Travelers Through Time and Space

Magical

It's so difficult to remember, as we age into oblivion, how special — sometimes magical — things seemed when we were younger. Not that we were aware of it at the time, of course. But there was an excitement that is impossible to really describe associated even with unimportant things that was slowly extinguished as we entered and then grew accustomed to adulthood. 

When I was in high school most of the Detroit Tigers baseball games were not televised, leaving radio as the only option for those of us who enjoyed following the local team. Especially when the Tigers made their biannual West Coast swing through Seattle, Oakland, and Anaheim, with games during the week usually beginning at 10 pm EST, that could be difficult, especially when those swings tok place (as at least one of them inevitably did) during the school year. But also enticing — listening to those games before (or even sometimes while) I fell asleep was particularly fun.

The Tigers were really good in the mid-80s, of course, which made the games especially meaningful. Listening in my dark teenage boy's bedroom in Ann Arbor, lit only by the glowing dial of the radio, as the sounds of the crowd, the crack of the bat, the familiar tones of the announcers all were transported to me from 3000 miles away, was ... magic. I still think of radio waves carrying purposeful sounds as magic — and I really felt I was listening to broadcasts from a different planet, a different world.

This is the hard part to capture. Imagine it. It's absolutely dark and quiet and still outside, my house and its other residents all asleep, and the only sound is coming quietly from the radio — a tool for communicating with another world, where there were people and hot dog vendors and fountains, laughter and cheers, and important goings-on. As I got older I would sometimes catch the games while I was driving home from a friend's house or a late movie as well — again, Michigan roads more or less empty, but Ernie Harwell's and Paul Carey's voice coming through my radio from a far-away land of light and sound and excitement.

I loved those broadcasts far more than their actual significance would merit. 

The Big A

In the late spring of 1988, after my junior year of college, my Dad took me and my sister out to Los Angeles for a couple of days — my first ever trip out West. One evening my Dad got us a relatively cheap hotel room in Anaheim, and while he and Emily entertained themselves elsewhere, I walked over to the Big A on my own to catch a baseball game, with former Tiger Dan Petry on the mound for the Angels. 

Dan Dealing

I got a cheap upper deck seat, a Coke and a hot dog, and watched the game, not particularly caring who won, but enjoying being in the magical world I had only been able to experience from a distance before. I was part of that crowd, watching that scoreboard, following the game. I thought, as it approached 9 pm in Anaheim, about the high schoolers back out East wondering if they should stay up past midnight to keep listening, and about them trying to visualize the planet that I was now part of.

This obviously isn't much of a story. But I find myself remembering how self-aware I felt, how odd, thinking about how strange and wonderful it was to be, finally, briefly, on this distant planet I had only received transmissions from in the past.

Indeed, as I think about it now, I remember not thinking that this is where the excitement of the moment was, or about how time zones work. I really felt as if I were on a foreign planet. The real world — our world — was back home. The world of New York and Boston and Washington D.C. (and Ann Arbor, Michigan), which had given up and shut down for the day. These friendly but obviously self-deluded Angels fans were certainly allowed to think their world mattered, but ... it was an adjunct world, it was a concession to them made by the East, it was ... not real.

It was magic — or at least a magic trick. 

And for that evening, that game, I was on the stage, participating in the magic trick, instead of in the audience, admiring it.

It's worth remembering how much of the world seemed magical to us when we were young, even though we wouldn't have used that word to describe it. I don't think I've become jaded or cynical. But a lot of the magic has dissipated. It's inevitable. Maybe even necessary. But a little disappointing.