Detroit Rock City (revised)

As you read this sentence, the party should finally be smoldering just south of its apex in Detroit. The Tigers, as it is, still have some work to do and a season to finish. After all, the World Series starts on Saturday night. Not that anyone in Philadelphia knows or cares about Detroit and the baseball renaissance that occurred there this season.

It’s a good thing Philadelphia sports fans are so provincial and laser-focused because the sight of Placido Polanco dashing around the field and slapping hands with the fans at Comerica Park with a bottle of champagne in on hand, the ALCS MVP trophy in the other, and a smile that spread from ear-to-ear would be enough to make a Philadelphia baseball fan sick.

That’s until the camera panned to Jim Leyland being carried off the field, coupled with the comments that followed from one-time Phillie Todd Jones who told reporters that Leyland was the only manager he played for during his 14-year career that actually made a difference in the standings.

At in the notion that Leyland should he have been carried off the field by Chase Utley and Ryan Howard instead of Sean Casey and Kenny Rogers and it’s enough sickness for some hospitalization.

At least until the playoffs end or the Tigers are eliminated.

For those too wrapped up in the Eagles season, the Detroit Tigers, managed by Jim Leyland, sent the vaunted New York Yankees and their considerable offense home for the winter in four games in the ALDS as well as the “Moneyball” Oakland A’s in another four games. With just four more victories, the Tigers will be World Champions.

Not bad for a team that lost 119 games three years ago, averaged more than 96 losses per season for the past decade, and had just two winning seasons since 1988.

How does that team come four victories away from the World Series title?

Do I have to say it?

Apparently, Jim Leyland wasn’t good enough to manage the Phillies even though he took the Tigers to 95 wins this season. Apparently the ideas he expressed to president David Montgomery and then GM Ed Wade were just a little too harebrained. Especially the ones about the corner outfielders – remember that? I do. He said the Phillies had too many strikeouts in the corner outfield positions, needed a new center fielder, third baseman and catcher.

Then he went out to the CVS on Broad St. for a pack of smokes only to come back to resume his meeting when Wade told him it would be a good idea to keep his interview date scheduled with the Mets.

Look what happened. The Phillies hired Charlie Manuel, came within a game of the wild card, fired Wade, and hired Pat Gillick. A few months later, Gillick traded right fielder Bobby Abreu, third baseman David Bell, and tried as hard as he could to get left fielder Pat Burrell to waive his no-trade clause. After the World Series, Gillick will allow catcher Mike Lieberthal to limp away as a free agent.

Talk about unoriginal ideas. I wonder if Gillick walked over to the CVS on Broad St. for a pack of smokes.

I may write about baseball and sports for many, many years. Or, Powerball numbers willing, tomorrow could be my last day. Either way, I will never ever forget how hard Leyland campaigned to be the Phillies manager during the winter of 2004. He was as shrewd as any seasoned politician and went above and beyond to the point of kissing babies and returning phone calls. In fact, Leyland wanted the Phillies job so badly that he even returned my phone calls.

Talk about desperate.

Now let’s stop for a minute before this descends into a Leyland-equals-good and Phillies-equals-bad essay. That’s just way too easy and not completely accurate. Surely, Leyland was not the only reason why the Tigers went from 300 losses in three seasons under Alan Trammell to 95-67 and the doorstep of the World Championship this year. Actually, there are many reasons why the Tigers were able to turn it around so quickly.

The biggest one? Someone listened to Jim Leyland.

Apparently, Leyland went into his interview with the Tigers and told them what he would do to the team to make it better in very much the same manner he did with Montgomery and Wade. But guess what? The Tigers bought it and look where it got them.

Yes, I will always remember that day sitting in the conference room in Citizens Bank park listening to Leyland talk about what makes a winning baseball team as Wade stood in the doorway privately seething. Leyland, with his resume padded with a World Series title with the Marlins and all of those division titles with the Pirates, acted like a know-it-all questioning him to the very group of people who questioned him for sport in the papers and talk shows, daily. They had turned the fans against the straight-laced GM and here was a potential employee giving them more fodder?

Who did he think he was?

Leyland had a lot of ideas to make the Phillies better on that chilly November afternoon and he didn’t keep too many of them secret. He explained what he thought his job as the manager should be:

“When you have veteran players who buy into your thought process, it eliminates a lot of nitpicking,” he said. “The veterans set the tone. Leadership is production. Putting winning numbers on the board, that's leadership. The manager is supposed to be the leader. That's not ego talking, that's just the way it is. I've said it all my life, you're either the victim or the beneficiary of your players' performance. That's as simple as this job is.”

And what elements make up a good team:

“[It's about] trying to create an atmosphere that's comfortable,” he said. “I'm not as big on chemistry as a lot of other managers. If it works, it's wonderful. I've managed teams that ate together, played together, prayed together, and we got the [crap] kicked out of us, and I managed some that punched each other once in a while and we won. It's getting the best out of talent. They're not all going to like me. Hopefully, they will, but I doubt it. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you're working toward the same goal -- win.”

Perhaps Gillick had similar thoughts going through his head after he traded away Abreu and Bell and when he was ironing out that deal to send Burrell to Baltimore?

Maybe.

More interesting to ponder is if things would have ended differently the past two seasons if Leyland were the manager instead of Manuel? Well, it’s not as easy as simply replacing one guy for another, despite what Todd Jones says. There’s no telling how all of the personalities would have blended if anyone but Manuel were skippering the Phillies. Besides, if Leyland were in Philadelphia it would be unlikely that Pat Gillick would be the GM, too.

Maybe Wade sealed his own fate by not hiring Leyland when he campaigned so hard for the job. But then again we should have all seen the handwriting on the wall when Wade stood at the podium after Leyland’s cleansing tell-all and said:

“Even if you’re polling the 3.2 million people who came to watch us this year, I don’t think you can get hung up on this people’s commanding lead in the votes 320 to 112 or anything like that. We’re going to hire a manager we hope our fans like, but at the same time we’re going to try to hire a manager that is going to get us to the World Series.”

Hindsight being what it is… well, you can fill in the rest.

But make no mistake about one thing – Philadelphia is barely a blip on Leyland’s rear-view mirror now. Actually, it’s hard to look back at anything when champagne is stinging the eyes.

Apropos, how would the Phillies' seasons have ended in 2005 and 2006 if Placido Polanco had been the third baseman instead of David Bell and Abraham Nunez? Just curious...

There is crying in baseball

They say there is no crying in baseball.

Surely whoever made up that inanity never spent a day in baseball. In the 30-plus years in which baseball has been a part of my consciousness and, truth be told, one of the major focuses of my life, the game has been nothing but crying.

There have been tears of joy, like the time when the Phillies won the World Series, or the celebration of the rare chance that someone will get the game-winning hit.

Then there are tears of defeat, like the 122 other seasons when the Phillies did not win the World Series or the hard-luck losses on center stage for the entire world to see. Mitch Williams, for example, and poor Bill Buckner. Donnie Moore.

Tears of pain, of course. Like the time I bravely stood too close when the big kids were hitting and took a line drive off my shin. Too this day I’ve never felt anything that hurt so bad or saw a bruise turn as purple as Welch’s jelly.

Yes, tears of sadness. Sadness for Donnie Moore. Thurman Munson, of course. Roberto Clemente. Lyman Bostock Tim Crews.

And now this.

There’s no crying in baseball?

That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Cory Lidle was killed on Wednesday afternoon when the plane he was flying crashed into a 50-story high rise on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Cory was a budding pilot, stellar golfer, smart poker player and a hard-working Major League pitcher. All of those pursuits, which Cory excelled at beyond the simple dabbling of a regular old hobbyist, took guile, wit and grit.

Certainly those traits were on display to Phillies fans who watched Cory pitch for parts of the past three seasons. They saw it on the mound, where the average-looking right-hander with an unexceptional repertoire of pitches somehow figured out a way to win 26 games for the Phillies.

Or they saw it in the papers where Cory’s penchant for expressing himself sometimes set off controversy or criticism, but were never ever boring. In an age of heightened PR sense and political correctness, Cory was nothing as simple as outspoken, but instead was bold. Unpopular decisions or controversial talk were always met with a shrug and a mischievous grin as if to indicate that he planned on getting everyone so riled up all along.

Sure, some teammates didn’t like it – such as Arthur Rhodes or Billy Wagner – but it’s hard to deny how lively Cory was.

That’s what I’ll remember the most about Cory. He was alive. He was engaging. He was aware. He knew what other people did, what they thought, what they wrote and what they were interested in. That’s not just rare behavior for a Major League Baseball player, but also for most people you come across on a daily basis. How many people do you come across who not only show an interest in you, but also give their time?

Isn’t time the most valuable thing we own?

But there Cory was after every game – wearing that ball cap pulled down over his eyes with a t-shirt tucked into jeans and clutching a plastic bag – waiting for the press. He answered every question, asked a few of his own before carrying on a few private, revealing conversations.

Last April he told me he thought he would be traded around the deadline if the Phillies weren’t in the playoff hunt. He didn’t have any insider information; it was just a hunch that proved to be correct. He also appreciated people who liked to tell jokes or stories, which made him a favorite sounding board for the writing corps.

More important than all of that, Cory was a father to a six-year-old boy named Christopher, who liked to run around the clubhouse. In just a short time it was easy to see where little Christopher got that mischievous grin and nature that often caused his dad to tell him to go sit in front of the locker and wait patiently. It was clear as the face on a clock.

He was also a husband to Melanie and a provider and friend for his family. Sometimes Cory’s twin brother Kevin came around when his Independent League team was playing in Camden. He was also especially close with his sister and parents.

So when I hear that saying where there is no crying in baseball, all I can do is shake my head in disbelief. There is crying in baseball.

There is crying in baseball when you think of that six-year-old boy who is never going to be able to play catch with his dad again.

Detroit Rock City

As you read this sentence, the party should finally be smoldering just south of its apex in Detroit. The Tigers, as it is, still have some work to do and a season to finish. Not that anyone in Philadelphia knows or cares about Detroit and the baseball renaissance that occurred there this season.

It’s a good thing Philadelphia sports fans are so provincial and laser-focused because the sight of Placido Polanco dashing around the field and slapping hands with the fans at Comerica Park with a bottle of champagne in on hand and a smile that spread from ear-to-ear would be enough to make a Philadelphia baseball fan sick.

That’s until the camera panned to Jim Leyland being carried off the field, coupled with the comments that followed from one-time Phillie Todd Jones who told reporters that Leyland was the only manager he played for during his 14-year career that actually made a difference in the standings.

At in the notion that Leyland should he have been carried off the field by Chase Utley and Ryan Howard instead of Sean Casey and Kenny Rogers and it’s enough sickness for some hospitalization.

At least until the playoffs end or the Tigers are eliminated.

For those too wrapped up in the Eagles and Cowboys, the Detroit Tigers, managed by Jim Leyland, sent the vaunted New York Yankees and their considerable offense home for the winter in four games in the ALDS. With just four more victories over the Oakland A’s, the Tigers could go to the World Series.

Not bad for a team that lost 119 games three years ago, averaged more than 96 losses per season for the past decade, and had just two winning seasons since 1988.

How does that team come four victories away from the World Series?

Do I have to say it?

Apparently, Jim Leyland wasn’t good enough to manage the Phillies even though he took the Tigers to 95 wins this season. Apparently the ideas he expressed to president David Montgomery and then GM Ed Wade were just a little too harebrained. Especially the ones about the corner outfielders – remember that? I do. He said the Phillies had too many strikeouts in the corner outfield positions, needed a new center fielder, third baseman and catcher.

Then he went out to the CVS on Broad St. for a pack of smokes only to come back to resume his meeting when Wade told him it would be a good idea to keep his interview date scheduled with the Mets.

Look what happened. The Phillies hired Charlie Manuel, came within a game of the wild card, fired Wade, and hired Pat Gillick. A few months later, Gillick traded right fielder Bobby Abreu, third baseman David Bell, and tried as hard as he could to get left fielder Pat Burrell to waive his no-trade clause. After the World Series, Gillick will allow catcher Mike Lieberthal to limp away as a free agent.

Talk about unoriginal ideas. I wonder if Gillick walked over to the CVS on Broad St. for a pack of smokes.

I may write about baseball and sports for many, many years. Or, Powerball numbers willing, tomorrow could be my last day. Either way, I will never ever forget how hard Leyland campaigned to be the Phillies manager during the winter of 2004. He was as shrewd as any seasoned politician and went above and beyond to the point of kissing babies and returning phone calls. In fact, Leyland wanted the Phillies job so badly that he even returned my phone calls.

Talk about desperate.

Now let’s stop for a minute before this descends into a Leyland-equals-good and Phillies-equals-bad essay. That’s just way too easy and not completely accurate. Surely, Leyland was not the only reason why the Tigers went from 300 losses in three seasons under Alan Trammell to 95-67 and the doorstep of the World Series this year. Actually, there are many reasons why the Tigers were able to turn it around so quickly.

The biggest one? Someone listened to Jim Leyland.

Apparently, Leyland went into his interview with the Tigers and told them what he would do to the team to make it better in very much the same manner he did with Montgomery and Wade. But guess what? The Tigers bought it and look where it got them.

Yes, I will always remember that day sitting in the conference room in Citizens Bank park listening to Leyland talk about what makes a winning baseball team as Wade stood in the doorway privately seething. Leyland, with his resume padded with a World Series title with the Marlins and all of those division titles with the Pirates, acted like a know-it-all questioning him to the very group of people who questioned him for sport in the papers and talk shows, daily. They had turned the fans against the straight-laced GM and here was a potential employee giving them more fodder?

Who did he think he was?

Leyland had a lot of ideas to make the Phillies better on that chilly November afternoon and he didn’t keep too many of them secret. He explained what he thought his job as the manager should be:

“When you have veteran players who buy into your thought process, it eliminates a lot of nitpicking,” he said. “The veterans set the tone. Leadership is production. Putting winning numbers on the board, that's leadership. The manager is supposed to be the leader. That's not ego talking, that's just the way it is. I've said it all my life, you're either the victim or the beneficiary of your players' performance. That's as simple as this job is.”

And what elements make up a good team:

“[It's about] trying to create an atmosphere that's comfortable,” he said. “I'm not as big on chemistry as a lot of other managers. If it works, it's wonderful. I've managed teams that ate together, played together, prayed together, and we got the [crap] kicked out of us, and I managed some that punched each other once in a while and we won. It's getting the best out of talent. They're not all going to like me. Hopefully, they will, but I doubt it. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you're working toward the same goal -- win.”

Perhaps Gillick had similar thoughts going through his head after he traded away Abreu and Bell and when he was ironing out that deal to send Burrell to Baltimore?

Maybe.

More interesting to ponder is if things would have ended differently the past two seasons if Leyland were the manager instead of Manuel? Well, it’s not as easy as simply replacing one guy for another, despite what Todd Jones says. There’s no telling how all of the personalities would have blended if anyone but Manuel were skippering the Phillies. Besides, if Leyland were in Philadelphia it would be unlikely that Pat Gillick would be the GM, too.

Maybe Wade sealed his own fate by not hiring Leyland when he campaigned so hard for the job. But then again we should have all seen the handwriting on the wall when Wade stood at the podium after Leyland’s cleansing tell-all and said:

“Even if you’re polling the 3.2 million people who came to watch us this year, I don’t think you can get hung up on this people’s commanding lead in the votes 320 to 112 or anything like that. We’re going to hire a manager we hope our fans like, but at the same time we’re going to try to hire a manager that is going to get us to the World Series.”

Hindsight being what it is… well, you can fill in the rest.

But make no mistake about one thing – Philadelphia is barely a blip on Leyland’s rear-view mirror now. Actually, it’s hard to look back at anything when champagne is stinging the eyes.

Not good enough?

New York sure is different than Philadelphia.

Yes, that really is an ambiguous statement, but when comparing the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, grand, open-ended ambiguity is the safest bet.

For the Phillies, the “Golden Age” of the franchise started in the mid-1970s and lasted until the early 1980s. For about a decade, the Phillies were about as good as a team could be in the Major Leagues. They were so good, in fact, that in 1979 Danny Ozark was fired as the manager of the team because he didn’t win the World Series after winning 101 games in 1976 and 1977 and a 90-win NL East title in 1978.

It wasn’t enough to get it done.

In 1983, general manager Paul Owens bounced Pat Corrales from the managerial seat even though he had the Phillies in first place with 76 games remaining in the season. Owens came down from the front office and kept the Phillies right where Corrales left them before the collapse in the World Series against the Orioles.

Those were the days when it was either the World Series or failure for the Phillies, and it’s safe to say that a similar mentality never really occurred in the team’s 123-season history.

It would be interesting to see what fate would beset Charlie Manuel if he stumbled the way Ozark and the Phillies did in 1979. Or what would happen to Manuel if he were the skipper in 1983 when Corrales’ first-place Phillies were doing something wrong 86 games in to the season.

How can a team fire the manager when his team is in first place?

Make no mistake; there are a lot of people who don’t want Manuel to return to the bench for 2007 after two seasons in which he won more games than all but one manager in team history through this point in his tenure. With the Phillies, 173 victories in two seasons in which the team was eliminated from wild-card playoff contention at game Nos. 162 and 161 is borderline historic. Actually, it’s more than remarkable – it’s unprecedented.

This is a franchise, after all, where only two (two!) managers have taken the team to more than one postseason. It’s a franchise that has been to the playoffs just nine times in 123 seasons. For comparisons sake, look at the Atlanta Braves who… wait, nevermind. It just isn’t fair to compare the Phillies to any other franchise.

Anyway, one of those dynamic duo of managers was Ozark, who won the NL East three years in a row but was axed when he couldn’t do it for a fourth, and the other was Ozark’s replacement, Dallas Green, who delivered the franchise’s only title in 1980 only to lose to Montreal in the 1981 NLDS.

That loss was enough to send Green on his way to Chicago where he thought he could break the Cubs’ losing curse. But Green quickly learned that even he isn’t that good. Sure, historically things are really bad for the Phillies, but even they don’t compare to the futility of the Cubs.

Maybe Joe Torre is the manager the Cubs need to help them end 98 straight seasons without a World Series? After all, it appeared as if Torre was going to be out of a job after 11 seasons as the manager of the New York Yankees.

Torre apparently was headed for the same fate as Danny Ozark in 1979 before general manager Brian Cashman and the Yankees players interceded. But unlike Ozark, Torre didn’t miss the playoffs this year. Actually, Torre made it to the playoffs in every season he was the manager for the Yankees. He averaged close to 100 victories per season, won the World Series four times, including three years in a row, figured out how to charm the fickle New York media and even more erratic, owner George Steinbrenner.

There is no way to categorize Torre’s time with the Yankees as anything other than wildly successful. In fact, there are some of those fickle and hyperbolic New York-media types who have deemed Torre’s Yankees’ career as Hall-of-Fame worthy alongside the all-time greats like Joe McCarthy, Casey Stengel and Miller Huggins. Add Torre to that tribunal and get 21 of the Yankees’ 26 World Series titles, and 30 American League pennants.

In other words, Joe Torre has done a lot better than Charlie Manuel, but only one of them was truly on the proverbial hot seat for returning to the same team in 2007.

One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Obviously, making it through Game 161 with a fighting chance is not a good season in the South Bronx. Steinbrenner, unlike David Montgomery and the Phillies, does not celebrate moral victories or potential. Because of that, Torre and his failure to deliver a World Series title since 2000, ends the season as a “sad disappointment,” as his boss stated. Those 1,079 victories, not including the 75 more in the playoffs, ring a bit hollow.

Torre, it seems, built expectations so high that anything less than perfection was not good enough. Is it his fault that his hitters picked a really bad time to stop being the best offense in baseball, or that the pitching staff he was handed didn’t live up to its old press clipping s anymore?

Of course not. But Torre made the mistake of having high standards.

We don’t have that problem here.

Instead, Charlie Manuel’s run in Philadelphia is still littered with hope and promise. For the Phillies, 173 victories in two seasons is nothing to sneeze at.

Nothing to do (and all day to do it)

The 12:02 pulled out of the station just as my traveling companion and I stepped on to the platform. I wouldn’t have noticed the train heading toward a horizon where the sky seemed to be resting right on top of miles and miles of a treeless green valley until my partner – from the vantage point of my shoulders – pointed and shouted.

“Look! Tommy! Choo-choo!”

Every train to a two-year-old boy is named Tommy or Thomas, but unlike the diesel and electric fueled Amtrak that rockets from city to city, these Tommy trains sound a hard-to-ignore “choo-choo!” To anyone who has ever seen a modern, 21st Century train it is hard to think if they make any noise at all. The only noise is a whoosh of speed as it quickly turns to a blur.

But here in Strasburg, Pa., just 45 miles from Center City, anachronisms reign. Not only do the trains go “choo-choo!” but also they run on coal-powered steam engines along a countryside devoid of strip malls and tacky suburban sprawl. They don’t need a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s here because it’s just as easy to go out in the backyard and dig up all of the organic produce desired.

Nevertheless, we would have to come up with Plan B because we missed that 12:02. Then again, Plan B was the easy part. On the way to the railroad station we had stopped at an Amish roadside stand where we bought a few apples, a bag of pretzels and a couple of drinks. Instead of the ride we parked it on a circular bench under a shady birch tree where we watched the train disappear beneath the inky plume of black smoke on a day so sunny and warm it was almost cartoonish. There, we shared the fruit and the pretzels while he sipped from a small plastic container of juice.

Plan B was perfect. We had nothing to do and all day to do it. There was no ballgame to rush off to watch and write about because the Phillies didn’t make the playoffs again. The Eagles had played the night before, but my companion was in bed long before kickoff. Besides, “Blues Clues” holds much more appeal to him than Andy Reid’s game plan. So instead of talking about sports or work we were going to sit there on that bench, eat those pretzels and feel the sun on a rare quiet day.

There would be time for games later. There always is. That’s the great thing about sports – a game is always there if you need one. Flip through the dial on the TV, or better yet, head out to the field nearby and there is sure to be a game going on. Sometimes the games that are played on those tiny fields in the middle of nowhere are the best ones. After all, it’s not the result that is remembered in the end – it’s the company you kept. No one says, “Remember the score of that game we went to five years ago?” Instead it’s, “Remember when we went to that game five years ago and how much fun we had.”

You know, just being there with your people. That’s what the games are about, right?

My companion pointed out the water tower blooming over a row of old dining cars and cabooses as he scraped the salt off his pretzel. He also pointed out the engineers in their overalls and funny, short-brimmed caps preparing for the next engine to barrel down those tracks. Mostly, though, we just enjoyed the quiet and the company.

It’s hard to imagine anything other than tranquility from our perch on that bench. Miles removed from the tourist traps where folks from New York and Philadelphia came to see the Amish (“are the Amish open on Sunday?”) and the farms while shopping for brand-name fashions in the outlet malls, the fields surrounding the train tracks barely quaked in the gentle breeze that seemed to spread the sunshine as if it were spores from a dandelion.

Yet even then there is quiet tenacity in that energy. To us it’s nothing more than a Rockwellian backdrop to a perfect scene.

Kind of like we are on that bench.

So it’s hard to imagine that just hours before chaos was in command. How could the roads that can barely handle the traffic at roadside stand or a country fair provide access for the fleet of ambulances and emergency vehicles? Forget about the teeming TV satellite trucks rushing to yet another tragedy like flies to manure or the helicopters circling overhead, how are these vehicles going to get where they desperately need to go?

It was a brisk, 20-minute jog from where we were sitting to where the ambulances, helicopters and satellite trucks had rushed. Three miles, tops, which, out here is like a couple of city blocks. Out here miles melt into the horizon like the clouds of smoke into the cloudless sky from that old train.

Sometimes it’s weird how lives intersect – a chance encounter here or there brought about by the ambiguity of geography. Weirder yet is how dreams and hopes haunt each of us. For some of us, all we want is a day in the sun, free from work and responsibility or a respite from the cares that can weigh us down. I’m lucky that I get to live a dream. All my hopes and desires are right here in the country alongside a railroad track. We have pretzels, some apples, a cool drink, great company and nothing else to do.

This could be the greatest day ever.

But for Charles Roberts – who lived just down the road from where we sat – dreams are nightmares. Worse, those little Amish girls who did nothing other than show up at the one-room schoolhouse on the wrong day, dreams go unrealized and unformed.

All we can say is that it isn’t fair.

It’s a shame that Charles Roberts could not find joy in playing soccer with his kids, or inviting his people over to watch a game on television. Why couldn’t he find joy simplicity and the nuance that makes the world spin a create smiles so big that they turn to tears of pure happiness?

Why couldn’t Charles Roberts take a trip up Route 896 to the Strasburg Railroad and sit with his boy at the side of the tracks?

Why?

Almost too fast, the food has been eaten and the drinks sipped dry. We’re starting to get restless from staring out into the miles and miles of fields that just won’t end until they reach the clear, blue sky. The platform is starting to fill up with tourists ready to board the 1 p.m. for a trip through the countryside to Paradise and back.

“Hey Michael,” I said. “Let’s get a couple of tickets and go for a ride.”