St. Louis: Perspective

There’s a city 80 miles to the west of St. Louis with a school that has had the same lunch lady for 40 years. That’s about 16 of my grey hairs longer than my lifetime and in our transient culture I cannot imagine doing anything for that long except, well, breathing.

That lunch lady, Dorothy, and her now retired husband have been coming to Cardinals games for those 40 years and probably longer. They will continue to come this season and in the future. They were at this game (and in my seats!) with their grandchildren who were visiting from a state due south and west of Missouri. Their original intent was to take the youngsters to the All-Star Game festivities two weeks prior. That was cost-prohibitive however. So they enrolled the kids in Cardinals Camp for some drills and some autographs. They caught a couple of games with the kids as well. She also caught me.

We talked for nearly three innings. Her ability to pause our conversation in order to catch a play, or cheer a red-clad hero was a testament to her merit as a fan and merit as someone who knows how to multi-task. But her merit as an elder – in terms that society once regarded its wisest citizens – cannot go unnoticed as she flipped this interview on its head.

As hard as I tried to ask her about her school district, I ended up explaining to her San Francisco’s convoluted public school-by-assignment system. I also told her about the home prices in my town, because she does watch the news. Wanted to make sure it was real, I guess. She also asked me what I thought was going on in the country.

She had me talking about myself and my world more than I was able to get her to open up. It was my first opportunity on the trip to really take the time to talk from my perspective about what life was like for me and why I was still showing faith in baseball, the country, and most importantly – my own lot in life. This conversation with Dorothy was the most political conversation on the trip too. We agreed that things were as bad as our relative perspectives have seen it, and that more than perspective has to change in order for the country to get back on track.

I can only imagine the changes she has seen in the youth of America’s cafeteria in a post-Miracle Mets world. For four decades Dorothy has been there faithfully everyday for the kids at her school. She will be there presumably until she is no longer physically able. She loves what she does and has the perspective to be grateful for the opportunity to do it.

Baseball, eh?

There are singular sporting events that provide their locations a large portion of their identity. Europe has Wimbledon, The Tour de France, and Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls. The US has the Indy 500, The Kentucky Derby, and The Masters golf tournament. Canada has the Calgary Stampede.

The 2009 version of the world’s biggest rodeo had been tied-down for two weeks already when Judy, a sixty-something Calgary-resident, started talking about her love of baseball in the lobby of the Hilton at the Ballpark, St. Louis. Over the next two days, Judy and her husband were to board a bus with a score of other fans and head to Wrigley Field for a night game, then on to Milwaukee as part of a baseball bus tour.

That’s what I was doing! I was going to those same two cities, but as Gene Wilder said as Willy Wonka said on the boat in the movie, “Strike that. Reverse it.”

Calgary has always been a great baseball town, and I did not need Judy to remind me of that. Baseball Cube on the other hand needed to remind me that the Calgary Cannons of the Pacific Coast League served faithfully as a AAA-affiliate for four major league clubs (Seattle, Pittsburgh, Chicago AL, and Florida) from 1985-2002. Calgary has two teams these days: the Vipers of the independent Golden Baseball League and the Okotoks Dawgs of the Western Major Baseball League – a summer wood bat league for college players.

While both of those diamond remnants have supplied southern Alberta with quality baseball over the last few years, it and the bus tours (three years in a row) are still not enough for Judy and her husband. She takes advantage of Canadian Tax Day, which is 15 days later than ours in the U.S., so that she and her accountant husband can play snowbird down at spring training in Arizona. She books and he goes although I think he would rather stick around for the end of Calgary’s NHL team’s regular season.

Judy adores this game and takes great pride in how her fellow Canadians describe her as crazy for that adoration. Sheer glee emanated from Judy’s voice at midnight in the lobby of a hotel on the Mississippi River about how she was in the middle of stretching a single into a double in terms of this bus trip.

She will do this presumably until she is no longer physically able. She loves what she does and has the perspective to be grateful for the opportunity to do it.

Oh wait, did I write that already?

My number one goal for the Roadie was not to provide my own perspective, but to tell the stories of others. If I were to gain any perspective, it would have been be gravy, and I would not have expected it to come from the likes of Dorothy and Judy.

I was just grateful for the opportunity to have done it.

Billboard Photo Credit: Jesse Dorogusker