ladies' days, ink strained wretches, and little lidded bottles

 I lived more like 80,000 feet from Wrigley, a bus ride to downtown and then deep into the bowels of the earth, emerging into the sunlight in a great roaring el train into the center of the mysterious north side where the streets had names and not numbers and the people had like webbed toes or something, because surely they were not like us at all,

We came on Ladies' Day, my mother, maybe another neighbor lady, and a half dozen of us kids frozen in awe at riding in a train so far above the city that cars looked like toys and people looked like ants.  We were pretty young then and didn't know the intricacies of the game but we knew enough to root root root for the home team, unless we were distracted by something like one of the adults opening up the baskets and handing out potato chips or sandwiches wrapped in wax paper.  We never bought a hot dog because they were way too expensive.

In fact it occurs to me, that we never bought anything, what was the ballpark getting out of us?  Well the adults had to pay for the kids to get in at half price, and as I recall back in those days those seas of green seats were pretty empty, and I grew up to become a Cub fan even though all the other kids were and remained Sox fans.

Those ink stained wretches who later became real writers have not much in common with the scribes of today.  I go for the box score first and only if something like a beanball incident occurred and I want the details of that, do I skim through an article for more information.  They have this beautifully structured game, they have a century of cornball slang that gets better as it ages, they have an essentially meaningless event which gives them freedom to make of it anything that comments on the human condition.

And mostly they just complain, the owners oughta spend more money, the manager shoulda done things different in that rocky third inning, this or that way overpaid player was dogging it.  On and on and on like sportsradio at its worst.

Very interesting about those interchangeable lids.  It would seem at first that you would not want the tops to be interchangeable because then when somebody lost a lid they would have to buy a new bottle and that would be ka-ching in your cash register.  But maybe the big cap and bottle industry got together and realizing that if the parts were interchangeable, people would be better disposed to the whole industry and make more use of their product, and consumers and manufacturers would both be winners.  Kumbaya.

But I'm guessing the lid manufactures got sick and tired of making a lid for every damn bottle that came down the pike and said fuck you guys, we are only making one size lids and you will start making your bottles to fit our lids unless you want to be stuck with warehouses full of lidless bottles.