A Smashing Start to "Next Year"

First appeared on April 11th, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

I don’t ask for much. I’d like a good hot dog and at least one of my children to follow directions the first time. I’d also like flushing toilets in Wrigley and the sports world to stop heckling her like she’s the subject of a Comedy Central roast.

I’m not in construction. The only thing I build are sentences and that’s done on a part time basis and somewhat pedestrian level. But I am a sports fan and I know enough to realize when Opening Day rolls around its best to have your ducks in a row. It’s not like the boys in Chicago had a short off-season after all.

So you pack yourself into a car and point it north for a little slice of heaven the outside world knows as Wrigley Field. You do this knowing full well the baseball gods will shine on you even though it is April and April in Chicago can sometimes require great bravery, or at the very least polar survival gear.

But Ernest Shackleton you are not, you are a Cubs fan and you don’t ask for much. You want a cold beer and a warm dog, a spot out of the wind and a toilet that works. The radio is alive with stories of civil wars fought in countries devoid of natural resources and any qualitative reasons for living there. And while you depart with the full understanding your journey is likely to end in heartbreak and misery, you harbor strong faith in the front office, despite their inability to hire a qualified plumber, and besides, this is ‘next year’ and you want to be able to tell your grandchildren you were there.

But an unexplained postponement leaves you flustered because, not unlike Washington, you are left choosing between a woman who hid her emails from the public and a man so elitist he believes everyone in the U.S. should be above accepting a helping hand. Talk about limited options indeed.

The Action 2 News broadcasts shots of construction crews delivering plastic outhouses to Wrigley, which only brings more inspiration to those jeering her. The jokes keep coming faster than Republican presidential candidates and while she may be undeniably stunning and the closest thing the sports world has to historical perfection, she remains incredibly fragile and self-conscious in the face of her multimillion-dollar renovation.

The Action 2 guy says something about the postponement being linked to a malfunction in the bathrooms on Opening Day before making a joke about a goat and you wonder if his hair is real and try imagining Shackleton’s crew using plastic toilets while crossing the Antarctic. Why can’t they just open the doors? You drove two hours and would be happy to just sit and watch the grass grow under the lights; after all games at Wrigley have always been more of an unavoidable distraction anyway.

So ‘Next Year’ is off to a smashing start as you take a twenty dollar cab back to the parking garage you had to move some stocks around and mortgage your house just to use for a couple hours. And as you limp out of town with your NXTYR vanity plate and Ernie Banks bobble head wobbling on the dashboard, you do so realizing ‘pottygate’ has made the Cubs the laughing stock of baseball. And while it’s not an entirely unfamiliar position, it is one they don’t normally assume until the first or second week of June.

© 2015 Eric Walker Williams