Wrigley Field is like a dilapidated, old hotel on the north side of town, which owes most of its existence to the fact that anyone who’s anybody still goes there.  Folks like me go there too.  We sit down on a late summer evening to the smell of beer, and yesterday’s beer, and body sweat.

You’ll find men wearing salmon shorts with their long sleeves rolled up and their sunglasses on top of their heads, women wearing salmon shorts with their long sleeves rolled up and their sunglasses on top of their heads, and those trying to get a few more days out of their white pants before Labor Day.  Occasionally you’d catch the glimpse of a whisper that mauve is the new salmon.  One is as poor to look at drinking beer as the other.

There are men trying to look important, and those unashamed to have come up from their parents’ basement to see the Cubs play.  The late day sun makes them squint.  There are 65 year old women trying to look 30, and those that have aged gracefully, young at heart, and comfortable being at the game alone.  There are mothers and fathers bringing their kids to the park with different partners than they began summer with, and there are the families you’d hoped you’d have someday.

Just which is which can be tricky.  Life does a poor job of separating out the genuine from the bullshit.  Stuck, I suppose, in a revolving door, round and round, confusing motion for movement.  Our eternal hope is that the divine will separate it someday, but for today we have baseball, which has attempted to separate the genuine from the bullshit since the days of Abner Doubleday.

Wrigley is uniquely situated in that regard:  a ballpark atop an old Lutheran seminary.

A friend and I and his two girls caught the nightcap of a doubleheader, and the next morning we all headed downtown.  The youngest insisted on visiting the American Girl store on Michigan Avenue.  I insisted on letting the family of three have at it.  While I was elsewhere, their father looked back to a discover a familiar face behind them waiting in line at the cash register.

“Excuse me.  Are you Ryan Braun?”

Ryan Braun is a Milwaukee Brewer, who was the 2007 National League Rookie of the Year.  He was named to five straight All Star Games from 2008-2012, was the National League MVP in 2011, and led them in homeruns in 2012.  He also sat for 65 games at the end of 2013, suspended for violating league policy on performance enhancing drugs.  For that, even in The Friendly Confines, he was booed the night before.

“I am.”

“I know you are with your family, and I don’t want to bother you, but could I introduce you to my girls.”

“Absolutely.”

Ten minutes later, he was filling me in.  “Think I did the right thing in not asking for an autograph?”

“I do.  I think it showed the girls some class.  What do you think?”

We had a tour that afternoon of Wrigley.  We spent time afterward in Wrigleyville, grabbing a late lunch, letting the girls find some last minute Cubs gear, and getting ready to find a cab back.  On the backside of Wrigley stood a boy with a three ring binder and his Dad.

“Is this where the Brewers come in?”

“That’s what we were told.  My boy is hoping to get an autograph or two.  The girls, their Dad, and I spent the next 30 minutes waiting as well.  When the bus pulled up, only one Brewer would sign.  It was the girls’ old friend, Ryan Braun.  Perhaps in stopping, he taught them something about movement and the work of trying to sort it all out for our self.