Scenes from Childhood: The Trip to the Ballpark

When I was no older than 13, we drove to Chicago for an All-Star baseball game. Uncharacteristically, my father had bought a clutch of tickets for the All-Star game at Comiskey Park. In the station wagon were my father and his brother, their two wives (my mother Eileen and our aunt Jeannette), and a pile of kids: me, a boy cousin or two, and a couple of my brothers. That's a lot for one station wagon, but those were pre-seat-belt days, and we just scrunched tightly for the two-and-a-half-hour drive.

 

Here was the plan. We would drive to Comiskey, on Chicago's South Side, and everyone except Eileen and Jeannette would get out of the car and go to the game. The two women would drive across town (these two very rural, small-town women would drive across Chicago) to see a distant third cousin. Then they would drive back to pick us up after the game.

 

Baseball is a game without a clock, which is one reason I love it. A game can be any length at all. But that made it difficult to know in advance just when the women should leave their visiting and start driving across town to pick us up.

 

The game ended. The thousands of fans tumbled out of the stadium, found their cars or their public transit, and left. We stood, our little band of men, boys, and a girl, and we watched for our green station wagon with the Indiana plates. We certainly didn't expect them to be "on time", since no actual time had been set for the pick-up. They couldn't have known when the game would end, although I think Daddy expected them (perhaps had even told them) to listen to the game with one ear as they chatted, so they could begin the cross-town drive at the bottom of the eighth.

 

We waited, watching stragglers leave the stadium. We saw the hot-dog and beer vendors leave the stadium. We saw the umpires leave and the uniformed guards leave. We watched the players leave, their slicked-back still wet, their crisp short-sleeved shirts making them look almost ordinary, much diminished from the god-like status we had accorded them earlier in the afternoon.

 

And then there was no one else around. We waited. We paced. We sat on the pavement and pouted (only the children). We had been there completely alone for some 30 minutes when a police car drove up to us.

 

"What are you folks doing here?"

 

To them we must have looked like a bunch of dangerously innocent rubes on their beat, a violent incident waiting to happen.

 

"Don't you know this is not a good neighborhood?"

 

Well, actually, we might have known that. But to a small-town person, what does "not a good neighborhood" mean? That this is where the mean old lady lives who yells at kids? I think the Chicago definition was somewhat different. We explained why we were waiting, and the policemen left, warning us to "be careful" (and what did THAT mean?) but otherwise abandoning us to the South Side. I think we felt a little less safe having heard their concern.

 

My father and his brother were responsible for the lives of all of us, weren't they?  I never gave a thought to danger because I was with my Daddy, who would protect us all. He knew everyone, surely. He could just say, "I'm Myron Johnson, publisher of the Delphi Citizen," and everyone would respect him. So I wasn't worried. Perhaps I should have been a little smarter by the age of 13, but I was a late bloomer.

 

How long was it? Two hours, I think. Two hours of standing alone in front of the stadium as afternoon turned to evening, sunlight turned to dusk and then to dark.

 

Which was worse for my father and my uncle? Worrying about us in our precarious situation, or worrying about what indeed had happened to their wives as they wandered through the unfamiliar big city?

 

Well, Eileen and Jeannette finally arrived. They'd just got to talking and they couldn't get away. And then it took longer than they had expected to get back across town to the ballpark.

 

We piled in the car and went home to Carroll County, not worse off for our urban adventure, and not even smart enough to be grateful for the uneventfulness of our visit to Chicago.

 

Copyright 2007 Ann Tudor
www.anntudor.ca