen. Bradley. There are flowers on Mother Jones's stone marker; two bouquets, one black and white silk, the other looks fresh. This part of the cemetery is a little garden, surrounded by a circular concrete walk.
Mother Jones is one of the great heroines of the American labor movement. Like the spirit of Joe Hill, she seemed to be everywhere in the early 20th century, lending her fiery support and courage to union people and causes. Year after year she would be there, at the gates, on the podiums, in the jails--on the front lines. As a Union man myself, I have felt her memory give me courage in struggles with what in my heart I continue to think of as "the bosses."
This is a great part of the American Adventure. People would come here to pay homage if they know it was here. In town I try to find a memento, even a postcard. There are some old painted ones at the drug store, insistently sold for a dollar, but nothing else. People at the drug store, the Five and Dime across the street, and the town library don't know much about this Mother Jones business. Apparently Betty does. She's in charge, but I don't want to go bother her at home. This is not Graceland, but get some new postcards.
Just outside St. Louis, still in Illinois, is Cahokia, the largest prehistoric city north of Mexico. The original city, center of Mississippian Culture from 900 A.D. to 1200 A.D., covered slightly less than six square miles. At its peak, Cahokia probably had a population of about 20,000.
The current historic site contains some sixty-five mounds in an area of 2200 acres. Few of these have been excavated, but enough is known about the city to construct the presentation available at the Interpretive Center/Museum. Through the stylized Birdman doors--the symbol for the site--the Center offers a fifteen-minute orientation slide show, which I see after being entertained by a middle-aged female employee and her non-stop post-mortem for the recently departed St. Louis Blues hockey team. She certainly has an analysis. St. Louis, I will discover, is a hockey town. Whatever may be happening down at Busch Stadium, all the people on the call-in radio sports shows want to talk hockey.
After the show, and a visit to the dioramas in the museum, I head out for a quick walk around the mounds. This little museum, incidently, is quite well put on. As I will also discover underneath the Gateway Arch, the St. Louis area is very good at small museums.
I lived in Oaxaca, Mexico, for a summer, and spent a fair amount of time wandering around Monte Alban; so I'd seen pre-Columbian temple cities. I'm also not much of an archaeologist. The classes I had to take to get my degree were enough. I was in this one for the stroll around the main site, then a climb to the top of the biggest hill, Monks Mound.
The Cahokia guidebook claims that Monks Mound--named for the French priests who built a chapel on the first terrace in the 1700s--is the largest pre-historic earthen construction in the New World. It covers fifteen acres, and rises up in four terraces to 30.5 meters. In the 1830s, someone built an entire farm on the third terrace. His grave is up in the northwest corner.
The fourth terrace affords a clear view to St. Louis, the Arch now glowing in the sun. It's time to cross the Mississippi again.
Busch Stadium is right downtown, conveniently located next to the National Bowling Hall of Fame, and just blocks from the Arch. I grab stadium parking, buy my ticket, and head into the roaring gale toward the river.
I walk past the green esplanade and the Gateway Arch down to the river. Riverboats are tied up to my left. One holds a Burger King Restaurant. Another -The Emerald Lady--loops in long ellipses up and down between bridges, calliope blaring, to advertise all the boats and their various cruises. Sticking my foot into the dirty river, I am again surprised at how much narrower it is than memory or myth would have it.
I climb the steps to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, dominated by Eero Saarinen's 630-foot-high Gateway Arch. The structure narrows considerably from bottom to top, making it seem much taller and skinnier than it actually is, especially from underneath. Visitors can ride to the viewing portholes at the top in small gondolas, rising inside from a station underneath the arch. I buy my ticket, but again vertigo strikes.
The closer I get to the visitors' pod, the more I start to sweat. My gag reflex turns on and the palps begin. Vertigo again. I've tried, but it won't work. With an abject half explanation, I crash out the entrance barrier to safety in the underground lobby. My breath returns, my heart slows down. I am o.k.
There is a series of photographs near the museum of people on top of the arch. One man is sitting on its top surface, changing the airplane-warning light bulb. Another is just standing there, looking up at whoever is taking the picture. These pictures make me almost physically sick.
The Museum of Western Expansion is splendid. Using documentary photographs, maps, paintings, and physical artifacts, the story of the nineteenth-century West is told: the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Civil War, the spread of the railroads, the conquest of Native Americans, the settling of the prairie. Vertical panels line the walls, containing large photographs and exerpts in script from the Lewis and Clark Expedition journals and others. The various sections include material displays and 360-degree dioramas that serve as focal points for the story.
The trapper section has a mock beaver pond. There are prairie grass, a towering grizzly, a buffalo, wagons (including a Conestoga), Civil War paraphenalia, a long-horn steer, a stagecoach, bales of hay, a sod house, dugout canoes, mining equipment. I walk about among the displays, wishing there had been museums like this nearby when I was a kid. I could have been like Steven Jay Gould, entranced by his dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History, set as a curious child onto his palaeontological course. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my life.
As the museum shuts down, I climb back into the wind. It is really howling. Sailing back to the stadium, I pass the Old Courthouse, where the first Dred Scott trials were held in 1847 and 1850, leading to the 1857 Supreme Court decision that Black people were not legal "persons" or citizens. They thus were allowed no right to sue in federal court.
Behind the courthouse I sit for a moment, hunkered down out of the wind near the fountain. Framed by the courthouse cupola, iteslf centered in the Arch, water flows down steps into the pond. Two teenaged couples soak their feet and giggle. Put straw hats on them and it's Tom, Huck, and Becky--American images, reminding me that baseball is played nearby.
The guy at the ticket office sold me a lousy seat, way back under the overhang. When the park fills up, I will settle in the front of the second deck over third base. Now I'm in left field, just in fair territory, watching batting practice, hoping for a baseball. Out there I watch the pitchers run football pass patterns as exercises.
Busch Stadium is ROUND, perfectly symmetrical, probably not a centimeter off. The color scheme is predominantly red--Cardinal colors--with blue seats in the bleachers. The lower level box seats sit way out toward the field, so that the upper decks are pulled back. The concrete roof hangs out over the third deck, designed in arches to mimic the city theme.
New-breed electronic scoreboards dominate left and right center. They will be filled with pictures, stats, ads, as the game goes on. One of the useful things they do here is tell fans the scoring on the hitter's previous at bat. This helps those who are keeping score, but who missed the at bat, to catch up.
Here's the first mascot I've seen, someone dressed up in a red bird suit. It looks like Woody Cardinalpecker. It's named Fredbird.
It dawns on me that in the majors they've been playing the "Star Spangled Banner" before the players take the field. The players used to run out, presumably ready to go, then take their hats off, and stand at attention while the interminable song was sung. A good, slow soul version, the singer really doing it, could take a lifetime.
Day after day they would listen to this stupid song, like water-torture. I pictured someone losing it one day, running completely amok on the field. Now someone has shown mercy. Maybe television didn't want to waste the time any more. Maybe the players union won a victory for sanity. Maybe there was a revolt of the players in Toronto and Montreal--imagine listening to two national anthems every night, even if one were actually musical.
The game begins. The Cards are playing the Braves, who take an early three run lead. It's Jose DeLeon against John Smoltz, two good power pitchers. The lady behind me is here on company tickets. I don't know if she's with a co-worker, boyfriend, or husband, but she's here to look at Todd Zeile, Cardinal catcher-turned-thirdbaseman. She makes no bones about it. She's also not the only woman in the park with this intent. The man is not ugly. As the game goes on, and the beer vendors do their job, she will borrow my binoculars more and more often. "Hey, Todd, turn around!"
Watching the vendors--five, six, seven in a clump, all selling Auggie Busch's wares--it occurs to me that, other than "Dancing Harry" in Birmingham, they are just about the only black people I have seen in the stands for the past week. Where are baseball's black fans? I'll see a few, here and there, about as many as there are in baseball's management, but except for players and vendors, not many.
I remember how odd it felt to see the James Earl Jones character in Field of Dreams. The J.D. Salinger of Kinsella's novel had been transposed into a black writer and fan, in a kind of Hollywood-style war-movie integration. Having sat at ballparks and looked around me, it rang strange.
In American cultural mythology, baseball is the country game, pure, idyllic, a hot summer's elegy played in small towns. Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell aside, it is played--in the legends--by white boys from the sticks: the Deans from Arkansas, Feller from Iowa, Mantle and Bench from Oklahoma, Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach. The city players were anomalies, set apart, like Gehrig, DiMaggio, even Musial from smoky Denora, by their special grace and civility.
In novels and movies, baseball stories are morality plays, pitting the wilderness purity of the land against the corruption of money and power in the cities. Nature is discovered, tamed, taught control, like Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham. It is brought to the city, put on display, corrupted, like Shoeless Joe in Eight Men Out, shot and bribed like The Natural.
Redemption may be found in the mythical home run of The Natural's last at bat, destroying the artificial lights that have darkened the game, but it is found especially back on the land. Here is the "Field of Dreams," built to stitch time together, to bring back Shoeless Joe and the others, one's father, perhaps, to show them to our child. It is a small, strange, stubborn act, this levelling of the field, chalking of the lines, setting of the bases. And the waiting.
But in the myth, it works. They come. And in the building and waiting and playing, we are all absolved for a moment of hubris and corruption. In the best of these legends--in Kinsella's (r)MDRV¯The Iowa Baseball Confederacy--the nation is returned, for a moment, to justice.
Except for (r)MDRV¯Bingo Long's Travelling All-Stars, and the wit and wisdom of Satchel Paige, there hasn't been much room in these stories for black Americans. Where once they were rural people too, slaves and small farmers, they have since become the essence of the city. Here, in lives sculpted by American racism, black Americans have built a political culture based on the expressive style of language, of the pulpit, the quick-thinking rap, and the artistry of physical grace in direct competition.
Black Americans--and black Hispanics--play baseball, just as they play football and basketball. I am watching one of the All-Timers tonight, Ozzie Smith. However, it doesn't seem to me that they watch it much, at least not on this trip. As Pete Axthelm wrote, basketball has become (r)MDRV¯The City Game. This is not so much about where it is played--for it is played everywhere--as about what it means to whom, and where it now fits into the mythology of American culture. You want heroes for black kids? You'll find them in Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, David Robinson. They all wear shorts.
Back at tonight's game, I search out the corporate spaces. Skyboxes go all the way around the field, ending high above right and left center. Fans out there may be pampered, but they're sure far away. There are four group areas out there, the Dugout Room, the Bullpen, the Cardinal Room, and the Grand Slam Room.
For the first time, "Take me out to the Ball Game" is not played during the seventh inning stretch. Instead, they play the Budweiser song and show the Clydesdales on the scoreboard screen. Tomorrow, at Wrigley, I will sing with Mr.-Seventh-Inning-Stretch himself, Harry Carey, But tonight I am scandalized. The Bud people, the owners of the Cardinals, have just documented my case about the moral corruptions of the city. They have chosen commerce over tradition. Bah! Humbug to them!
The Wizard saves the game, in particular and in general. In the bottom of the ninth, he drives in the two tying runs, with an infield hit no less. For the umpteenth time this year Joe Torre's Cardinals have rallied from behind. Lee Smith comes on in relief, bigger than Delaware and a lot more intimidating.
With one out and the bases loaded in the eleventh, Ozzie does it again, hitting a line drive to center to score the winning run. Lee gets the win as the "Smith Bros." do in the Braves. This is the most interesting baseball I've seen so far.
Listening to hockey talk on the radio, I cross the Mississippi for the last time--now ten times in all--and drive north toward Springfield. I pull in at the Coalfields Rest Stop on I-55. I've grown soft with all this motel living. It's time for some discipline. The sign says there's a four hour maximum here, and there's a guard/caretaker sitting on the bench with a stick. Down to the end of the line I go once again. Four hours is better than nothing, and I bet he speaks biggly and carries a soft stick.
Under my sleeping bag in the front seat, I slip away from the evening of the seventh day.
DAY 8: It's root, root, root for the Cubbies.
It's early morn in Coalfields. I've slept almost seven hours. I haven't been beaten, but I don't want to press my luck. So it's up and out.
I've been at it for 3236 miles now. Today it's back to Chicago, by way of a detour for some childhood memories in Elmhurst. It's Tuesday, April 30. Only six days left. In a week, I'll be wondering why I decided to teach summer school.
Tonight I'm going to hear Harry Carey sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" in the "Friendly Confines" of Wrigley Field, one of America's remaining treasures. This will expiate some of baseball's shame at offering the Budweiser song last night.
Like Studs Terkel and Mike Royko, Harry has grown from a quintessential Chicagoan into a national character--one of those great examples of what Americans think they might be at their best. Hearing Harry in person, once again publicly defeated by the tempo and tune, but thoroughly undaunted, is, like seeing the Grand Ole Opry, or riding up the Empire State Building, a requirement for American cultural citizenship.
However, the road to Harry isn't straight. Springfield is in the way, and I need to find out just how short Lincoln's bed really is. I'd also like to find out if Sousa Jamba is in town, but I don't know who to ask. Jamba is a bemused Angolan writer, who has been travelling the country sending "Letters from Springfield" back to Wigwag magazine. Nearly every state has its Springfield, and Jamba is doing the Grand Tour. The guy at the Shell station thinks he's in Idaho, so I give up and ride downtown, guided by the yellow ribbon hanging off the top of the Hilton tower.
The silver-domed capital is flanked by bronze statues, a miner to the right, a seated Indian dealing with what looks to be a French trapper/explorer/factotum. Abe stands in front. A few blocks away, not far from the old capital, is the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, a couple of square blocks of closed-off streets and restored houses, affectionately known as "Mr. Lincoln's Neighborhood."
At the Visitors' Center I get my free ticket for the 10:45 tour of the house the Lincolns lived in during much of their time in Springfield. This pretty park, with its wooden and brick houses, lawns, birdsong, and leafy trees, dappled in the sun, would be a very peaceful place were it not for the gaggles of school kids waiting for the 10:35, 10:40, and 10:50 tours, practicing their acts for the "America's Dumbest Videos" TV auditions.
There are three of us peacefully waiting when our guide shows up, wearing his sunglasses and complaining that his early morning motorcycle ride to work didn't help his hangover any. This is no fresh-cheeked young Ranger, but maybe a close personal friend of Waylon Jennings.
We tour the house, four rooms on both floors. The second floor had a little room for the maid, who worked for room and board plus $1.50 a week. Lincoln's bed is pretty short. The lady in Bement was probably right.
Out back are the stables and a three-hole outhouse. Three holes strikes me as not too private for a privvy. Our guide goes about three for ten in answering our relatively obvious questions, not as good as Wade Boggs, but better than Jose Uribe, I guess--one question above the Mendoza Line. He directs us to the Visitors' Center for answers, and then launches into diversionary riffs about things we hadn't noticed.
Suddenly, he just walks off, without another word, to mingle with a new group. I think our tour's over. I hope he's feeling better.
Up I-55 I go, through the rich farmland of central Illinois, past a billboard advertising "Maple Sirup," over the Vermilion River, just beckoning for a canoe. The sound of the wind is constant. It's been with me for days, beating from the west. I stop for gas, and the flags thwap. I hear they call the wind "Mariah."
There's time to muse now, as I cruise northeast. I travel from fiesta to fiesta, carnival to carnival, changing from cocoon to crowd, loving the ceremony of it all.
At home, when I am crazed and anxious, I head for public spaces--Bayside, South Beach, Coconut Grove, Aventura Mall--to be anonymous among the throngs at the caf‚s, on the promenades, at the street festivals. Though I often speak to no one, the movement and the noise soothe me. The sounds of my city's many tongues make a tropical buzz, a calming mantra that allows me once again to focus for a time. This baseball thing is a trip to the Grove writ large.
Here's Joliet, where Elwood picked up Jake, and the Blues Brothers went off on their "mission from God." I, too, am now on a bit of a mission. Along the Des Plaines River, I drive by clusters of water towers, back into the scummy Chicago air. I am on my way to my summer childhood, to Elmhurst, to Spring Road, to Gramma's house.
The entrance to Elmhurst from the south on Illinois 83 is fronted by steel and glass skyscraper sentinels. I count nine immediately before me, tan, aqua, blue-green. They stand apart from each other like giant titans guarding the pass, like lone trees whose exuded chemicals inhibit undergrowth. These are the corporate headquarters of Oakbrook, planted in the old fields. I feel like a shrunk kid, landed in the middle of some interactive computer game, trying to sneak through to Gramma's.
A quick right and a left, darting before the giants can move, and I'm skimming north on Spring Road. It doesn't seem too different from the roads around it, but somehow it has been singled out to appear on the map of Greater Chicago on the back of my Official Highway Map of Illinois. Maybe 'cause Gramma used to live there.
The road traces the growth of this part of town since the 1940s in four segments. The southern quarter is the newest, made up of a development of small box houses, some with gables, like a little Levittown. This, too, used to be fields.
The second section is an older version of the first. These were the new houses when I was young, sprigs for trees, new lawns growing in the rich dirt.
I then come to the stretch in which the houses are yet a bit older, a bit larger, with a much broader range of personalities. These are the few blocks leading to the intersection of Spring and Valette, where we used to wait for the downtown bus. The house I'm looking for is here, but I'm not quite ready for it. I avert my eyes as I drive past, planning to sneak up to it on foot.
So I park on the northeast corner of the intersection, near Ahlgrim's Funeral Home. On up the street are the shops that lead past the torn-out tracks of the Aurora and Elgin Railroad and on to St. Charles.
Across the street to the west are new one-story professional offices. On the southwest corner sits the rebuilt Evangel Lutheran Church, looking now like any prosperous modern place of worship, with clean red-brick lines and new stained-glass window.
I stand in front of the church, looking across the street, finally, at the fourth corner. Gramma's was the third house in. The many-gabled house on the corner house has a wonderfully unkempt lawn, covered with dandelions. The intense yellow is like Proust's madeleine, flooding me with nostalgia for midwest summers, in which I remember dandelions everywhere. As I sink into reverie, transported in time, a car pulls up, a young man gets out and proceeds to mow the lawn. The smell of fresh cut grass is born out of the death of dandelions. Thus passes romance.
Gramma's house is distinctive. It's another box, four rooms downstairs, the upstairs divided in half. But for some odd reason, the roof is shaped like a barn roof, a curved, slightly kinked half-cylinder, with its open end facing the street. There is nothing like it anywhere nearby. It's like a spoof almost, Gramma's barn. I don't know why they bought it in the first place. Maybe it reminded them of Wisconsin.
It's been fixed up some since the summer of 1984, when I last passed this way. It looks repainted, or re-sided in a tan color. The broken window on the door has been fixed. The old screen porch, where I used to sleep in the heat of summer, has been walled-up.
Gazing at the house, I remember a few vivid scenes. I remember trying to convince people that the kitchen curtains had caught on fire from hot grease on the stove, and being told not to interrupt, when somebody suddenly smelled the smoke and ran in screaming to put out the blaze. I remember sitting on the porch on humid afternoons, listening to news broadcasts about the Korean War.
There were nights when I would lie in my bed upstairs, huddling under the covers, repeating over and over, "I don't believe in God," and deliciously waiting for some terrifying cosmic sign.
Days, I would wait for Gramma to get ready to go with me to the drug store to buy some penny candy. She must have been in her late forties, early fifties. She was always ready for some fun, whether playing cards, going shopping, or whatever, but she would never go out of the house without her hat. Later, when she began to speak gibberish, we came to call her "the mad hatter." When her hair thinned out, she would pin the hat to her wig. Once I was walking down the street with her in Florida. A nice, polite old man walked toward us. He tipped his hat gallantly to the little old lady. In jest, she returned the greeting, tipping her wig as well.
We used to drive to Gramma's from wherever around New York we were living. It would take two days. We would take the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and I used to lie awake at night thinking about the tunnels through the Alleghenies. I loved those tunnels--Blue Mountain, Kittatinny, Tuscarora.
We would stop overnight at a motel in Ohio, Warren, maybe, or Bowling Green, where I would forget my well-loved pillow, and we'd have to go back half an hour to get it. By the time we got to the Illinois border, everybody was ready for release.
One summer I rode with my Uncle Bob, dad's brother. Uncle Bob was another of the family's cheapskates, who drove most of the way out on the shoulder of the road, for which he had an abiding attraction. During the whole trip, he fed me only a couple of chocolate bars, one as we neared Elmhurst. We got to Gramma's and I ran up to the door, my face covered with chocolate. The door opened and Gramma said, "Who's this little boy with chocolate all over his face. I don't know anyone like this."
I broke into horrendous tears. She felt so bad. She never did anything mean to me again.
I cross the street now, sidling over into the neighbors driveway. I can not bring myself to ring "Gramma's" door, even though there is a car in the driveway, so I sneak a peek into the back yard from the neighbor's. The yard is wilder than it used to be. A picnic table is there, with its benches. There's a swing set that looks old enough to have been the original.
Grampa would cut the back pretty clean. In one corner, there was the little garden, in which, I think, Gramma planted only tomatoes, sweet corn, and rhubarb, yards of rhubarb, an endless supply. I got so sick of rhubarb jam, rhubarb pie, even rhubarb infested jello, that to this day I can barely listen to the word. It would accompany her meat and potatoes, whatever kind of the former cooked to resemble a three-hour pork chop.
The rest of the back yard was given over to a croquet court. Grampa would play with me after dinner until the Yeti mosquitoes drove us inside at sunset. We would sit on the porch, then, sipping lemonade, and watch the fireflies trace the night.
It was hot in those summers. One time the temperature hit a hundred for seventeen straight days. People were terrified that I would get heat stroke and pass away; but to a nine-year-old boy, there is no such thing as too much summer. So there was three week long tug-of-war, the grown-ups hauling me in like a hooked trout, me trying to dart and hide in unreachable places.
I would ride my bike though the fields where now corporate headquarters graze. I'd go up the little hill two blocks to my school, to play baseball on the black tar playground, my sneakers sometimes sticking to the new tar in badly repaired seams.
I walk around the block: Spring to Valette to Saylor to Crescent. Up one more street, I pass the tiny spanish-style stucco house of my best summer friend, Gary, whose folks were church friends of Gram and Gramps. I haven't seen him in over thirty years. Some years ago I heard that he was a commercial airline pilot.
As I walk around I notice the names on the houses. They are Irish, Italian, Czech. They used to be Norwegian and Swedish, with a smattering of German.
Then I am back to Valette and the school. The blacktop playgound is unchanged. The school's old weather-worn brick bulk is intact--a quintessential school building. Tentatively, I try the door, but it is locked. I'm sort of glad, not at all sure that I really wanted to see the inside.
There's a "new" addition at the end, what looks like the school office. This is obviously where one is supposed to enter. The window is opened and a woman asks me if I need help. I say that I once went to school here and just wanted to pass by. For a moment I am tempted to add, "Tell the kids to work hard. Somebody who once was here went on to teach at Harvard." Fortunately, judgement returns.
I walk up Spring Road, north toward the old Aurora and Elgin tracks. Wendt's Drugs, my source of penny candy, moved across the street to a more modern building, in 1971, says the pharmacist.
The tracks were ripped up years ago, when the Railroad went under. The right-of-way, here called Wild Meadows Trace, is part of the Illinois Park System, which maintains many miles of old roadbed in ribbons of walking and bicycling trails. Looking to the west, I can see the Villa Park water tower at the bend where I'd get my first glimpse of the train that would take us into the city. The trail is lined with historic lamp posts, each sponsored by a local organization, listed on the park's orientation sign.
I walk back to the old house. I have made my pilgrimmage, circled my holy places. If there is any ground where the spirit of my Gramma exists for me, it is here. If there is any ground where the spirit of me as a child exists for me, it is here. This is the source, the only place where my life held together, year after year.
It fell apart years ago, of course, when the house was sold, and when I left home, and when Grampa died. But it was there for a while, deep as truth.
And who, I cry, will share the memories? They are gone, puffballs in the wind. Living souls, come and gone, like we all, endlessly. And I am in a loneliness beyond words--outside the salvation of sign and symbol. I stand on a sidewalk in a small prairie town and shudder bone-deep for the disconnection of us all. My hands are on my head. I am bathed in tears and sweat.
In the passage of time and the generations I see no meaning, only the passage of generations and time. There are no answers, nor even questions. There is only the mocking of human pride, the death of the dream, the foolishness of the attempt.
I have come to this place out of the end of things, the banal clich‚ whose power comes from it very banality, its ordinariness, its inevitable part of the tragedy of being human. Many things are ending for me, and I curl into myself in the dark. I have no strength to begin again, no will. I see no point.
It is over or out. I must choose.
And in a manner almost automatic, the moment passes. I am sitting in the grass. The sun hurts my eyes as I try to squint them open through drying tears. I am, after all, on a journey. I have at least had the strength to come here. In truth, I chose to do so. I thought there might be dragons here.
There is no redemption in what I now do. Not yet. But, like Sisyphus, I do it. I will leave this place. It has taken me as deep as I can go right now. But I will bring along my sense of it, soldered to my soul. It will help me see small epiphanies, seducing me on, day by day, until, perhaps, some vague sense of hope and meaning returns.
Pain is a curious thing. When it is, it is all there is. It is infinite and beyond measure, and no one can be inside with us. When it is over we can try to tell someone what it was like, but words do not cross the line. We can not bring bring anyone back to what it was really like. It is another reality, like a nightmare or an acid trip. I can't even take myself back, and I was there.
I have the memory of pain. And we can share talk of having been there--"yeah, I remember what it was like"--but we can't share the being of it. Already, as I drive myself to the Elmhurst College campus, I begin to distance myself from that feeling I had, standing on the church corner.
* * * * *
Later--as I write these very words, in fact, just an evening's sleep from the story of my afternoon swoon--I see that moment, indeed, the darkness of my past few months, as a mote in the sea.
I have just come from the place where my Gramma is trying desperately to die or not to die, I can't tell which. I found her slumped over in her wheelchair. As she straightened, her toothless mouth opened in primal cry--maybe pain, maybe despair--her face contorted, seeking tears. Her thin white hair hung down, like all the crone drawings I'd ever seen. I stood at the doorway, silent. She is blind enough not to know I was there.
The last time I saw her, just before this trip, she was tooling around the halls in her chair, babbling a mile a minute, ordering people around. Now I drop the clothes I have brought, mumble something about being from out of town to the courageous young aides working the floor, and turn out the door.
It is too much. I can't stand it. It is unleavened despair.
I drive away, through town, past mom's condo, to the beach, and by a house we all used to live in. I am shaking, not with the heat I felt that day in Elmhurst, but with a kind of gunmetal chill. This is not about me. It is about her.
The work is not yet finished, and I retrace my way. I have not the slightest idea if I'm doing the right thing. Will I make her going harder? I don't know. I do know that I must tell her that I love her beyond measure and that I can not help her. I must tell her goodbye.
"Gramma," I say, coming into the room, "it's Stephen."
"Teven? Teven?" she asks, looking towards my voice. "Oh, Teven! Oh, Teven! Teven! Teven!"
I grab her hands. She knows me. She tries to cry, then stops, reaching up to pat her hair.
I pull up a chair and we talk. I can't understand her, but she nods as I tell her I've just been to Elmhurst and Stoughton, and about the new church. She holds my hands and burrows into my shoulder as we talk, presses her forehead against my cheek. I stroke her hair, tracing the blue veins showing through her thin scalp. She pulls my hand to her face.
I tell her I love her, and she say, clear as a bell, "I love you, too." Then, I think, but I'm not sure, "Tell everybody goodbye."
She wets herself, and I ask if she wants the nurses to change her. She smiles up at me. "No," she says, "don't want to." She has gone beyond that.
In and out she drifts. She rests, dropping her head toward the table before her, then reaches for my hand. Her smiles merge into grimaces, and I can't always tell which is which, as I look down past her gums to the back of her throat.
I stay an hour. What's the difference, an hour or a lifetime? I have to leave sometime.
"Goodbye, Gramma. I love you so much."
I am now part of Gramma's dying, just as she is so much a part of my living.
But, God, it can take so long, this dying.
My father-in-law took a week, publicly presiding over his going, calling in all his people, finishing all his business.
Gramma's infinitely lonely passage is taking longer. And she howls against the terrors.
I will not see her again. I beg that it end soon.
Godspeed, Gramma.
* * * * *
I walk the lawn of this pretty little college, founded by Germans in 1871, before they were swamped by Scandinavians moving south. It is a place of the young. Mortality is far away here. I do not stop these children, to say "Don't be foolish; remember the albatross," I let them chatter by, Elmhurst "Bluejays". They will know in time--in their way.
These schools that pull at me are places of hope and promise, especially the small liberal arts colleges. The older I get, the less I care for the political economy of the university. These monstrous institutions have become just another kind of business, seeking growth for its own sake, driven by the manager-priests of the Great God Budget.
To keep their jobs, faculty submit to the narrowest criteria of worth, penning themselves inside disciplines as if the world were actually so ordered. They willingly make themselves small. They entice graduate students to teach their classes, to run their labs. They scramble for research funds, and for the overhead monies that come along, by domesticating their creativity into safe, unthreatening formulae. They judge whole lives--thumbs up, thumbs down--on only one kind of evidence, as if synecdoche were truth, not trope. It just deadens the soul.
As I have lost interest in disciplines, departments, institutions, and the training of graduate students, I have rekindled my love for the teaching of undergraduates. That's why I took this path in the first place--to continue conversations with people who want to know, like the ones I keep finding in liberal arts colleges. I like students in the intellectual babbling stage, before they have settled on the sound system and syntax of their adult beliefs.
Screw footnotes. Tell a story.
Talk about the big things, like dignity and justice, kindness and cruelty.
The great universities I visit are full of these kids. So are the little places, Milliken, Elmhurst, later, Berea. Elmhurst is one of those names I look for on a Sunday morning in the fall, when I read the football scores of the previous day in the fine print. I look for big schools, little schools, going region by region as it is printed in my local paper. I hunt especially for those places where friends and friends' children have gone, places with which I have some kind of connection, however vague. Elmhurst is one of them. I've never been to a Bluejay game, but I had a nice moment of quiet delight a few years ago when I read that Elmhurst had played a scoreless tie with Division III juggernaut Augustana.
So, today I balance the map of death, lying creased beside me, with its antidote, not by plan, but by falling in with a pattern building under my awareness. Wheels within wheels, like Ezekiel. Only later does the picture focus. Now it's time to turn toward Wrigley. Maybe the path will turn upward.
I put small beads on the chain: the downtown Elmhurst theater where Grampa would take me on Saturday afternoons to see the serials--Flash Gordon, Hopalong Cassidy; down Lake Street, through Maywood, still industrial, but now a little piece of Mexico; into River Forest, and the apartment on Bonnie Brae where Gram and Gramp moved when they gave up the house.
I came here twice when I was long gone from home, driving across the land, guided to their building at the edge of Oak Park by the familiar Weibolt's sign hanging off the store on Lake Street.
In the myths River Forest is famous for its supposed mob families, gangsters who grew rich during Prohibition and moved out of Chicago to the respectable mansions just west of town.
My schoolmate, colleague, and good, good friend Jean grew up here, in this upper middle class town. She, too, shopped at Weibolt's before riding east to college at Wellesley. We met later, out on the West Coast, graduate students in the anthropology departmant at Stanford. Jean trumped her Seven-Sisterhood with a vengeance, disappearing into the lowland jungles of Colombia for years of fieldwork. She tested herself beyond any of us, intrepid, like a nineteenth-century explorer caught in a time warp.
Jean came out of one jungle and moved east into another, jumping two centuries to take a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was already in Cambridge, overmatched and confused. We would have dinner together now and then, talk life through, try to find some sense in things. Years later, she is a true and good friend. She has been there, always, for the hard parts, walking me through the shadows of the valley. I love her dearly, and I think of her here in River Forest.
After the stops and starts of Lake Street, driving into the Loop on the Eisenhower is a complete jangle. It takes all my attention, riveting me with micro-second decisions as I dodge other cars and potholes.
The Chicago skyscrapers still amaze me, just as they did when I would come in with Gramma and Aunt Sadie for a visit to Marshall Fields or Carson, Pirie, Scott, to ride the escalators and have lunch in the department store dining rooms. This is one of the great skylines, whether seen from inland on the Eisenhower, from out on Lake Michigan, even from the shore at Northwestern University up in Evanston.
It's a no-nonsense town. I'm listening to the local news as I turn onto Lakeshore Drive. Dan Quayle is in town, preparing for a trade mission to Asia. In D.C., pundits talk about political gestures and photo opportunities. Here in Chicago, what politicians do are "stunts." Like Jauss and Telander and the other "Sportswriters" on the Sports Channel, Chicago newspeople tell it like it is. "Stunts."
Except when it comes to the Cubs. Chicago is a big city, and in a big city, money counts. The game is get the buck, get the tourist, maybe even get the neighbor. I get off Lakeshore Drive somewhere around Wrigley, in the middle of the North Side. The parking places want ten, fifteen bucks, as if it were a normal thing to ask. This is the beginning of something I will feel here, just as I did at Comiskey--the gouge. I feel peoples' hands in my pockets all the time, maybe not the club's hands at Wrigley, but those of the people around the park, the parking people, the bar people.
For blocks around you need a special sticker to park on the street during the season's few night games. The sticker is partly for those with season tickets, but mainly for the people who live there, so they can have places to park in their neighborhood when outlanders pour in. Night baseball has already disrupted their lives enough.
What I do, with my out-of-state plates, is find a spot blocks away without a tow-warning sign. It may be that I need a neighborhood sticker for normal times, but I'm betting they'll tow the other violators first. Sure enough, at the end of the game, I am ticketed, but not towed. I'll consider the ticket as another souvenir of the trip, a memento of the City of Chicago.
Well, here it is. Wrigley. This is one of the great ballparks, certainly sold as the great American experience--the quintessential old-fashioned baseball emporium, cheap bleacher seats in the sun. I came here as a kid, for fifty cents, I think.
But what I find is that the ticket's expensive, the sellers are grumpy. So are the ushers. Chicago's beginning to leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I think I'd rather see a game in Kansas City or Milwaukee or Atlanta. I'd lots rather see a minor league game. In some ways I feel as if places like Graceland, which say, "Yeah, we're a bit of a rip-off--take us as we are," have an honesty about them. Fenway Park says, "this is a tough New England place--like it or lump it." I think Wrigley makes some claims to be something else.
Later on I will meet a couple of really nice ushers. One is an older woman who lets me come up to the top deck and look around when I tell her about my odyssey. She lets me in to see some of the sights, then introduces me to a kid, maybe still in college, who is himself trying to get to all the major league ballparks. He's seen twenty so far. He also likes Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Fenway, but Wrigley is best. Maybe you have to climb a bit, or go to Comiskey, to find some cordiality.
The old brick ballpark is beautiful--the outfield walls with their ivy growing on them, the leaves now sort of half in. There's the low brick wall behind home plate that I see from the centerfield camera on television. Beyond the outfield fences are the famous apartment houses with bleachers built on their roofs. Tonight they will all be jammed with people drinking beer and root, root, rooting for the Cubbies.
What's at least as interesting are the couple of floors of apartments below. It looks like residents have moved dinner tables to the windows. I imagine them sitting there, drinking wine, perhaps in candlelight. It's much more elegant than the stands above, like personal Skyboxes.
On the roof of a building in right field there's a very pale-lavender sign--Torco--shaped like a football and outlined by lights that sparkle on and off. It's a Wrigley version of Fenway's Citgo sign in Kenmore Square.
I'm eating my beef barbecue in pocket bread on the concourse when suddenly there's commotion. Not ten feet in front of me Harry Carey himself is directing two women to an electric cart for a ride somewhere. He climbs into the middle, squeezing a knee here, a knee there. Everybody's yelling, "Hey, Harry, let me take a picture!" He's smiling, waving as the cart pulls away.
This has been a hard day. I've dug down pretty far into this business of the ends of things. I don't know if I'm ready for any climbing out of the pit, but maybe a bit of it could happen. In the sentimental legends, Wrigley would be the place to feel the first breath of redemption, reconnecting to life through the ivy on the wall, maybe even through Harry himself, returned from his own near-death.
But it doesn't happen. Like the beginning of Brahms's A German Requiem, Wrigley is a false start. The scent of commerce, and a kind of North Side arrogance, have settled on the road for now. I must wait a little for the power of the game--the power of the game in surroundings that value it--to help me along. Maybe we've all freighted Wrigley with too much philosophical weight, just as we tend to do to the game itself. Maybe I'm confusing it with Gramma's stuff, but it feels like a promise betrayed.
If I lived in Chicago, I think I'd be a Sox fan. People on the whole were just a bit friendlier, and they seemed to care more about the game, as if they knew and understood it. They were quite happy with the old Comiskey Park, and will suffer the new one, although not without bitching and anger.
Later tonight I will see a new Wrigley tradition that I find arrogant and offensive. Fans in the bleachers will throw a Houston Astro home run ball back onto the playing field in disdain. The whole crowd yells "Throw it back! Throw it back!" I think of a kid who may have caught that ball--maybe one chance in a lifetime to be connected to the game that way (I've never caught one)--forced to give it up by the mob in its nasty humor. This is the mark of a cynical age. It's the kind of stupid, snotty thing White Sox fans talk about when they talk about Cub fans.
Just before the game, the crowd is entertained by a harmonica band, four guys in their fifties and sixyties. This, even "The Flight of the Bumblebee," is charming and fun. They are good.
The seats here are close to the field, but back under the overhang, you can get stuck behind a pillar. Just where the overhang starts to blot out the sky hang TV monitors showing the game; so those seats have their own rewards. These old parks can give you a feeling of claustrophobia. Whatever one thinks about the new ones, they never do that. They hold you open to the sky.
I move up to the second deck near third base, as has become my wont. I'm sitting in front of a real drunk, loud, obnoxious kid, his date, and another couple, none of whom have the wit to shut him down. He's into the game, having a great time, covering it with a constant stream of swear-word-adjectives. "What a fucking blast this fucking game is! All-fucking-right!"
People around him, including a kid or two, stare at him from time to time in disbelief and discomfort. No one goes to get an usher. We all just wait until he subsides into stupor.
Then I sit here and look out over the grass field, over the outfield walls, the apartment bleachers, the night lights of the city beyond them. I look up at the stars. I am out in the open, under the sky. I see what the promise of Wrigley has been, can be. There is even a cluster of black fans down the way.
Three home runs sail out tonight on the twenty-two mph wind--one for Houston, two for the Cubs. The game is a wipe out. By the end of the third, it's 6-1 Cubs, on its way to a 10-3 final score, before 27,523 fans. Mike Bielecki gets the win. The hitting hero is the Cubs second string catcher, Hector Villanueva, making a start tonight. A large man, he is "strong" tonight. "When I do well, they call me strong. When I don't do so well, they call me fat." Hector is 3 for 4 tonight, with a home run and 4 RBIs, as strong a man as you'd want on your side.
During the seventh-inning stretch, Harry leans out of his window and leads the crowd in the song. I move around so I can see him as I sing along. No question, I get shivers down my spine. For that alone, I'm glad I came.
I leave Wrigley to collect my parking ticket and head north on the toll road, toward Milwaukee. As I drive out, I see a White Castle. I haven't seen one in years. I stop for a cheap, oniony hamburger, but there's a line, people ordering twelve, seventeen, nine burgers. One bite and they're gone. I'm salivating, but I can't stay.
Just across the Wisconsin state line, I drive into Kenosha, to see if there is a Class A Midwest League night game tomorrow. The Brewers are playing in the afternoon and I'll be in no hurry afterward. But Kenosha is out of town, visiting Rockford. It's just as well, for tomorrow is going to be different, and I wouldn't have gone anyway.
Back at the toll road, I pull into the parking lot at Marc's Big Boy restaurant. I'm exhausted, emotionally drained. I've been to Gramma's and to Wrigley, the latter neither particularly confining nor particularly friendly. In the dark at the far corner of the lot I put down my seat, and in the friendly confines of my Chevrolet, I end the evening of the eighth day.
DAY 9: The Prequel
"I've been slimed!"
This is my first thought as I wake. Next to me is a tank truck. Kindly trying to skirt my car, which is directly in the way, someone is spraying lawn chemicals on the grass around the parking lot. All I can think is, "Oh, shit! Cancer!" as I hurry to the other end of the lot to repack the car.
Today is May Day, International Workers Day, and I am on my way to the city of Laverne and Shirley, workers if ever there were. In many parts of the world, everything would shut down today for parades and celebrations. It's a day when I always need a bank, desperately.
But this is America, and I'm going to Milwaukee. Not only will things be open--and I don't need a bank today--but the Brewers will keep them open almost forever. Baseball is played by the calendar, but without a clock. Today's marathon with the White Sox will explore the implication.
Milwaukee is the midwest version of Baltimore, a small industrial city on the water, not so glamorous as other places in the region. These are ethnic cities, sausage and beer cities, lined with the row houses of the lower-middle class. They are the Big Leagues' versions of hick towns, where sometimes people, like Kareem, feel in cultural exile.
People who love these cities really love them. "Go ahead," they seem to say, "make fun of us; turn us into a hick joke. But we've got something special here, and we wouldn't have it any other way."
I'd been through Norwegian Wisconsin on my way out of Minnesota. Now I was in German, Slavic Wisconsin. I'd gone from Lake Wobegon to "Roll out the Barrel." I would feel the Catholicism here, especially driving around Marquette University, past its soaring church. I would remember also Al McGuire's NCAA basketball champs, improbably bringing home the balloons and seashells.
My introduction begins at the southern end of the city. Seeing a Firestone sign in the distance, making my credit card good this May Day, I stop to get my rear tires checked. They have been making little thumping noises for a while. The harassed guy who runs the place comes out for a look. "It's your shocks," he says. "The tires are just beginning to wear. Lord knows, I'd like to sell you some new ones, but those'll get you home o.k."
I thank him and head on, already feeling good about the nice people in Milwaukee. In Chicago I would have gotten tires plus a parking fee.
I drive downtown, up one street, down another. Looks like a small midwest city to me. I turn north by Juneau Park at Lake Michigan and stop at one of the municipal parks that lines its shores. This one is a pile of rocks, big ones jumbled together at the water's edge. The beach is just to the south. I can look back at the city. It is cold and windy. It's probably in the mid-fifties, but I am freezing. This is no longer summer, barely spring. Long winters here.
Continuing north I am soon into a pretty fancy neighborhood. This is North Point, an historic area. There's a gothic castle tower here, topped by another, smaller tower. It's made of Cinderella's-Castle white brick. I find a sign in back. It's the old North Point water tower, built of Niagara limestone from Wauwatosa in 1873. It's Disney World!
Passing the Victorian brick houses on Wahl Street, I find parks, bluffs, houses in port city architectural style, even a par three golf course up on the bluff. Just inland is the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a pretty functional set of buildings, with a small central green, and bordered on the north edge with woods. There are not so many leaves at the beginning of May, but lots of dandelions. The library here is named after Golda Meir. I had forgotten that she was from Milwaukee.
I drive down the hill back into town, past the Mecca and the Bradley Center, to Marquette, an urban university looking like Temple or Northeastern. I'm ready now for a highlight.
Even though I quit drinking some years ago, I can not resist a Brewery Tour. Fortunately, Milwaukee, one of the great beer cities, has one at the Miller Brewing Company. I love the whole idea of beer--the smell, the taste, the lore, the ring marks on my desk. Just the look of a bottle of iced cold beer, beading on a hot day, tells me that the world can be saved. With the huge growth in the marketing of non-alcoholic brews in recent years, my life has been much brightened.
Brewery tours are actually pretty much alike. What sorts them out, the American ones from the European ones, for instance, is the greater reliance among the former on media techniques. This tour of "Miller Valley" starts out near the Gift Shop with a video presentation about the company's brewing history and its products. Perhaps I'm spoiled by Disney, but there seemed to be a lot of attempted cuteness here, and not much substance. This show is very much like a commercial.
The brewing center is temporarily closed, so we spend our time in the packaging and shipping centers. Fortunately, I know how beer is brewed, and I am always mesmerized by the packing facilities, with their cleaning machines, bottle fillers, and noisy, spinning conveyor belts. In the shipping center, my knees grow weak at the sight of all that beer.
I would be thoroughly enjoying this tour, however, were it not for the self-appointed life-of-the-party and his barrage of clever, pun-filled questions for our over-polite guide. He slows us up enough to cheat me out of a final Sharp's at the Miller Inn tap room.
I share a table with the other single guy on the tour. He is a relatively new doctor, originally from St. Louis, who has returned to the midwest from medical school in the east to work in a neurological trauma facility, putting motorcyclists back together. He's driving around for the few days before his job starts, getting acclimated to the Greater Milwaukee area. The thought of a baseball game is tempting, but he has other plans.
I have two quick glasses of Sharps on tap, leaving before the promised third one. Thanks, Harvey. I take my souvenir packets of barley, corn grits, and hops--encased in plastic in the tour brochure--and head for Milwaukee County Stadium.
The stadium is surrounded by parking lots, which become scenes of a massive tail-gate parties before Brewers games. People come in groups, even busloads, and set up their grills out on the concrete. I park and walk past the smell of hamburgers, sausages, and chicken, as the party goes on in the stiff breeze. There are families, school groups, clusters of retirees. What a nice feeling there is here.
Inside, on the concourse, my eye is caught by maps on the wall showing visitors where they can whatever food is available. Nearby are price lists for everything. This is a user-friendly stadium. There are even escalators out in left field, if you can find them. As at Minneapolis, souvenirs are sold off the floor, not in shops. On the second there are two beer gardens, east and west looking out over the parking lots. These are available for private parties.
This is one of the oldest of the new ballparks, feeling more like Fenway or Wrigley than like Comiskey or Royals Stadium.
I have the trip's best park sausage here, a bavarian with onions, sauerkraut, and Stadium Sauce. All that's missing here is Chili John's chili, the second best chili known to my good friend Herb, just behind his own.
Herb is a cinematographer, novelist, building engineer, carpenter, chef, and member of the Leverett House Senior Common Room at Harvard. He is from Green Bay, by way of Cornell, a man of sly wit and unruly optimism. He knew all the people from Lake Wobegon, but he got away. I met him when he married my longest-term Boston friend, Martha.
They both tend to see life's vicissitudes as opportunities. My forgetting to bring the wine is an opportunity to enjoy the food with water. A flat tire allows us a few unexpected moments to be here, at the side of this interesting road. There is not an ounce of goofiness in this way of being alive. It is just a mellow focus that these good people have, quite at home in the world and at peace with themselves. I love them dearly, and I hear Herb's sardonic Wisconsin drawl as I look for my seat.
There's grass here. The stands rise up two big flights, plus a mezzanine, extending down both lines. There are bleachers in left and right center, the latter split in two by the scoreboard, with a map of Wisconsin on top. The box seats are red; the general admissions seats are a sea blue-green. Again, monitors are hung for those in back.
I start out, as this story started out, in a front row seat, second deck, third base again. But the wind is too much and today I move around a lot, fidgeting and trying to get warm. I try to keep my mind occupied in the cold. When Robin Yount comes up to bat for the first time, I suddenly realize that I've seen some future Hall of Famers on this trip.
Counting the sure bets, if lightening doesn't strike tomorrow, stopping some of them in their tracks, I've seen (or would have seen were it not for the Disabled List): George Brett (Royals), Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, maybe Jeff Reardon (Red Sox), Kirby Puckett, maybe Jack Morris (Twins), Carlton Fisk, Tim Raines (White Sox), maybe Don Mattingly, maybe Steve Sax (Yankees), Ozzie Smith (Cardinals), Ryne Sandberg, maybe Andre Dawson (Cubs), now Yount, maybe Molitor, maybe Randolph (Brewers).
Some of the men I've seen, like Mike Greenwell (Red Sox), Shawon Dunston (Cubs), Bret Saberhagen (Royals), and some others, are possibles, but it's too early in their careers to tell.
I don't know what to think of Ken Griffey, Jr.
I feel like I'm seeing a bit of history, like others saw the Babe, Williams, and Feller. I wonder if they were as cold as I am.
There is no clue about what is going to happen in this game. Chicago jumps off to a 3-0 lead in the first, scores 2 more in the third. Knudson, the Brewer starter, is gone when the Brew Crew rallies for 6 in the bottom of the fifth. Franklin Stubbs highlights the inning with a 2-out 3-run homer. The Sox tie it in the seventh, as Raines hits one out. They bring in Radinsky, their third of what will be seven pichers. The Brewers will use six.
Some of the 13,973 fans in attendance will stay until the end, six hours and seven minutes after the first pitch. Not me.
* * * * *
I drive to Indiana, signing up for the comforts of the Interstate Inn in Rensselaer. As I register, I smell curry coming out of the apartment attached to the office. I tell the Indian manager--owner, I soon learn, about to buy another motel on down the road--how wonderful the smells are, how I once lived in Kenya and ate curry regularly, how Indian cuisine is one of my favorites.
He is pleased, but a bit surprised. He tells me that he's had people complain about that smell, saying that if the rest of the place smelled like that, they couldn't stay here. How cosmopolitan, we Americans.
Just next door, I get a DQ blizzard, chocolate/peanut butter, and then head to my room. I turn on the television, and there's Nolan Ryan, pitching the top of the eighth. You know the rest.
For me this has been a "winter" day. Yet I have been saved the expense of two tires by an honest man. I have drunk Sharps on tap. I have watched part of a very distinctive baseball game, almost getting to Gary before its end. I have smelled curry in rural Indiana. I have seen Nolan Ryan, who is almost as old as me, by gum, throw his seventh no-hitter.
On this evening of the ninth day, there is the faintest of hints in the air that a slim possibility of redemption might exist. Nothing much--for the universe doesn't offer much--but enough to push the stone a little further.