Every year the Chicago Public League hosts the city championship baseball game at one of Chicago’s Major League Baseball parks, alternating years between Guaranteed Rate Field (home of the Chicago White Sox) and Wrigley Field (home of the Chicago Cubs.)
Meaning every year, two Chicago Public Schools teams — and their families, and their friends, and their classmates — get a free night of watching dreams come true.
This year the game was at Wrigley. This year the game also happened to be a matchup between my son’s high school (Kenwood Academy) and my daughter’s high school (Lane Tech College Prep). I took the Red Line after work to cheer on both teams (no bad outcome!), but mostly, honestly, to watch dreams come true.
If you have known and loved a child who poured their whole heart and soul into something — sports, plays, band, art — you can’t watch a bunch of baseball-loving kids running on and off the ivy-ringed gem that is Wrigley Field, in their uniforms, surrounded by their teammates, cheered on by their peers and their parents, under the lights, and not get a little choked up. I couldn’t anyway.
You can’t see their names in lights, watch their game-changing hits replayed on the big screen, see them bound out of the on-deck circle to walk-up music that fills the park, knowing that every moment and hit and miss and catch and throw weighs a little more than usual, and not get a little choked up. I couldn’t anyway.
Fine, I cried the whole time.
Mostly because of what I imagined it all meant for the kids on the field. But also for what it meant to the parents and grandparents and other people I was surrounded by whose whole hearts, I know, were on that field. Whose hours and months and years of cheering and driving and sacrificing and fee-paying and equipment-buying and schedule-shifting and laundry and love were on that field.
Sports parents get a bad rap and, honestly, they earn it sometimes. My son has played every sport under the sun in his 14 years on Earth and I have listened to grown-ups yelling things at children, at coaches, at officials, at parents that make me cringe in disbelief. (And understand why so many kids prefer video games.)
In my more gracious moments I try to remind myself it’s because they care. Sometimes really loudly. Sometimes with profanity. Sometimes they throw things. Because of the caring! (Right?)
But that’s not the point of this story. Besides, I saw none of that on display at Wrigley.
What I saw is this.
Kenwood was leading 3-0 going into the final inning. With Lane up to bat and two outs to go, a walk followed by a double followed by a single and then another double put Lane up 4-3.
The stadium was electric when Lane’s next player came up to bat. He wore No. 2. Elias Padilla. I was sitting behind his family, who had on T-shirts with No. 2 on the back. Whole hearts on the field.
Padilla hit a grounder that brought the score to 5-3 and I watched his family erupt and embrace and give thanks to someone or something above — I won’t presume to know their faith. I watched them watch his dreams come true and I watched theirs too, maybe.
And I’m telling this story because it’s not the one that gets told about Chicago. It’s not the one that gets told about humanity, really.
We are in an election cycle that’s going to pit us against one another and try to make us fear one another and try to make us loathe one another. Chicago is going to show up in speeches as a crime-infested boogeyman, the inevitable product of left-leaning policies or Democratic mayors or people who don’t all look alike living side-by-side or whatever narrative is convenient.
This won’t be a good faith effort to solve the city’s deeply entrenched, interconnected issues of community disinvestment and income disparities and school inequality and all the rest. It won’t be to conjure our best thinking and the better angels of our nature.
And it won’t be unique to Chicago. It will be part of a pattern that, honestly, at this point, doesn’t feel limited to election cycles. Maybe it’s just who we’ve become — a nation filled with a bunch of people working to divide us and a bunch of other people trying valiantly, exhaustedly, not to be divided. Not to fear. Not to loathe. Not to be feared or loathed.
I want to believe that the second group — the ones who don’t want to be divided — is big and loud and tireless. I look for signs. I find a lot of them.
On a recent Monday night I found them at Wrigley. A bunch of families watching their kids’ dreams come true and reminding us that, really, we mostly dream of the same stuff. For our kids to know joy. For our kids to know safety. For our kids to have bright futures. For other people’s kids to know joy and safety and bright futures. For our own good health to witness it all.
We have that in us. That’s the story I want us to tell and remember. Because it’s true. And it’s beautiful.
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