and of course she will make a wonderful grandma, shes the best mom in the world, after all.

over the years my mom has taught my sister how to be the best mom in the world so i have nothing but good feelings for my little neice.

rarely am i one to talk about me losing to my sister, but heres a good one that im sure you’ll enjoy.

in our junior high, they had this thing where if you made the honor roll you’d get to go on a field trip with all the other honor roll kids to a Cubs game.

my sister made it no problem, me, i missed it by a point or two. it was tragic.

tragic because we didnt live very close to the friendly confines of wrigley field, so every visit was special.

one day a lot of the kids werent in school and i asked someone why and he said, “oh, all the honor roll kids are at the cubs game.”

i was all, “that sucks, i only missed it by a point or two!”

he said, “i know, me too.”

so he and i arranged for a bunch of kids to ditch the last few classes of school and walk over to the sod farm and we played baseball, out of protest.

some rich kid brought a radio and we listened to the game as we played ours.

the day was may seventeenth.

why do i know this date? because it haunts me like a ghost.

only 14,952 went to this afternoon game between the last place Cubs and the second to last place Phillies, starring my favorite opposing player at the time, Larry Bowa, and my two favorite Cubbies, Dave Kingman and Bruce Sutter– but those who attended will never forget it.

and neither will i.

The wind was blowing out and the Cubs jumped to a 7�0 lead in the 1st and lead 15�6 after three innings.

When the score had errupted to 21�9 going into the bottom of the 6th, we ran to Scott Fennesy’s house to watch it on tv.

Big mistake.

The Cubs gave up 12 runs in three innings like only the cubs could. they were experts at self destruction. they gave up just enough runs to send this wild game into extra innings, entering the tenth inning tied 22-22.

dave kingman had hit three home runs in this game, larry bowa went 5 for 5.

it may be the most vivid recollection that i have of all of junior high.

it may have helped that it happened all day.

mike schmidt broke the tie in the tenth by hitting a wind-aided homer (barely) over the left field wall off of bruce sutter, the best reliever in baseball, at that time.

and my sister was there.

and when she came home she tossed me the stub.