No Rain on Their Parade

The city was still gray when crowds began to gather on Broadway for what was known as Dodger Day.

Traffic was already beginning to back up on the freeways, and cars were crawling the last few blocks to their parking lots far earlier than crawling was usually necessary.

I was among them.

Heavy traffic does nothing to sweeten my nature, especially if it is caused by an event that could have just as easily been avoided.

I accept that earthquakes might create confusion on the thoroughfares, but I can’t understand why people would willingly thrust themselves into chaos for the sake of shouting hooray.

I had driven to work early not to join those with blue hats and sloppy smiles but to research a column entirely unrelated to the World Series.

Sure, I watched the games on television. I had to. I was born in Oakland and now live in L.A., so it was a case of my past battling my future.

But notwithstanding those ties to a sporting event, I am not likely to make any special effort to be present at a miracle or to celebrate it later.

I say this so you will understand my frame of mind by the time I got my car parked Monday morning and began slouching toward Times-Mirror Square.

My intention was to get through the fans and the vendors as quickly as possible and get on with an essay far more compelling than anything Tommy Lasorda would have to say.

But then I began to wonder what drove all those hapless souls to journey downtown from as far away as Bellflower to cheer a team that will most likely be forgotten season after next?

The answers, I suppose, were obvious, but I wanted to hear it from the fans, so I wandered along Broadway to the City Hall lawn and began asking.

There was a lot of “Isn’t this terrific?” and a collection of other responses typical of those who get a bigger thrill out of a game than they do out of their first baby.

But then a man named Jeff, who looked at me as though I had just asked if I could sleep with his sister, replied incredulously, “How often do you win?”

It was a response not meant to invite a search for double meanings, and at first I placed it on a level with those bumper stickers that say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

The kind of mentality that embraces winning at any cost is the same mentality that has caused blood to spill ever since man began to understand, however vaguely, the importance of being numero uno.

But as I wandered through the early crowds and thought about Jeff’s response, I realized that such a comparison would be inappropriate .

These people weren’t out there to start World War III.

They were cheering one small win in their lives that had nothing to do with horror and nothing to do with social conscience and nothing to do with anything likely to trouble their sleep.

We all need that.

James Barrie, who wrote “Peter Pan,” said, “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December,” and maybe that goes for a baseball win too: something decent and innocent to talk about when the skies lower and the rain falls.

It doesn’t have to be baseball. We win in a lot of ways. I watched a little girl named Nicole take her first step in life across the sun-splashed tile of our living room, and I doubt that there will ever be a victory sweeter than that.

I sat with a young man named Jason who would be dead in two days from cancer and heard him say that dying was a kind of cure because he believed salvation dwelt in the starry skies. If winning is believing, that was winning too.

I hadn’t intended to get solemn over a baseball parade but that question (How often do you win?) kept buzzing through my head, and at the end I had to say not very often.

We do the best we can. We claw ahead until our fingers bleed and run until our legs buckle, but few of us ever make it to the front of the pack.

I came away from the gray morning still believing that winning isn’t everything and it sure as hell isn’t the only thing, but it is something .

As I waited to cross the street, a guy with a bedroll over his shoulder stood next to me, so I asked him what he thought of the whole thing.

He shrugged and said, “I guess it’s important.”

I said, “I guess,” and gave him $5.

It was my lunch money, but so what? I figured he needed something out of the day too. I mean, how often do we win?