Lately: You don’t hear from me for weeks, and then I’m like, “hey, I’m moving to St. Louis,” and now here I am three days later being like, “no, really, read more about St. Louis, okay?” That’s what that is: I’m asking you to read this essay I wrote for
, an online literary magazine about the Cardinals.
And Where We Had Thought To Be Alone
My first month of college, I was paralyzed with homesickness for St. Louis. I lived in a sardine can of a room with a girl who watched Nip/Tuck on maximum volume until 4 o’clock every morning. I missed the smell of the wet grass in my parents’ front yard on hot September mornings and the itchy waistband of my plaid uniform skirt, rolled twice and safety-pinned closed. I craved Ted Drewes and toasted ravioli and the Cardinals.
There was a group of us at Georgetown, freshmen from St. Louis, and we all agreed to watch the playoffs together that fall, for however long the Cardinals lasted. If they made the playoffs at all. You’ll forgive our doubts. It was 2006, and I was only 18 — away from home for the first time and helplessly watching my favorite team endure a historically grotesque September collapse. Our watch party plans (and a reprieve from Nip/Tuck) were only guaranteed on the last day of the season, when the division was settled with the Cardinals (barely) on top.
I watched the games crowded in tiny D.C. dorm rooms, four to an extra-long twin, baseball caps flipped inside out, collars popped, too scared to smuggle in beers. Some of us were friends, many of us just acquaintances, brought together because we were St. Louis kids trapped here, halfway across the country, while our baseball team made an improbable run to the World Series. During commercial breaks, we talked about home — about which games we’d gone to over the summer, which proms we’d been invited to, how much we missed our cars, how we wished we could order Imo’s. I could trick myself, sometimes, into thinking these other kids were as dejected as I was, that they needed the Cardinals as much as I did.
