27 & Baseball

I have always been independent – just ask my mom, who delivered me to my first apartment at the age of seventeen. I like spontaneous adventure. This year I am taking myself to see Fitz and the Tantrums for my birthday…at a concert venue in Jim Thorpe, an hour and a half up the Northeast Extension. I have never been there, and am relying entirely on Google maps to lead me. 

The scenery in northeast Pennsylvania is beautiful. I am lost in rolling hills and deep river valleys. It is halfway through the Lehigh Tunnel that I am reminded of a day four years ago when I set out on a similar adventure – and failed.

A fortune teller once told me I would have three great loves in my life. One would end badly. One would simply slip away. With the third I would develop a great long friendship, seven years filled with travel and adventure before falling madly and deeply in love, producing children. He would be seven years older than I, and we would meet when I was 27.

The year I turned 27, I was living in Brooklyn. A night of drinking and dancing with the girls had produced a brain-pounding, nausea-inducing hangover and a mission. There was a ball game that night in Philadelphia. I had been talking online to a guy in Cherry Hill for about a month, and I had concocted this brilliant plan to buy tickets to the game, sending him one and keeping the other.

The problem was, Cherry Hill had a girlfriend. He advertised himself as “single”, of course, so it wasn’t until I was in it up to my neck that I learned how serious was their relationship (three years – they had been together for three years). When she learned of my existence, she put the kibosh on our meeting at any ball game – or meeting ever. 

With or without him, I am determined to go to that game, if only to prove to myself that I can have an adventure all on my own, thank you very much. I was 27; I could do anything.

My boss, with no hesitation, loans me his beat-up diesel Mercedes, and I head down the BQE into a brilliant orange sunset, the promise of this thing they call a cheesesteak making my mouth water. My head is swimming with the romance of it all.

I have never been to Philly before, but about an hour into my journey it occurs to me I should be well out of New York City by now. I look for my next landmark, a sign telling me I am entering New Jersey…and what I see is JFK Airport.

Google maps sometimes misses vital pieces of information – in this case, the Verrazano fucking Bridge. Having never been to Staten Island either (in fact, having been told there is nothing of interest in Staten Island), I had no idea you could go THROUGH Staten Island. I have followed the BQE all the way around the tip of Brooklyn and ended up on the other side. (For those of you unfamiliar with geography, that’s Queens…not Pennsylvania.)

I turn around, hoping to make the last few innings – if only for principle’s sake – but by the time I reach the Holland tunnel it is the bottom of the fifth, and my friends are begging me to give it up and join them for a beer.

The Mets beat the Phillies that night, even without my attendance to cheer them on. And though I missed the likely risk of death and dismemberment as a Mets fan in Philadelphia, I was thoroughly defeated. It was more than missing the possibility of running into Cherry Hill. It was more than the wasted twelfth-row third base seats I had been looking forward to for a month. It was the fact that I had decided upon that game as my first “27-year-old adult” adventure – and I never made it out of New York.

When I finally pull around the side of the mountain and see the chalet-style radio station at the tippy-top, excitement overtakes fatigue. I have made it. I bested Google maps. 

Later, walking out into the fog after a concert worth every mile, I am buzzing with satisfaction. I made this trip all by myself. I did it for ME. And damn, do I take myself on the best dates.