The Few, the Proud, the Parents

I was driving down Harlem Avenue yesterday on my way to picking up Michele at the train; call it a very late afternoon, the Monday after Easter.  The temperature readout in my car indicated a brisk 43 degrees for April 2^nd.  Whatever benefits to the sun being out were erased by a “brisk” northeast wind off of Lake Michigan.  In Chicago, we use “brisk” as a euphemism for “we’re freezing body parts here, buddy.”

I slowed down to catch a glimpse of the high school baseball game going on at the Morton Field, the Mustangs against somebody I didn’t recognize.  There were maybe thirty or forty people in the stands behind home plate.  With spring sports, it’s all about loved ones.

I couldn’t tell you the score because the scoreboard wasn’t on; that, too, is a spring constant.  And I couldn’t tell you the outcome because the Chicago papers no longer bother with decent coverage of high school baseball and softball.  At least when Clare played, I could find game summaries tucked away among the box scores and standings.  This morning, the Tribune was up to its old tricks of snipping away at those box scores it deigned to print while the Sun-Times ran the betting odds on today’s pro games and the NBA G League standings.  The Morton game was the proverbial tree falling in the forest, unwatched and unremarked upon by sportswriters or stringers.

But the parents didn’t care; those were their boys on the field, cold be damned.  No doubt they knew that the weather for the week is only supposed to get worse, with a chance of snow—flurries or showers, take your pick—mid-week.  If the game was on the schedule, they had to be there.  So, mothers and fathers settled in with whatever defenses against the cold seemed to work best; Michele and I went to most of Clare’s games wearing long underwear and sitting huddled together, a wool blanket wrapped around us.  It always worked, at least for a few innings.

A mother or father may been warmed by the knowledge that Luke Gregerson, the Cardinals’ new closer, pitched on the very same mound for Morton not so long ago, just as I knew one of Clare’s baseball friends at Morton was drafted in 2009 and 2010.  So, scouts do come to the field at 26^th and Harlem.

But not until it gets a whole lot warmer.