After attending the last six Phillies home openers, I was shut out from purchasing tickets for the game on April 2nd against the Atlanta Braves. I had more or less resigned myself to the fact that I would not be carrying on the tradition that started in 2001. That is until a conversation about “On the Road” reinvigorated my life.
Since turning 22 this past February I have begun to feel, how do I say it? Old. I know that in the scheme of things 22 is not that old and looking back on this someday I will see how young I really was. But when your future job appears closer to you then your high school days, certain anxieties begin to set in.
I was having a conversation the night before the game with an old friend from high school who is about to graduate from Villanova next month. We were discussing as we often do, our lives, our plans for the future, and ultimately, the conversation turned to regrets and those moments in your life when you feel alive. It is difficult to define these moments. They are the ones when you have an out of body experience, when you can see yourself from above and know in your head that this is life, this is what living means.
He said how looking back, he had a good deal of these moments in his teenage years but like me in recent times, school and figuring out his career had become overwhelming demands on his mind. Basically, we both agreed that as the years have passed by, these moments had become few and far between. We talked about Bob Seger’s “Night Moves”, Van Morrison’s “Wild Nights” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Spirit in the Night”; how these songs seemed to describe a time that had somehow evaded us in our lives. Then we moved onto one of the great American classics, Jack Kerouac’s timeless masterpiece, “On the Road”.
We all know the story of Sal Paradise and his friend, Dean Moriarty and their travels across the country. How their lives seemed like an open book, how their futures seemed to have endless possibilities and compared this with the rigid demands that were placed on us by our society, our peers, our parents and more than anything, ourselves. Needless to say it was a depressing talk. My friend then said, “Where is that person in my life? Where is that free spirit to come and take me away from this normal life? Where is my Dean?” It was at that moment that I decided that one way or another we were going to make it into that Phillies game.
I met up with my friend a
round noon on the beautiful sunny day, about an hour before the first pitch of the 2007 season. We went up to the box office to see if there were any single tickets left for the game and told that they had all been gone since 9:30 in the morning. We walked to each of the entrances to the stadium, walked through a good deal of the parking lots and were unsuccessful in finding anyone at all who had tickets for sale. Then I had an idea.
McFadden’s Bar and Grille is attached to the ballpark and I figured somehow making our way from the bar to inside the stadium was our last shot. Getting in the bar was a problem, as a long line had formed outside to gain entry. Luckily, an old man was holding a side door open looking for his friend and we were able to slide inside ahead of the crowd. We made our way to the outside dining area and realized the only thing keeping us from entering right into the stadium was a metal fence and a few security guards letting people who actually had tickets into the game. Between the end of the fence and the brick façade of the stadium was a space of about a foot and a half. This was our ticket in.
Among the crowd of people drinking and eating we made our way back to the fence. Sitting for a minute to think of our plan and figuring out the right time to go, at around ten of one I decided, let’s go (and coolly, I might add), squeezed in behind the fence and walked right into the stadium. My friend followed behind. We walked to a spot directly behind home plate and as a sense of excitement and wild abandonment set in that we hade actually made it in, that we had made it to opening day, my friend looked at me and said something I will not soon forget: “I wouldn’t have done that without you. Thanks for being my Dean”.
(PHOTO CREDITS: ANDREW FRANKLIN)
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