Some ancient force within us longs for return and re-installation … Tolkien announces the Return of the King, Odysseus reclaims his bride and his throne, the biblical Children of Israel wander for 40 years in the Wilderness while the historical Jewish nation as a whole waits two millennia for the re-establishment of the Israeli state, Simba battles and reclaims his throne as the Lion King. The longer denied, the stronger the theme.
How strange — suffering, losing, shame — still harbors and safeguards the seed of both restoration and redemption. Joy and victory triumph over humiliation and injustice. But do they? And, how long? How long?
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. intoned from the steps of 1965 Montgomery that “the moral arc of the Universe is long, but inevitably bends towards justice.” How do we persevere with inner grace to mold our outward visibility during the season(s) of discontent? Do we remain “good” sports in the meantime?
The universe of professional American baseball offers its own cosmic context for the law of return. The recent ascension of the Chicago Cubs to the lofty throne of world championship, denied for over a century, should serve as a case in point.
Chicago waited 108 years to achieve a place in the sun. Over the course of those many years, I couldn’t help but commiserate with the hundreds of thousands, nay millions of Chicagoans and fans overall who had hungered and thirst and dreamt of this moment, sometimes, oftentimes cruelly and characteristically denied (as in the case of the 1945, 1969 and 1984 Cubs).
What should we learn from all of this? Multiple layers of explanation of interpretation abound. First, for the immediate experience, the Cubs overcame the strong Cleveland Indian team as a feat of exceptional perseverance and will. The ability of a team set back 1-3 in World Series play to return in triumph should offer a thrill to any baseball fan. But for the Chicago fan, the pattern of the near defeat rang an, oh-so-familiar tone of a chronically cursed Cub pattern of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
Often, I wonder what reinforced this pattern over the course of so many decades (10 to be precise). In my more imaginative moments, I muse that during the peculiar 1908 World Series (which saw the Cubs defeat the rival New York Giants on a tiny technicality of base running) some terribly tragic Cub player transgressed against an innocent New York fan to the complete disregard of the many thousands, but which the Almighty Eye responded with the appropriate judgment.
Another angle: In an age of instant gratification and commercial insanity, the Cubs, subject to such ongoing mockery, in victory brought a kind of reconciliation and healing to untold Chicagoans, legendary Chicagoans who, in all their muscular and vocal legendary pride and devotion, came blinking agog into the illuminated circle of 21st century victory with a smashing understanding that they no longer needed to dwell in sad shame. The day had dawned. “Free at last … free at last … thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
What can the Cub victory offer us in the distant, “red-socked” County? A collective, national memory, I suggest. The Cubs last gained the crown when William Howard Taft ascended to the Presidency. America had yet to cash in on mass production of automobiles and related industries. Television and radio were still largely non-existent to the homeowner as well as the wealth of electrical and mechanical appliances which consume us today. America’s pre-eminence on the global stage had just begun to stir after the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. In many ways, we still lived in 1908 as an agricultural nation. The Wright Brothers had only recently ascended from Kitty Hawk.
In a sense the Cubs’ century of shame served as a time capsule encoding much of the modern American Experience like some strange cultural fossil waiting to be excavated with the final out of the seventh game. Again, as a new political age inaugurates, what can we learn about ourselves as Americans in seeing this Chicago ball club return us around the bases back to 1908’s Field of Dreams?
Here’s what I learned: we never needed a candidate promising to “Make America Great Again”. We already were great, still are, and will remain great. The wholeness of our national health remains a function of our historical memory. We are a great people of strong arms and stout hearts because we remember and treasure our story. It serves as a story of liberty, justice, freedom and the pursuit of happiness through our playfulness. The cheering and weeping of scores of Cub men and women across the taverns of the north and south side of the city were only the heralds harking to the real cheers of the ghosts of an American century. May the song of that windy city always stay true red, white and blue. May the criminal violence and needless anger of recent years melt and gnash away in a revived city spirit available to any American city … with heart and voice and a new song. And similarly, when, for millions of Americans, the blackened disk of the Moon totally eclipses the face of the Sun, August 21, 2017, for the first time in almost 40 years, let us awaken to our uniquely American dreams joyfully in the full flush of new frontiers.
Larry Berz of Caribou is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics. He was born in Chicago, March 27th, 1956 and walked the stony streets of Wrigley Field in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
