Waiting To Exhale, Part Deux

I simply could not believe how many people were in the Miami airport this morning at six am -- so many that I was afraid I was going to miss my flight, though I had allowed more than an hour. In fact, I got off the rental car bus a couple stops early because it was stuck in traffic.

United somehow assigned me and another passenger the same seat number, which you'd think couldn't happen, but we compared boarding passes and that's exactly what happened. The guy who had the same seat number as I did had already sat down next to me, and the third person was nice enough to take another seat, so we didn't have to move.

Turns out Mr. Duplicate Seat Guy was a Cub fan (well, it was easy to guess, since he was wearing a Cubs cap) who had driven from New Buffalo, Michigan, to South Bend, flew to Chicago, and then to Miami only on SUNDAY, to see one game only and then fly back this morning. Cost: about $350.

He thought it was worth it. Even with the loss, so do I.

Then I got back to my construction site -- er, I mean, house, which is being torn up for a kitchen remodeling project. Today's hammering was workers installing some new windows. Honestly, sitting in the basement working on my computer, it sounded pretty much like the kids running around upstairs, so I guess I'll get used to this fairly quickly.

My son Mark is 8, and when I was 8, the Cubs were just beginning to work on the "lovable losers" tag that they've now had for decades. I don't think he really understands that this simply doesn't happen all the time. Nevertheless, thanks to Jeff, he will be coming to Game Six. Now, you might say, what am I going to do with an 8-year-old if (I nearly wrote "when", but no, I can't!) it comes time to celebrate tomorrow night?

Let's just say I hope I have to deal with that problem. I am making contingency plans, just in case.

Tomorrow will be the latest calendar date that baseball has ever been played in Wrigley Field (Oct. 10, 1945 was the previous latest), and the ivy ought to be gorgeous.

So will the baseball. When we went to dinner tonight with the kids (since there's now nowhere to cook in my house), Mark took his GameBoy and played Cubs vs. Marlins.

The Cubs won 5-4, and he's sure that's a good omen for tomorrow.

Me too. Most of us have waited our entire lives for this day. Let's win it.