I had opened my eyes to a mostly dark hotel room. A sliver of early morning light made its way around the fringe of the curtain and threw its force into the darkness. Though in sharp contrast, from the bed I could not tell where the light ended and the darkness began. Maybe the darkness has no beginning. Maybe the light has no end.

Outside, the light the summer had lavished now came into a world that was beginning to know the value of its scarcity in mid October.

I was not alone. Beside me was another bed, and from that one came a soft noise. It was the slight stirring of a man still embraced by sleep.

Here in the outskirts of Chicago, sleep had come easier for me than it had come for him. It had finally came for him, though, and I was reluctant to drive it back. There was no hurry. There was plenty of time.

In my bed I thought of the conversation from the night before, just before we turned in.

“I’ll toss and turn a lot,” he said. “It takes me a while to get to sleep. Usually it doesn’t come until the early hours of the morning. I kind of worry I’ll keep you up,” said the young man with cancer, apologetically.

“I think we will be just fine, Chasen,” I reassured him.

That evening my blood still had beer in it, and I was happy and warm, and I knew I’d sleep the sleep of a child. For some reason knowing he was worried about me of all things made me smile a little more. In the time ahead, I’d continue to find a kindness about him. In the years ahead, I’d admire how he maintained it, and wonder if I had let less in life keep me from the same.

I usually wake up by 9. Will that work for you?” he asked.

“It sounds good. There’s no hurry. We’ve got all day to get back.”

“I had fun tonight, you know.”

“I did too.”

I was still smiling about that the next morning, in bed with light making its way into our room. A portion of that light had come to rest on the back of my hand, popping out from under a pillow. A jolt turned me from it.

Would he think we came all the way out here because I felt sorry for him? The warmth faded. I quietly found my suitcase and headed for the shower.

I suppose I had felt sorry for him once, but now I admired him. It was about friendship now, looking straight across.

I dressed without waking him, slipped out the door, and headed down to the lobby for coffee. ESPN was on the far wall, about to give a rundown of Game 4 of the NLCS between the Cubs and Dodgers. I didn’t need the rundown. We’d seen it in person.

In September he had told me he was lifelong Cubs fan that had never been to Wrigley. I thought I knew someone who could help with that. They did when the postseason came around.

It was harvest, his family was busy, and even battling cancer he was going to be present and accounted for as the crop came out. So when I first called, he turned me down, and yet I just knew he’d call back.

A half hour later he did. “You still got those tickets?”

“I’ve got two. I can run them over. Do you have someone you want to go with?”

“I figured I’d go with you.”

I hadn’t planned on that. We were just getting to know each other.

He was thirty, tall and strong, although cancer and the treatments had left him thin. There was a pain in his leg that would cause him to shift his hips slightly when he stood, but he did his best to hardly mention it, save needing to get out and stretch his leg from time to time.

On the trip out the day of the game, we took a leisurely pace. Farmers were in the field from Knoxville, Iowa all the way through Illinois. We talked a little about everything we could think of. We came to talk mostly about our lives, though, and twists and turns.

There’s a funny tendency when someone is telling you a story. They get to the meat of it, and if we as a listener sense it is a difficult, we refrain from asking them about it. As though the teller, who had already went through it in actuality, would somehow be unable to talk about it in retrospect.

The teller, meanwhile, invariably senses the silence of the listener and thinks they are making the listener uncomfortable, so they stop. It’s like starting a journey and giving the whole thing up when you come to the first river to cross. For some reason that day, we asked questions and forged ahead.

When we finally to our room north of Chicago, he wanted to try for an hour of sleep. “I won’t of course,” he confided, “but I’ve gotten used to that. It does do me some good sometimes just to lay down and shut my eyes.” The hour came, and the hour went, and the results were as he expected.

An Uber driver began the hour drive that would take us to Wrigley. We quickly left main routes behind to avoid the snarled up traffic, and made our way picking throughthe side streets of suburbs and a city lined with homes and business. We rode most of it quietly, taking in the enormity of it all. Back home there were folks who had never made it in to here. Here there were folks who had never made it out.

Sometimes he closed his eyes and picked up where he had left off in the hotel room, flirting with a desire to get a little rest. His leg was getting tight, and he would let his head drop to his hands. I wanted to ask how he was doing.

For fuck’s sake, I thought, don’t ask him that. He’s got to be tired of people asking him that.

Finally, in the midst of a residential district, the driver stopped. “This is as close as I can get,” he said curtly in an Eastern European accent. “Just walk that way. You’ll see it. It’s just right over there.”

I was apprehensive. Traffic had been slow, and even though people clothed in Cubs blue were now on the sidewalks, I wondered how close we actually were. The hesitation wasn’t lost on our driver.

“This is as close as I can get. Just walk that way. Right over there,” came his steady insistence.

“This will work just fine,” Chasen said as he opened the door and popped out.

I followed him. “I hope it isn’t a long walk,” I said anxiously.

“It’s just a walk. It’ll be nice to stretch.”

The driver drove off into the coming darkness. We crossed the street and followed the rest who were making their way. A block or two later I heard him say, “Well there it is.” I looked up from my anixety about what was to come.

In front of us loomed the left field lights so large I hadn’t realized what I was looking at. You saw them without seeing them at first. Sometimes in life it is the sheer scale of things that make them elusive. Such was Wrigley that night.

Its lights, looking like a glorified erector set, splashed light on the final remnants of the day. Beneath them it was better than daylight. It was as if they stopped time or turned it back.

“I thought that driver was just trying to dump us to avoid the traffic. Turns out he left us at a hell of a spot,” finanlly giving voice to the worry he already knew I had.

“I knew we were close,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“You didn’t see the city snow plow they were using to block the street he wanted to do down?”

Embarrassed, I chuckled. “No. I guess that was lost on me too.”

He kept steadily marching on. Below the outfield scoreboard were the bleachers where the rowdies sat in the summer time and employees told you to keep your kids away. The whole crowd would be rowdy tonight. The Dodgers were poised to sweep.

Construction had begun on the new shops at Wrigleyville. We hopped in one so he could get a t-shirt for his young son at home. Back outside, the mounted police were in the streets on the far side of the barricades we walked along.

Inside, before the place was full, he had his run of it. The only photograph I have of him is from that night as he peeked out from beneath the upper deck on the first base side of home plate, to look up at the broadcast booth and see the late Harry Carry’s glasses recreated on the windows.

During the game, Wilson Contreras and Javier Baez both homered in the second, whipping the crowd into a frenzy that never let up. Jake Arrieta went six and two thirds, and the Dodgers kept everyone on the edge of their seats in the eighth and ninth.

We had a beer together. He sipped off my second and third. We cheered the homers that shot straightaway to left, and looked in suspense for those that hung above the upper deck in the night sky, only to drop down and clear the fence. That night the Cubs would win their only game of the 2017 National League Championship Series 3-2.

Near the end, I asked him if he was worried about the crowd and wanted to get out early. “No, he said, “let’s stay till the end.” So we did. It ended on a double play.

On the ride back to the hotel, I thought I heard him catch some sleep.

The next day, I got a call in the hotel lobby around 11:00 am.

“Where are you at?”

“Down in the lobby, watching television and reading emails.”

“What time is it? Shit. It’s 11? Why did you let me sleep so long?”

“Because you could. Was it any good?”

“I haven’t slept like that in a long time,” he laughed. “Heck yes it was good.”

On the way home, his wife called.

“I’m sorry I missed you earlier. I was on a call.”

“That’s all right. I figured as much.”

“Where are you guys at?”

“That’s what I was calling you about. We’re back in Chicago,” he said and held the phone away from his mouth, breaking loose with silent laughter that shook his shoulders as he brought his hand down to slap his knee.

There was a pause, “Are you serious?”

“Yes. I had a ton of fun last night. My phone blew up with texts saying that we had to go back for Game 5. They thought I was the lucky charm. Dan and I found a pair of tickets on Stubhub, and we decided to split the cost and find another hotel.

I wanted to talk it over with you first, but those tickets weren’t going to last forever. So we just did it. I figured you’d be okay with it. What do you think?”

“I think your son will be excited to see you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be excited to see you guys. I knew you’d understand.”

When the call ended, he laughed without any reservation.

“You know, I thought I’d feel pretty tough today, but I feel great. It was like all that yesterday stretched my leg out or something. You let me sleep in too long.”

“I was going to have to wake you up. I drank them out of coffee.”

“I better call her back and tell her I was joking.”

“Maybe you should check Stubhub first.”

We stopped to get something to eat at a McDonalds in LeClair, Iowa, perched on a bluff above the Mississippi. Outside were a couple picnic tables, allowing you to sit there and look back over the river that you had just crossed, or were about to, or would someday.

I was convinced he would beat it. He did, I guess, just different than I thought. On the trip, he taught me something. We are all looking for something to die for. I don’t know why. I suppose we figure it makes our life worth more.

You don’t have to scroll far on social media to find us, the would be virtual martyrs, and the just causes we’ve picked out, playing it up for the crowd. In the end, I don’t know what it does to advance a cause, if it advances it at all. Chasen taught me that whenever you find whatever it is you’d die for, you got to figure out how to live for it.

That’s it. That’s the trick.

When we got home, he took the time to show me around the farm. I never told him how much that meant to me. But at the end, I knew he was eager to find his brother and his Dad and see how harvest was getting along, so I gladly let him go.

When I got to Shannon’s place that evening, she poured me a drink as I sat down at her island. She poured vanilla rum into the bottom of a tumbler of ice, and dumped a Diet Pepsi over the top of it. It fizzed and swirled and mixed around, but for all the commotion, at the bottom remained a splash of spirit hardly diluted.

As I drank it, I told her about our trip.

“Is there anything you wished you would have asked him and didn’t?” she asked.

“Yea. He is in the midst of it. I should have asked him if he was afraid.”

Just this year I was back to the farm. His family was hosting a UTV poker run to raise money for the Seeds of Hope Foundation, seeking to help farm families on similar journeys. Just around the first few corners, we came to a county historical marker mentioning an 1853 wagon train.

When I got home, I looked it up. A winter storm had left the wagons stranded on a bluff overlooking Whitebreast Creek. The party decided to camp there and ride the winter out. By the next spring elevn of the party had died. One, a girl named Emily, was nine days old.

I don’t know what the trip had cost them to make it that far. I don’t know where they were headed. But I did think about the rest of the party sitting on that bluff, looking at that river that was still there to cross.

They did. He did. We can too.