The Flog – The Fabry Log

For the first time since the 1980s…I believe it was at Comiskey Park, before it was imploded, my wife and I attended a baseball game together. She grew up rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates, I grew up rooting for the Big Red Machine of Cincinnati—we came together and cleaved in Chicago…but in the intervening years and a lot of children, we just didn’t go to a game together. Most of the time it was because every time I had tickets, there were a bunch of kids clamoring to go with me.

So this weekend we attended the Milwaukee Brewers vs. the Colorado Rockies in 70 degree partly cloudy conditions. And I kid you not, with all of these children between us, we were texting each other on our cell phones. An incredible sight.
Now the reason we were there and we could afford 11 tickets was because those tickets were given to us. My son had type 1 diabetes. Throughout the year there are a lot of meetings and activities to let the kids know they aren’t alone, and so the diabetes foundation offered a free ticket to a baseball game for every member of the family. We received free parking. We looked forward to it for months. And when the day arrived, the kids were excited. Not the teenagers, because they rarely get excited at anything. But the little kids were excited about the trip.

So we pulled into our prearranged parking spot, which I have never had before, and walked around the building to another parking lot, which looked more like a carnival than anything else. There were booths with balloons and face paint and ring toss and darts you could throw to break balloons. Everyone with a wristband got a little bobble head bear..until they opened the boxes filled with the long armed monkeys and they traded in their little bobble headed bears for the long-armed monkeys. So we timidly made our way to some of the games and one child won a little airplane you wind up and throw and another won a hackey sack and another won a balloon you blow up and let go and it flies to the other end of the room making a weird noise.

And then we ate hot dogs and drank diet soda and it was time to go to the game.

Now the best thing I saw that day, wasn’t necessarily the look on my children’s face. The joy of winning some plastic thingabob and being so excited. It came in the 3rd inning when all the people who had been painting faces and blowing up balloons and handing out raffle tickets for baseballs and standing in the sun and retrieving Velcro baseballs from the neighboring parking lot trudged up section U321 to find their seats. These were people who were volunteering their time, who probably have had family members with diabetes, who know a bit about what a wallop that disease can put on a young child, and who simply wanted to help out. Nobody gave them an ovation, nobody acted like they had hit a grand slam homerun, nobody acknowledged their efforts as they passed by—I don’t even think they got a slushee for their service, but it was the best thing I saw this past weekend.