Earlier this week, I had a business
meeting out in Chicago. It was too early
in the day for me to fly out the same day, so I arranged to fly in the day
before. In the past few years, I’ve had
the chance of spending a good amount of time in Chitown, but as fate would have
it, I could never coordinate my trips with dates when the Cubs were in town and
playing at Wrigley Field . . . until this trip.
While I grew up a baseball fan, going
mostly to A’s and Giants games, I’ve had a list of the ballparks in which I
would like to watch a game. The list
isn’t very big: Yankee Stadium (the old one), Fenway Park, and Wrigley
Field. Back in the late ‘80s, I lived in
The Bronx and was able to attend two games at the old Yankee Stadium – once
from the bleachers where I got Bo Jackson (who was playing for the Royals) to
do a goofy pose for a photo and once on the lower level on the third-base
side. A few years back, my family and I
were in Boston about two weeks after the baseball season ended, so we missed
our chance to see a game but went on a tour of Fenway Park. While I’m glad we did it, I still want to see
a game at this historic park. And of
course, there’s Wrigley Field with the ivy-covered walls located smack dab in
the middle of a neighborhood. But I’m getting
ahead of myself – sorry!
On my flight out to Chicago, just after
we took off, the pilot comes on and says, “Good morning, ladies and
gentlemen. I’m Captain Steve Dauntless
and assisting me here in the cabin is my First Officer, Douglas Bornhoffer. We’re going to climb to 30,000 feet and find
some good stable air for our flight out to Chicago today. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight.” First off, I’m not sure why they tell us
their names. It’s not like we have
trading cards of the pilots and first officers that we’re all waiting to trade
or we’re all playing “Fantasy Fly Boys”, and we’re hoping we get the right guys
so we can rub it in our friends’ faces.
Also, in all the flying I’ve done, when the pilot has come on and made
the introduction, I have yet to have one of my fellow passengers look over at
me and say, “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe
how lucky we are! We’re flying with
Captain Dauntless. Do you know what his
ERA is?” At that last comment, I would
have a look of confusion painted on my face, and my fellow passenger would say,
“ERA! It’s his End of Runway Accident record.”
My only response at that point would be, “Well, I hope it’s zero.”
The second thing I find odd in these
little feel-good announcements from Cockpit Carl is the need to tell us our
cruising altitude, which is generally 30,000 feet. I would be impressed if the guy came over the
PA and said, “Ladies and gentlemen. Most
pilots like to cruise at 30,000 feet, but as you’ll notice in the next two or
three minutes, we’ll be climbing so high that nothing on the ground is going to
be evenly remotely recognizable. I do
that just to keep a little mystery in the flight. Oh, and I’ll be deploying the oxygen masks
just for the heck of it. Don’t be
alarmed, it’s your choice, really. The
air can get a little thin at 55,000 feet even in a pressurized cabin like
ours.” Telling us the cruising altitude
is silly. There’s nothing that tall that
we need to be careful to avoid. The
tallest building in the US is under 1,500 feet.
Mount Everest is just a tad over 29,000 feet tall. And I’m going to take a wild guess and say,
anything over about 20,000 feet is probably difficult to gauge anyway. With that in mind, the next flight you take,
bring an altimeter along and announce aloud your aircraft’s altitude in 5,000
foot increments. Your fellow passengers
will thank you, I’m sure. And if you
don’t make it up to 30,000 feet, demand to speak with the pilot – they love to
have their performances critiqued.
A little over three hours later, we
landed safe and sound (always my preference) at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. After picking up my rental car and making it
to my hotel, I fired up the Internet (God bless Al Gore for inventing that!)
and mapped out the best way to get to Wrigley Field from where I was
staying. Knowing that Wrigley is located
in the middle of a neighborhood and parking is a premium, I chose to catch a
train out in the north suburbs that would take me within a few blocks of the
park.
When I arrived at Wrigley, I chose to
purchase a bleacher seat. The folks at
Wrigley make a big deal out of their bleacher fans, so I thought this would be
the quintessential Wrigley Field experience – and it was. Upon entering the park, I was handed a pink
t-shirt and was asked to wear it at the end of the second inning for a
breast-cancer-awareness promotion and photo.
Gladly. I chose to make my way to
left field because there seem to be more right-handed batters than lefties, so
the odds of catching a home run ball were higher. One can dream.
I found my seat and sat down to watch the
end of warm ups. I noticed a lot of the
people around me were “regulars” – you could tell by the way they talked to
each other and interacted with the ushers.
As I sat on my metal bleacher seat, I realized I had come woefully
unprepared for an evening game in early May in Chicago. The cold metal beneath my hindquarters
quickly seeped its way up into my body through my jeans and thin underwear. (The only reason I added the detail about my
underwear was that if I had finished the sentence at “jeans”, some smartass
would invariably say, “What, you were wearing jeans with no underwear?” I know I would have said it if the roles were
reversed.) I had only brought a thin
fleece jacket and an ASU tuke (beanie) – not exactly the right outfit for 45
degrees with a mild wind blowing in from Lake Michigan. The ironic thing was that the official organ
player was playing Beach Boys songs to make everyone feel like spring had
arrived. I almost exploded when he/she
busted into “Surfin’ USA”.
As the players cleared off the field and
before the ceremonial first pitch was thrown out by a cancer survivor, the
field crew came out one more time to tidy everything up for the game. The last thing they did was spray down the
dirt in the infield with water to keep the dust down, and surprisingly, this
took six dudes with just one hose. The
lead “hoser” – the one who actually held the end of the hose and guided where
the water was sprayed – was dressed in a Cubs polo shirt and chinos. The other five cats were dressed decidedly
more casually, and they held the hose in three- or four-foot increments between
one another – apparently, this is a very heavy hose (although it didn’t look to
be more than twice the size of a standard garden hose). What struck me most was the fact there was a
disparity in the “uniform” of the lead “hoser” and the other “hosers” –
obviously, there’s a pecking order, and this lead guy is the big cheese. I’m not sure what he does better than the
other guys in handling the hose and directing the water spray. The ability to spray things is innate for
practically every male on this planet – we’ve been doing it since birth.
As the game began, I quickly realized
something: the game of baseball is mind-numbingly slow and so boring that I
believe we all lost a few IQ points for sitting there watching the contest
between the Cubs and the White Sox.
Ironically, I grew up playing baseball, and I loved it. Well, I might not have LOVED IT, but it was
the only sport at which I had a modicum of talent and could hold my own on the
field without embarrassing myself.
Basketball, football, soccer, etc. – none of these sports held any
fascination for me. Weird!
Near the end of the second inning, a woman
came to our section and reminded us to wear our pink shirts for the photo. What made me laugh was this statement: “Come
on all you White Sox fans. We put the
Cubs logo on the back of the shirts on purpose so you wouldn’t have a problem
wearing this for a photo opportunity for a good cause.” While the two teams are in different leagues,
the cross-town rivalry is alive and well, and the “pink shirt” organizers knew
their audience. Kudos to them! My mom’s a survivor and so are a number of
phenomenally brave women I’ve been lucky enough to know in my life.
The bleacher fans were some of the nicest
people I’ve ever met. Despite their
“niceness”, I couldn’t take it any longer after the fourth inning. The combination of the sports equivalent of
watching paint dry and the cold assaulting me at every turn, I decided it was
time to get back on the train and make like a baby and head out. As I was leaving, I looked down and noticed
that the ivy on the brick wall on which the bleachers sat was completely dead. Apparently, this stuff doesn’t grow well in
subarctic temperatures either.
My train ride back to my car was moving
along smoothly for the first three or four stops. Suddenly, without any prelude, one of my
fellow riders screamed at the top of his lungs – it was a sound one would
expect coming out of the mouth of a 13 year-old girl watching “Texas Chainsaw
Massacre” (which would be odd because that movie is rated “R”, and no
responsible adult should take an impressionable girl to watch such a thing, but
that’s another topic for another day).
As I looked in the direction of the scream, I noted it was coming from a
40-something dude who proceeded to tell the entire train car the differences
between what a heterosexual man and a homosexual man . . . prefer. After he was satisfied that we were clear on
this subject, he “educated” us on the correct terms for castration as it
applied to the different genders (given the degree of detail he shared with us,
I’m pretty sure he paid attention that day in biology class). His stop came just in time – there was a guy
on the other end of the car who didn’t seem to be following Screaming Sammy’s
lecture, and I was afraid we were about to get a demonstration. After Sammy left the car, the rest of the
ride was practically silent. I could
tell my fellow riders were glad to see the back of this guy, but truth be told,
I was beginning to be nostalgic for my days in New York City on the
subway. I still remember the guy who got
into our car in Harlem and walked around asking for money. When he didn’t get the amount he was seeking,
he started playing a saxophone. Of
course, he hadn’t taken a single saxophone lesson in his life, and he WASN’T a
child prodigy. After about ten seconds
(that seemed like ten minutes) of unmitigated noise, sax man said, “I won’t
stop until you give me some money.” And
we all dug into our pockets for as much loose change as we could find.
The rest of my time in Chicago was fairly
uneventful. And the plane ride home was
okay except for the toddler who sat behind me with restless leg syndrome and a
mother who was absolutely oblivious. I can’t
blame the kid because, well, he’s a kid, and his mother obviously stayed for
all nine innings of the game the night before and lost too many IQ points to be
a responsible adult.
