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My Grandfather’s Chicago Cubs Helmet (Prose Poem)
My Grandfather’s Chicago Cubs Helmet
A blue helmet with a red “C” in the middle. Just that, plain, for everyone else but me. The colors of this helmet are the way in which I can express my feeling about my grandfather. Blue. Blue is the color that my days take since the day he passed away, even when the sunlight hits the Earth as hard as it can; blue are the memories that I spent with him, every baseball game we saw, every time he took me, my brothers, and my cousins to play baseball and soccer to the park, every Friday night spent with him are now blue, are in the past. And red, the way he lived every single day, intense, with courage, and passion; but there’s no way to explain how he lived baseball, how he lived every game passing without sorrow or glory, using the helmet, thinking and hoping that the Cubs will eventually win a World Series, how he lived when Chicago Cubs finally won the championship, after 89 years of patiently waiting for their moment of triumph. He didn’t play baseball, but he was a fan of it, enjoying game after game, season after season, year after year, watching or hearing every game he could, at home, at a restaurant, at a bar, everywhere. Even when we gave him new caps from the Cubs, he insisted in using that old, plastic, hard, uncomfortable, and ugly helmet. He transmitted me his passion through it. Maybe he didn’t use that helmet every time at every moment, but that is how I remember him, every single day when I see the helmet laying now in my bookshelf.
