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Class Story 03 -- An Annotated Take Me Out To
The Ball Game
"We are going to be splitting a room at the Sheraton
Palace Hotel and Angela will be meeting us there. My guess is that Angela will directly ask her
mother if she is sleeping with me. When
her mother says no, will Angela be convinced?
I doubt it."
I was thinking about this on our way down to San
Francisco. Carol likes to be the one in
control and so she always does the driving when we go to events.
At the end of this day, the Giants lost the game to the
Chicago Cubs, 3 to 7, but Carol and I went through many small disasters before
it was over. My sister had purchased
three tickets to a Giants baseball game, a night game at PacBell Park. She was going to meet Carol and me at the
ballpark, but in the end she cancelled and mailed me the tickets. I was taking my next door neighbor, Carol,
whose daughter had season's tickets and went to most games. We planned to meet up with her before the
game to have dinner. Carol and I each
have grown adult children who take up more of our time these days, than when
they were teen-agers.
Carol grew up here in Monte Rio then went away for twenty
years to raise a family. She came back
when her mother had died and her father was living his last few years. She's lived here ever since.
Carol is red-headed and lives alone. She is petite, probably because she smokes so
much. Her face has got smoker's wrinkles
and she looks older than me. To balance
things out, she does no exercise, no walking, no bicycling, no gardening, and
no sex. She underwent a hysterectomy two
years ago and the doctors told her to (1) quit smoking and (2) start getting
plenty of exercise. She has ignored both
pieces of advice. One good thing that
came out of the operation was that her remarried ex-husband paid her a visit in
the hospital. It was the first time they
had spoken in nearly ten years. There is
still considerable bitterness.
I retired to Monte Rio five years ago. I am the antithesis of Carol. I don't smoke and I'm twenty-five pounds
overweight, even though I work out. I
follow Dr. Pericone's skin care diet and use yoga to keep my body
flexible.
My daughter is 39; Carole's is turning 37. I am not just friendly with my ex-wives, I
socialize with them; sometimes even mix them together in parties. I have stayed at the Palace hotel on many
occasions. It is an old haunt of mine.
So to start with, having the host meeting place be The
Sheraton Palace put us in the driver's seat and we felt like in-charge
parents. It is hard, the older you get,
to maintain a parental superiority, because it doesn't exist anymore. We all admit that our children can run
circles around us with the modern technological toys; computers, cell phones,
even VCRs. But in simply meeting for
drinks and dinner, we could still hold onto the illusion that we had an edge in
sophistication and suavity.
Carol and I had attended Spring Training in Scottsdale for a
week three years before. Again I was
thinking her kids would figure, "Mom is going off with this good friend
for eight days in the same room of a posh hotel in Scottsdale and the only
thing on their agenda is watching one baseball game a day, duh! Something else is going on."
My family, I was sure, recognized that this was just a
friendship or more likely, just didn't feel the need to be concerned.
Talk, talk, talk.
That's one of the definitions of a small town environment. The sign entering Monte Rio says population
1,150 and probably a third of them know me.
At right angles, an overlapping other third knows Carol. Just a few weeks ago, as a courtesy, I picked
up Carol's dinner from a local grocery that prepares a Monday night take-home
special. She said, "Oh,
No!" And sure enough, the next day
the clerk at the grocery said to Carol when she was purchasing a pack of
cigarettes, "Car-rols got a dat-te."
"Car-rols got a dat-te."
She reminded me that it will take a decade to live this down.
Early on after I had first moved up to Monte Rio, I used to
rib her about crossing the no sex line, but she was steadfast. There is no word play anymore and I regret
this. I can always say this ribbing was
tongue in cheek, but that was never true with me. We men are driven to seek sex.
Carol worried about the people that attend out wine-maker
dinner series. This consists of eight
consecutive Sunday night dinners in February and March, all held at local
restaurants. There are no special
menus. Wine aficionados, who sign up,
pay $40 a head for a dinner accompanied by a specific winery's selection of
wines. These dinners are always at one
large table seating 22 people. The
guests of honor are always a winemaker and their spouse from a different small
winery. We are in our third year of
attending and although I have brought other people several times, she has
not. Six out of eight times we are
together and I think she is concerned that we are being "type-cast"
as a couple.
It usually doesn't cross my mind that strangers assume that
Carol and I are a couple, but she has mentioned it a few times, so I am sure
that it does bother her. I use the
expression bother her, because she is committed to staying alone and
single. The solitude she enjoys also
includes women. No girlfriends, no
boyfriends. Being human, she enjoys
shared events like dinners, movies, picnics and even sporting events. But put the label of "date" on it
and it's the kiss of death. She and I
have reached an accommodation defined as neighbor-friends. This is an unspoken agreement.
On the subject of childcare, however, we were united. We frequently spend time talking about how to
handle adult children and we thought we were in control of this particular
evening.
Alas, our attempt at parenting didn't last for long. Yes, we got in the first salvo; but this
bounced off their shells like raindrops.
After cocktails at the hotel, we next went to a favorite watering hole
of theirs. The "theirs," being
Angela, Carol's daughter, and her best friend, Sara. A new place to me, the xyz bar was on 3rd
Street, a block or two off Mission, and up on the second floor. A trend-setting place, everything was either
back-lit or illuminated from underneath, including the odd shaped, 40 foot long
glass bar. Angela was best friends with
the female bartender, to the point that we wound up with no bill after a half
an hour of drinking cocktails. Next we
moved on to the designated dinner restaurant, LuLu's on Folsom and Fifth
Street. This was again, the height of
trendiness, and rightfully so. I do not
say this with negativity. This was a
recognized hot spot that I had wanted to try and one that I was happy to be
in. More to the point, I was happy to be
with a group who seemed to know what they were doing here. Angela and Sara ordered for us all. The place was all hustle and bustle with a
large main floor eating area surrounded by a mezzanine area on either
side. People were so tightly packed, it
reminded me of a cafeteria at college.
Most of the wait staff and patrons alike also looked like college-aged
kids.
The gossips around Monte Rio probably wonder why we decided
to share one hotel room, but they just don’t understand that when you’re over
sixty, there is far less sexual tension than at thirty. We chose the Palace to get maximum bang for
the buck. We took one room because it’s
cheaper. At sixty, there are no more
hang-ups about bathroom usage, nudity, farting in bed, the 101 creams applied
to the face overnight.
As we walked out of the restaurant, totally and happily
sated, our task was to get to the game by the first inning, remember the
game. We were all a few sheets to the
wind, as the expression goes. Carol took
off her new shoes. They were chafing her
feet because the shoes were too big. We
had walked everywhere so far; hotel to bar to restaurant, but it was a mistake
to continue walking on this last leg to the ballpark. The headlines of the paper that day declared
that this was to be a major protest day by "critical mass," a bicycle
mounted protest group, I can't remember what they were protesting, but their
goal was to disrupt traffic to the ball game.
The second reason to avoid the walk to PacBell was Carol's feet. The park was a mile away.
Do I love Carol?
No. We're buddies. We're sports buddies. We're drinking buddies. We're neighbor buddies.
We had my sister's tickets, supposedly only a few rows away
from Angela and Sara. But by the time we
got to the stadium, Carol's feet needed medical attention and we went our
separate ways. I stayed with Carol and
we hobbled to the First Aid Station. The
resident nurse correctly diagnosed Carol with congenital stupidity, bandaged
her blisters, gave her an aspirin, and told her to call someone else in the
morning. We tried to find our seats, but
were confused and disoriented and too late for the 1st inning. We wound up in the right center field
bleachers (Angela's tickets were left field non-bleachers, "Barry
territory"). We picked a spot where
the quintessential ugly fan was seated.
He provided screams and foul language, the stadium cops repeated
warnings but nothing stopped this guy. He
continuously heckled the Cub's center fielder, Sammy Sosa, a home run hitting
rival of Barry Bonds. We soldiered
through four innings of hell.
Carol was getting aggravated and bitchy.
There are times when she can be real bitchy, it's always
after she's been drinking too much.
She says nasty things to me, about me.
I usually shut things down for weeks or months, but then we
begin again.
Recently, after a wine-maker dinner where we were seated
between a prominent artist and a successful lawyer, she confided in me that she
felt her life was monotonous as she realized that she had lived all her life in
Monte Rio, never really traveled, never sowed her wild oats. I told her we had someone in our writer's
class that felt the same way and that we all hoped that she would break out of
her shell and find that her life was as rich as anyone else's, she just missed
some of the bad parts.
Then the rain started and cold wind passed through the
park. It must not have been too bad on
the field because the game continued, inning after inning. Then it started to attack us like sleet
periodically coming down in cold sheets.
This was worst game I'd ever been to; the Giants were playing badly and
losing, our seats and the weather were miserable. We kept trying to huddle under what little
protection we had brought with us. The
driving cold rain finally drove us right out of a lackluster game. When we left, we breathed a sigh of relief at
escaping from the boisterous fan, the bad game, and the bad weather. We looked forward to a nice hot toddy
cocktail in the Palace hotel bar.
Carol and I like to have fun together.
The relationship is similar with my 1st ex-wife,
the mother of our daughter.
I stop at her house for 3 hours of conversational catch-up,
once a month on my way down or back from Carmel.
We have traveled with our grandchild to the Grand Canyon for
a week and stayed in one room.
Our troubles hadn't ended just yet, though. By winding up in the right center field
bleachers, we exited on the back side of the park. We had to walk all the way around the
park. We stood at a taxi rank for about
half an hour, thinking, "where is everybody tonight?" After no taxis came, we moved to the trolley
car track and waited another ten minutes for the next tram out. The tram promptly stopped about eight blocks
up the road, in a tunnel (our hotel was only 15 blocks away, but it was
raining.) We waited about thirty
minutes. It was crowded, we were standing
up, and all the passengers were getting antsy.
There was nothing anyone could do.
They wouldn't open the doors because of being in the tunnel; the
conductor came on the speaker and said, "Just a bit of confusion at the
next station, folks. It will all be
sorted out soon." Each minute
seemed to be getting longer and longer.
Finally we pulled out of the tunnel and after a few more
blocks at the foot of Market Street, Carol and I agreed to get off the tram and
walk the rest of the way. Into the hotel
and up to the room we went, quickly changing out of our wet clothes. I put the radio on to hear what happened to
the game. It had been stopped because of
the rain for over an hour; they were only in the eighth inning and the Giants
had tied the game up 3 to 3. Carol
called her daughter's cell phone number and Angela answered, "What ever
happened to you guys?" she asked.
"It's a long story," said Carol
, "What happened with you?"
"Oh, we got bored by the game and left in the 4th inning
before the rain began." answered Angela.
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