(Day 1 photos can be found
here)
After the flight I had from Atlanta to Tucson, the rest of the day was only marginally strange.
What happened is the guy on the aisle seat in my row warned me that he has seizures nearly each time he wakes up, and they lasted anywhere from 10-15 seconds. I didn’t know if he was joking until he told the flight attendants the same thing.
Sure enough, he falls asleep, and halfway through the flight, he jolts bolt upright, stiffens and starts shaking violently. I’m just watching him as people around me are punching their flight attendant call buttons, because he said not to worry. He continues convulsing until he slumps into the unoccupied middle seat between us. Then, he wakes up out of breath.
I ask him if he’s all right, and he said he was okay, and asked me how long it lasted. I said “About 15 seconds,” and he said, “That’s good.” Seemed like a nice guy, but even with the advance notice, it still scared the hell out of me.
But on to Tucson!
My flight was delayed about 25 minutes, but it really didn’t matter because Matt’s was delayed an hour. So he got to the Tucson airport the same time I did. The airport was nicely adorned with a “Home of the World Champion White Sox” banner, by the way. I’ll try to snag a picture of the banner, if not the banner itself on the way out.
We took our ultra-sweet rental Ford Focus (the Chevy Cobalts must’ve been taken) to Hi Corbett Field for the Rockies-Cubs game, since the Sox were out of town. We found parking relatively close to the stadium and managed to get there at the end of the third inning.
Hi Corbett is a great place to watch a game. The hot dogs were overpriced (that’s what you get with Aramark), but the seating was comfortable and so was the temperature (high 60s, partly cloudy). It’s also the home of Arizona’s women’s pro softball team, which makes me wonder how that’s possible since it’s 366 feet down the left field line and 400+ feet to the power alleys.
The Rockies did all their damage before we got there, staking a 6-0 lead after three, and the Cubs didn’t show much from there on out. Jacque Jones struggled to get reads on the ball in right field, and the offense didn’t amount to anything until Mike Restovich broke the shutout bid in the seventh inning with an RBI single.
Cub fans outnumbered Rockies fans to Matt’s chagrin, but they provided some entertainment, in both the forms of good Cub fans and ones that fit the stereotype.
The people in front of us were great, asking us to not call Felix Pie “the next Corey Patterson” – and Felix did earn our temporary respect by actually working the count full before flying out to left. And then there were the stereotypical Neifi jokes, and Matt, a man who witnessed the dawn of the Neifi Era in Colorado, actually got to make a joke at somebody else’s expense. A rare occasion for a Rockies fan.
But then there were the women in the Mark Grace jerseys. And the fans who left
en masse early. And the ones who chanted “Throw it back! Throw it back!” for a solid 20 seconds towards a guy who caught a ball tossed by the Rockies third baseman after he caught the final out of the inning. And that never gets old.
As a city, Tucson itself was… well…
I don’t want to use the word “slum,” because I’ve only seen half of it, and probably the half that’s closer to the University of Arizona and downtown has some nicer parts. But the parts we saw, in between Hi Corbett and our hotel, often brought to mind what the end of the earth might resemble.
It’s all brown, which is to be expected from a desert, and the air is accordingly dusty. But because there hasn’t been rain in about 140 days, it’s even more arid. You’ll drive over “rivers” that are now ditches, and by clusters of homeless people sleeping in parks with brown grass (a homeless man also caught up to us from behind on bicycle while we were entering a restaurant, asking for hotel money). A majority of windows are covered by security bars, plywood or graffiti. It’s hard to tell what land has been set aside from development and what’s just plain ol’ land that can’t grow anything, because low-rise buildings pop up along the road in a random fashion.
The mountains are beautiful, and the temperature was just about perfect, but the half of the city I saw today was in desperate need of a powerwashing.
Nevertheless, it has what only a few other cities can claim right now – live, Major League Baseball action, and for that I’m thankful. We’ll be heading out bright and early to Tucson Electric Park to catch the White Sox practicing before the game, and of course the game itself. They’ll take on the Giants, and if I'm up to it, I'll have the opportunity to boo Barry.
(Count Chocula was unavailable for comment.)