Dear Evan:
I was never a baseball fan. My father tried. He took me and your Uncle Benjie to Texas Rangers games, back in the 1970s when shorts were short and metal bleachers sat wavering in the Texas heat. Watching baseball was literally painful.
Fast forward to 2001, when I landed in Chicago and, specifically, near Wrigley field. Near enough to hear the games from the courtyard behind a little 3-flat apartment building. Near enough that we neighbors would put out a portable radio and listen to the games just to make sense of the cheering and, more often, disappointed silences.
The Cubs worked for me. They fit me. They were the Charlie Brown of sports teams, someone you loved but you knew would never get to kick the metaphorical football. The Cubs would never dance with the Little Red-Haired Girl. I could sympathize. The years I spent in Chicago, I would watch the Cubbies from Wrigley Field, or from my friend’s bar, The Dark Horse, or at home with the windows open so I could still hear the crowd live. The Cubs were easy to love.
One year early on, I was standing at a hat stand just outside Wrigley looking at a smart design from the 1918 Cubs when a home run ball fell to the street maybe 20 or 30 feet away. I didn’t get the ball, but I did buy the hat right then. You still see me wear it almost every weekend, worn and faded now.
Last night, probably 13 years from buying that cap and 2,000 miles from Chicago, you toddled out of your room at almost midnight. I gathered you into my lap. “Look!” I pointed to where men in bright blue were celebrating on our television. “Who just won?”
“The Cubs,” you murmured.
“They just won the World Series!” I was tearing up a little. More than a little. You snuggled against me and half-slept while I watched the celebration.
The Cubs win, I whispered to you. The Cubs win. Holy cow. The Cubs win.
I love you,
Daddy
