After a Rain Delay You Can Meet Your Heroes

At the tail end of a weekend of music and debauchery, I made my pilgrimage to Chicago's Wrigley Field. For baseball dilettantes, Wrigley Field, as sports venues go, probably tops the list of the most iconic ballparks in the world.

The original scoreboard stands intact and is manually maintained and if you miss a play, there is no megascreen to broadcast a replay. In fact, there is very little to distract you from the game itself; unlike most ballparks, it has its market -- the religion of North Chicago -- it needs no converts. Houses wrap around the stadium where in lesser cities there are parking lots, slums, freeways, skyscrapers. The flags rank the teams in each division by record. The outfield walls are ensconced in ivy. The fans fill the stadium and drunks line the bleachers despite being the stewards of a century-long championship drought.

I went to see my team play in enemy territory and the weather couldn't have been more hostile. Gales swirled in opposition to my team as they opened a tiny lead in the game. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

After six innings, the storm of the century came. The tarp rolled out. The wind picked up.

We sat in covered seating and wind blew rain through the sides of the stadium and pelted us. We watched a thousand flares of litter left in the bleachers switch their seats, convening at frenetic moments like fans condensing in pursuit of home run balls. A fan ran onto the field and slid across the slick tarp to the applause of thousands, applause which turned to disapproval as he was put into handcuffs. And then sirens came on, in rare alarm to the possibility of a tornado hitting the stadium. People ducked under the seats, we were urged to move to the concourse.

Laughter of three boys who hail from a city with no rain delays carried on with hubris and disbelief. Then the lightning began to mark the sky so fiercely that it would be national news the next day.

We staked out a place in the concourse where we could see players from our team come outside to watch the downpour. The closer stood outside and chatted with fans, his evening duties on their way to Lake Michigan. Thunder shook the stadium in the way that ships are crushed in mariner legends. If the music of the organ grinder had been replaced with Wagner, I would have written my last will and testament on a hot dog wrapper and prepared for the universe's next season. In this life, we stood soaking in the concourse, taking shit for our Astros uniforms.

The rain let up a bit. We walked back up and observed the newly empty stadium. It was like the Grand Synagogue of Budapest, gilded and patient for its washed-away audience. It was stellar and beautiful. We didn't want to leave. We stayed for three hours.

The game resumed and we took the best seats we could. The teams came out and played with demonstrated irritation. After an inning the rain picked up again. We sat in it and watched the rain gleam through the stadium lights. The rain carried over from the upper level like foul balls in reverse until it turned to lightning again and the game was finally called after one salvo set national mythologies running for cover.

We waited outside by the team bus. The rain had finished and it was almost cold for August. One-by-one, players came out of the latticework of the concrete ark. The ones that were kind to us were kind, telling short stories, signing autographs. The ones that were not kind kept going -- like a summer tempest.