Thanks, Cubs!

While monitoring both the Cubs-Reds and Brewers-Padres games last night, I couldn’t help but think back to the way this baseball season started for our family — that cold, snowy outing at U.S. Cellular Field and the slightly warmer game under the roof at Miller Park a few days later … a game between, yep, Chicago and Milwaukee.

Not being much of a prognosticator when it comes to these things, I didn’t really have an opinion back then on how the season would go for any of the teams, least of all the hard-luck Brewers and star-crossed Cubs. Hope springs eternal, of course, especially when it comes to the Cubbies. But I certainly didn’t imagine that Milwaukee would be in first place for 133 days this season, that Chicago would start so slowly and finish so strong (kind of a reverse of the usual pattern), or that both teams would be involved in such an exciting stretch run.

Now the Cubs get to play in October, the Brewers get a much-deserved tip of the cap, and a fun cross-border rivalry between teams from cities 90 miles apart gets a little stronger.

You’ve got to love it.

Silly me. I’m a Cubs fan. I’ve been a Cubs fan for more than 40 years. How could I have expected this to be easy?

I was actually dumb enough to let my guard down last weekend, after the Cubs swept the Pirates and the Brewers struggled in Atlanta. I actually thought the Braves’ comeback to beat the Brewers Sunday afternoon was some kind of sign. I actually thought it was all but over, that I’d be able to relax during the last week of the regular season and watch the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

Now it’s Thursday. The weekend is looming. The Brewers have taken two of three from those annoying Cardinals, who always seem to win when you want them to lose and lose when you need them to win.

And the Cubs — those lovable, exciting, completely exasperating Cubs — have dropped two in a row to the Marlins.

The standings are too tight. The magic number isn’t dropping nearly fast enough.

Could we really be heading right down to the final day? Could we, God forbid, even be facing a one-game playoff next Monday?

It might be too early to worry about such things. One game at a time and all that nonsense.

But still … still …

How could I have thought this was going to be easy?

Last weekend, my wife and I ventured downstate for our first visit with the girls since dropping them off at the University of Michigan in late August. It was a good time, and of course went by far too fast. It was reassuring to see them doing so well — mostly adjusted to dorm life, mostly settling into their classes, mostly well on their way into this new stage and this great adventure in their lives.

We had the grand tour, ate some wonderful food and saw a football game that was … well, not a good game, not precisely. In all honesty, Notre Dame looked as if they’d struggle to beat a decent high school football team. But after U of M’s rocky start, a win was a win.

On Tuesday, back home and back at work, I was very envious that the girls had the chance to attend a reading and signing with Gregory Maguire, who ranks right near the top of my personal “favorite writers” list. The author of Wicked, Son of a Witch, Lost, Mirror Mirror, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and a passel of children’s books, Maguire was visiting Borders’ flagship store in Ann Arbor to promote his newest, What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy.

I would have happily let a fairy, rogue or otherwise, take away a few of my own teeth for the chance to attend this event, but I’m so pleased that my daughters now have such great opportunities available to them, just moments away. A signed book is a marvelous keepsake, no doubt, but an evening spent listening to a world-class writer discuss his work is truly a lifetime gift.

For many years now, I’ve enjoyed reading — and very occasionally posting — at what is arguably the most famous Internet forum for theater fans and professionals: All That Chat.

Many of the people who post there live and work in New York, and many are in the theater business, so it’s not surprising that the site became a trembling, buzzing hive of communication on September 11, 2001, as folks scrambled to find the latest news and searched frantically for any word on their families and colleagues.

One year later, on September 11, 2002, the regular chat board shut down for the day, replaced with a forum for people to post their thoughts, feelings and memories on the first anniversary of the attacks. That special page stays hidden in the “All That Chat” archives, but once a year, on 9/11, the moderators post a link so that we can pay a brief visit and be reminded of those two specific days: a day that everything changed and a day twelve months later that we looked back.

My own contribution to that forum described where I was on September 11, which just happened to be a theater full of people with very close ties to New York City. Spending that day, and that entire week, in their company was traumatic, exhausting, heartbreaking, terrifying — but also a bittersweet gift that I will never forget.

This is that first-anniversary forum post, edited just a bit to rerun here:

On September 11, 2001, I was at the Rozsa Center in Houghton, Michigan, working on the local crew for Big League Theatricals’ national tour of Titanic. We were in the middle of tech — two weeks of load-in and set modifications, prop building, costume alterations, sound and lighting adjustments and rehearsal. In fact, the first two full dress rehearsals were scheduled for that fateful Tuesday.

Of course, all of us Michiganders were shocked, dismayed and saddened by what happened out east, just as the rest of the country was. But being surrounded by the Titanic cast and crew, so many of whom were from New York, brought the tragedy even closer and made it more real.

We kept TVs and radios going in the green room all day. We kept Internet connections open. We tried to comfort the tears of cast and crew. We tried to reassure them when they were unable to get phone calls through to New York to check on loved ones. We did what we could to help, but at the time it felt like no one could do enough.

In the best show business tradition, both that day’s rehearsals did proceed — and the entire cast and crew performed exceptionally well. The rest of the week went smoothly. On Friday night, opening night, the cast, tour crew and local crew gathered just prior to the half-hour call, meeting in the parking lot outside the loading dock for a candlelight vigil, with songs and prayers. Then they went in and blew the audience away with the first performance of the show. As you can imagine, already emotional songs such as “We’ll Meet Tomorrow” and “Still” and the finale with its reunion between the living and the dead carried a little extra weight that night. The audience could barely walk out of the theater by the time the show was over, and those of us backstage were not doing much better.

In a bizarre sort of way, I’ll always feel blessed that I was able to share that tragic day, and terrible week, with nearly 50 New Yorkers — all of us so far away from what was happening, but also so very close.

A gut-wrenching moment — “We’ll Meet Tomorrow,” the lifeboat scene — from Big League Theatricals’ 2001-2002 national tour of Titanic. This picture was taken at a media photo call one day after the September 11 attacks and several days before the tour opened at the Rozsa Center in Houghton, Michigan. Click the picture to see the full-size version.

For a few days now, I’ve been pondering how best to explain the excessively long absence from my blog … but I’ve finally reached the conclusion that there is no good way to explain it.

Sometimes, when you’re apologizing for something you should have done but didn’t, you might have a perfectly valid excuse. Sometimes your excuse is a little half-assed and lamebrained. And sometimes you have no excuse at all.

In my case, I think it’s probably a bit of all three.

If I tried, and if I really wanted to, I could fill long pages with detailed explanations of my summer, which actually included just about everything but a vacation. I could tell you about all the up-and-down-and-inside-out emotions of getting my daughters ready to go off to the University of Michigan, where they are now in their third week, and quite happily ensconced, thank you very much. I could tell you about the craziness in my day job, the way a usually quiet season when not much happens in the news business became instead a feverish hell of breaking stories and special meetings. I could tell you how I worked myself to a point that felt dangerously close to exhaustion or collapse, and how, when I wasn’t working, I didn’t have much energy or enthusiasm left over for much of anything else — blogging least of all. I could tell you a lot, but it wouldn’t really serve any purpose, and frankly it all sounds kind of depressing when you say it out loud or write it down.

But here’s the thing: it wasn’t really a depressing summer at all. It was just busy. It was a roller coaster. It was, well, life.

So now we know. Life isn’t just what happens when you’re busy making other plans; it’s what happens when you should be blogging.

For now, I’m back. I’m reading and writing and working and playing and trying to make sure that I carve out time for all those things that got swept aside, or merely ignored, over the past few months.

And I’m blogging.

Wow. You know what? It feels really, really good to be here.