Happy Birthday Memories

Boy howdy, adoring quesolitos! What a Thursday. Another gorgeous day in the heart of South Jersey. I hope that wherever you are right now, you are having an amazing day. And if you aren't then I hope that the chin music (baseball term, synonymn for the high cheese, also a baseball term) can cheer you up. I am a people pleaser people. What can I say? Anyway...

So, it is only officially less than a month from my birthday now, and it gives me reason to cast my mind back to the days of yore and a tear comes to my eyes as I think of tender birthday moments from my past...like my thirteenth birthday.

I am not Jewish, so there was no bar mitavah; however, there was a midwestern football fan's equivalent--my first pro-football game. As I look back now, I realize that the trip was planned and agreed to by my father almost three months in advance, but most of the planning was on the fly (it's the thought that counts). That is the only way you could explain scalping our way into everything we did and having to search for a hotel for like three hours once we arrived. But back then, I didn't care, I was in the windy city and I was ready for some football.

We were going to see the Bears and the Redskins play--I know, now it sounds like two nerdy fat kids fighting over a kitkat, but back then it was actually a really good game. Well, having spent the better part of our day haggling at places like the Three Tree motel or the Wrangler Inn, we finally deciding on the delectable digs of the super-chic Super Eight. Only the best for us! It was a serious birthday bash!

It was Saturday afternoon and we had nothing to do. Dad had a plan. We loaded up in the car and drove over to Soldier Field, the home of the Chicago Bears. It was gorgeous. It was proud. It was dignified. It was not like the cookie cutter stadiums of much of the rest of the league, this was special. Also, it was saturday, and Soldier field could have been the most special and dignified place on earth and it would still be empty. So my dad parks the car near an entrance and we get out and begin to walk around this masterpiece of social art. We circled, my hand never leaving the stone facade of the stadium wall. I watched as we began walking under the high wall with the columns. I grew excited. Then I saw it--the part of the wall that bears the testimony explaining that Solidier Field was built in honor of all of the men and women who have served our nation in its armed forces giving their life for our freedoms. I shuddered. I looked for my father, himself a veteran, to hold his hand at this moment. I didn't feel him around me, so I turned and looked for him. As I lowered my gaze I found him, fly undone, urinating in public, on the very wall that I was so proud of.

I was about to cry at the desecrating sacrelige I had seen. I screamed, "Dad! You can't do that! That was built in honor of the soldiers in our armed forces!"

"Well, that's me! I'm a veteran, so suck it up, little girl. Bout time you learned to shut up and be a man." I could always count on my dad in these more sensitive moments. He after all was teaching me that part of being a man is public urination on architectural landmarks.

So it wasn't long before we came up to a security guard who fortunately only chastised my dad for taking a leak on the wall, especially after my did bribed him. Actually, dad bribed him so well, we got to tour the inside of soldier field. We got to go down Bear Alley where the media room and the locker room is. I got to look inside the lockerroom, and even walk out onto the grass at soldier field. Oddly, I found a five dollar bill on the sideline. I still have it. My dad tried to argue it was his.

So the next day, we went to the coldest football game of my life, scalped two tickets for and sat in what they called the "family section," had two beers "accidentally" thrown on us, watched my dad get into a swearing match--which he lost--with the sailor next to us because the guy was swearing too much in front of me in the family section. Mark Rypien stopped a fight by completeing a touchdown pass in the endzone resulting in loud cheers and groans, which thankfully diverted their beer-shortened attention spans.

How do you forget something like that? The Bears may have lost, but I came out the big winner.

God save the Cheese.