The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

 Ask Clare, and she no doubt will tell you one of the best days of her life also happened to be one of her worst.  Both parts involve me.

It happened July 2004, the summer between sixth and seventh grade.  Clare had spent the previous eight weeks proving girls could play a boys’ game.  She hit a walk-off homerun the last game of the season of Bronco Ball and then took part in the homerun hitting contest the next day.  Let me note here that she was the only female among 25 contestants.  We all felt pretty good about her finishing fifth, and this going up against a bunch of travel-team boppers.

Right after that, we took a driving vacation, from Springfield to St. Louis to Galena.  In Springfield, we toured the Old State Capitol, walking where Abraham Lincoln walked and listening to a reenactor talk about that young politician; for a fleeting instant, I thought my daughter might follow me into the history profession.  Then it was off to St. Louis for its Arch and The Hill, the blue-collar Italian neighborhood where Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola grew up.  Don’t let anyone tell you a Chicago bungalow is narrow, not compared to the shotgun house a young Yogi lived in.

After St. Louis, we drove up to Galena, in the northwest corner of Illinois.  For people from Chicago, the hills around Galena are our idea of mountains; a couple of hundred feet high is fine, thank you very much.  We’d been to Galena before, loved it, and planned a few days of exploring.  The very best and worst day-trip a 12-year old could take was in and around the town of Dyersville, Iowa.

The adult portion of the day unfolded 45 minutes west of Dyersville, which itself is a little west of the Mississippi River.  We were headed to a speck of a town by the name of Quasqueton.  It was a place straight out of Thornton Wilder, with dirt road and Civil War Monument—the right kind, to the Union veterans buried around it; our daughter was not impressed.  So much for that history idea.

 We drove outside of town a short ways to tour a home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in his post-WWII Usonian style.  Wright was in the neighborhood of 83 when the house was finished in 1950.  If he had lost anything to age, it didn’t show.  Not to go off the deep end here, but the thing about Wright is his ability to combine intimacy with light.  Walk into one of his homes and it feels like a near-death experience with a happy ending:  Yes, it’s a bright light and, Yes, it’s just for you and, No, you won’t die if you walk into it.

Of course, Clare hated every second of it.  Wright built the house on the banks of the Wapsipinicon River, and that might have been part of the problem.  Michele and I were not above quizzing our daughter about stuff—why was the movie good or the restaurant bad, what was the best part of the museum?  She might have been petrified we were going to give hera pop quiz in spelling.  The word is “Quasqueton.”  No, make that “Wapsipinicon.”

Thank God for Dyersville, or Clare could have gone all Lizzie Borden on us.  For anyone from another planet, Dyersville is the site of a cornfield from a certain movie about Shoeless Joe Jackson and friends.  Nothing like pitching a little BP there to lighten your daughter’s spirits.  As I recall, Clare lined one ball at my head and hit a couple of shots that rolled to the corn.  As you might expect, we took a picture of her stepping out of said corn.

Yesterday, Michele and I spent a rainy Saturday traipsing through the village of Oak Park to tour yet more homes designed by Wright.  Six hours in, as we waited outside our last house of the day, Clare called to tell me the White Sox were about to sign 19-year old Cuban phenom Luis Robert to a contract that could go well north of $20 million.  Our daughter says none of her friends’ parents do the kind of stuff we do.  It was the best of times after the rainiest of days.