For a Stranger in Town, a Little Love Goes a Long Way

This will be a love letter, pure and simple. When you go out of town for four days just hoping to get a break from the office, see some friends and take in some baseball games--and you fall in love instead--you have to tell someone about it, don’t you?

Like all great love affairs, I didn’t see this one coming. You get to a certain age, you’ve been around the block a few times, you’ve got all the proper defense mechanisms working, and then, boom, right between the eyes when you least expect it.

But I’m getting ahead of the story. On paper, the trip to Chicago had ‘can’t miss’ written all over it. The baited hook had been the offer to go with some local baseball nuts to attend the season opener at Wrigley Field, the venerable home of the Cubs that lets you remember you can actually enjoy a baseball game without an organ and electronic instant replay on the scoreboard.

At Wrigley, the North Siders in the neighborhood stand on rooftops across the street from the park to watch the game and sing along with the people in the stands as aging announcer Harry Caray leads the ritualistic singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch.

Orange County, it ain’t.

I got to Chicago late Thursday night, just in time for a short visit with my hosts before we all went to bed.

The next day was Opening Day, supposedly the centerpiece of the trip.

Until I met her.

She was in the kitchen when I came upstairs from my basement quarters.

“Elizabeth, this is our friend Dana,” her mother said.

My first view of her was somewhat obscured, hiding as she was behind her mother’s leg. She was a brown-haired girl with the eyes of a doe, eyes that are going to both enrapture and torment an endless series of males.

I turned on the charm, and it worked. She soon sailed off from the safe port of her mother’s leg and straight into my arms. I picked her up, she hugged me for no reason that I could ascertain and showed me her red painted fingernails. At that instant, I wouldn’t have cared if a wrecking crew had obliterated Wrigley Field and declared baseball forever banned in America.

We went into the living room. “Day-nuh, read!” she said.

We settled into a blue chair. She sat on my left leg; she moved over to my right; then she faced me and said “Like me,” and gave me a hug. She listened as only the innocent can to stories of “The Beauty and the Beast,” of Horton the elephant who hatched the egg and of the bus with the big round wheels. Something in her head prompted her to count to 10 and then recite the alphabet, which she did until she got to that mysterious part where letters disappear into wherever it is they go.

We finished the first round of books, and she said, “Day-nuh, read!” and I said, OK, and she went over to the shelf and came back with nine more books spilling out of her arms.

Don’t worry, her mother said, she’ll eventually lose interest. I was hoping she wouldn’t, fully prepared to purchase and read an entire set of Encyclopaedia Britannica if that would keep her sitting on my leg and and saying my name and then blurting out laughing.

Like all short-and-sweet interludes, this one was laced with unfettered joy and sprinkled with the bittersweet knowledge that I couldn’t stick around forever. Once, she spilled soda on my arm while I was reading to her and it sat there for a second, puddled up. She lapped it up and I called her a puppy dog, and she thought it was hilarious.

We shared many things in a short time. She showed me the Easter eggs she found on Saturday and how to arrange them in a basket. She told me somberly how “a lion eat me” in a bad dream she had the night before. On Sunday, she brought home a blue balloon from her grandpa’s house and gaily showed me how she had stuck a purple plastic egg on a teddy bear’s nose.

Her mother sent her downstairs to awaken me in the mornings and she’d venture into the chilly basement, pull back the big covers and say, “Day-nuh, wake up!” I’d grumble, and she’d bark out the command again.

I left on Monday afternoon, mildly disappointed that she didn’t burst into tears when she learned I was leaving, but realizing she had lots of little-girl things with which to occupy her mind. It’s a big world she’s trying to get a handle on, and the surprises and new faces must seem like one big blur to her.

I got back home Monday evening, after a long airport delay and flight foul-up. It was the kind of travel day that makes you wonder why you ever leave home in the first place.

Then I played the phone messages. The first one was a wrong number, but the second one sounded like a chorus of angels.

“Day-nuh, hi,” the little voice said. “Day-nuh, come back,” it said. I heard her mother prompting her to say bye, and she ended it, “Day-nuh, bye.”

Back at work now, I have a vague recollection of some baseball games at Wrigley, of sightseeing downtown, of driving along Lakeshore Drive alongside Lake Michigan.

But mostly I remember being shot right through the heart by Elizabeth Gray Meister, all of 2 years and 4 months, and vowing here and now to make life miserable for anyone who ever takes her away from her world of blue balloons, purple plastic eggs on bears’ noses and good nights’ sleep.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.