Cubs 20161102

I got home from work around ten turned on the world series Cubs up 6-3, within in a few pitches game is tied. My father is smiling. Indians coming back. Baseball is him in a paternal trickle down of my dad giving up baseball as teenager to move furniture, deliver newspapers and drugs for a local pharmacy. My grandfather listening to Yankees games on the radio and apportioning the quiet masculine body of a bat and a ball for a man who beat things, rough with gun barrels and asbestos

Little boys grown up men charging in dirt, sliding grass stains marking time. Something in the Bill Murray, Eddie Vedder, 1908 history sidebar, the miserable snowball of Cleveland, imprinting joy of knowing what it means to see your perennial loser city win. The splint in the human experience of hope, of want, of feeling connected to something bigger than yourself, that it is ok to be child-like gushing with wonder that magic or fate or luck will find your cheeks and bring that smile, knowing the agony of defeat is that millimeter away in the angle of contact. Sports at their best make humanity nervous and exhilarated, hopeful and mad, in the bottom of the ninth dreaming that anything is possible.