It was early afternoon, Wednesday, October 5, 2022, a beautifully sunny and warm, almost hot day, and, having just finished booking a January 2023 holiday to Dublin, I sat back at my desk and gazed out my loft windows, thinking of a way to celebrate. It would be my second trip back since I’d obtained my Irish passport during the COVID pandemic, which I now proudly owned in addition to my Canadian passport and green card, and even though my trip was still over three months away, the prospect of once again returning to Ireland had me super-excited.

“Maybe I should just go to the White Sox game instead,” I said to myself after briefly considering taking a nap on the couch. Normally the regular season would have ended the previous week, but on account of the league’s spring lockout, play had been extended into October. It was Chicago’s final game of the year, versus the Minnesota Twins, and though the White Sox had originally been expected to be contenders, they had underperformed—”Like always,” their fans moaned—and were once again out of playoffs. On any other day, the nap would have definitely won out as I’m really not that much of baseball fan—I find the game super boring. Rather, it’s the promotions and giveaways that I enjoy. That, and the park itself: the manicured diamond, the outfield’s intricately mowed patterns, the brick walls draped in ivy. Most games I stay for only four or five innings, six max, or about as long as it takes me to drink two extremely overpriced ballpark beers. As tempted as I was to lie down on the couch, though, I realized that I’d be foolish not to take advantage of the gorgeous weather. We might not get another day like this until next spring, I thought. Just don’t forget to bring your phone.

Unlike an increasingly large proportion of society who can’t bear to be without their phones, I do not feel the need to be permanently attached mine, preferring to set it on my desk whenever I leave the house. I’m not sure if there are any kind of statistics kept on this sort of thing, but I just might be the only person left on earth who uses a phone mainly for the sole purpose of which it was first intended: to make and receive telephone calls. Whether I’m shopping for groceries, going to a movie, or meeting friends for a meal or drinks, the last thing I want is to be interrupted by a phone call. I’m not overly fond of texting either, as I can talk much faster than I can type. If, for some reason or other, I find myself in need of a phone while away from home, well, everyone and their dog now owns one, so it’s not like I’m left stranded. For me, it’s just an added inconvenience having to lug my phone everywhere, of always patting my pockets to make sure I haven’t lost it like I’m forever doing in regard to my wallet and my keys and my sunglasses, and so I leave it at home. Unless, of course, I have no other choice. Take buying a ticket to a sporting event. Sure, at the onset of the pandemic, paper tickets were already being phased out, but COVID certainly played a large part in hastening their demise. Saving the ticket as a keepsake, with its imprinted price, date and time, and section, row, and seat number, was sometimes the best part of attending of a sporting event. To me, the loss of paper tickets seems like collateral damage, like another senseless death.

Aside from calls and texts, today’s phone puts the world at your fingertips—news, weather, entertainment; flashlights, calculators, and alarm clocks; financial transactions. And selfies, lots and lots and lots of selfies—having evolved not only into a necessary but a vital, if not the most vital, tool for survival. This, I found out the hard way on my previous trip to Ireland, in October 2021, the first while using my new passport. The week before my flight, I wrote in my notebook, “Things to remember to pack for Ireland: my liver and a sense of humor.” Unfortunately, I forgot to add one more important item to that list, because on leaving Chicago, I lost my phone somewhere in O’Hare Airport, and it wasn’t until after arriving at my hotel in Dublin that I discovered it missing. After frantically retracing my steps, I concluded that I must have left it at the Aer Lingus counter after checking in for my flight. I then managed to contact the police at O’Hare, who, in turn, put me in touch with an Aer Lingus manager named Marissa. As I’d suspected, Marissa confirmed that she’d had a phone turned into her the day before which fit my phone’s description, and she assured me that it would be waiting for me on my return. Upon hearing the news, relief washed over me, not from having successfully located my phone but from being free of the responsibility of taking care of it for the next three weeks. And so, to celebrate, I had a pint of Guinness and then followed it up with a dozen or so more after that.

I didn’t give my phone another thought until the morning of my departure, which was Monday, November 8, the exact same day the U.S. lifted restrictions for foreigners entering the country. Now in order to board a flight to the States passengers had to fill out a contact tracing form that had been sent overnight to, you guessed it, everyone’s phone. Had it not been for my Irish passport, I might still be stranded in Dublin, but, thankfully, after encountering all sorts of obstacles—snaking lines of frenzied passengers headed back to America for the first time in ages, harried airline workers, unresponsive computer systems—an Aer Lingus supervisor named Tom Powell (“Like Colin, the old U.S. Army fellow,” he pointed out when, flustered, I didn’t catch his name and asked him to repeat it), pulled the form up on his phone and allowed me to input my information before fast-tracking me through the boarding process. This, after leaving me alone, sitting in the terminal, anxious and sweating, with both my heart and mind racing while he went for coffee. “I’ll be back in twenty-five or thirty minutes,” he’d told me an hour before my flight was scheduled to depart. “This place has been going mental all morning, and I haven’t had time for me break.” Then he added, probably because he saw the fear in my eyes, “But don’t you worry. I’m not about to leave an Irishman stranded. When I get back, I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

Waving goodbye to him as I rushed toward Customs, I called out, promising to buy him a Guinness on my return, and he nodded in agreement. “And don’t forget to bring your phone with you,” he called back.

***

The Sox game started at three ten, a good two hours later than day games were normally scheduled for, meaning I didn’t have to rush like I usually did. The later start allowed me to arrive shortly after the first pitch instead of sometime during the third inning, which I also usually did, and after buying a ticket, I tried bringing it up on my phone as I approached the gate. “This stupid thing doesn’t seem to want to load,” I said, annoyed, after passing through the metal detector.

The gate attendant was a young Black man, around nineteen years old, with droopy eyelids and cornrows “Try turning it to Airplane mode, then turn the Airplane mode off and try again,” he told me, looking over my shoulder at my phone’s screen.

I followed his instructions and—voilà—up came my ticket. Having learned something new for the day, I thanked him as he scanned my ticket, adding, “You’ve just made a good day even better.”

Because none of the ushers seemed overly concerned about checking tickets once I got past the gate, I chose to sit out in right field, which, at three forty-five in the afternoon, was still bathed in sunshine, instead of my assigned six-dollar seat in the shaded, upper deck. Not that it mattered. I mean, it looked like there were maybe, maybe, five thousand fans in attendance, if that. And as one might expect, a game featuring two teams that finished well out of the playoffs wasn’t anything to write home about. The game had barely begun, and Chicago was already down 4-0. Minnesota then proceeded to quickly tack on another two runs before the White Sox manager finally emerged from his dugout and toddled to the mound. The catcher and the infielders soon joined him, and as everyone stood around trying to decide what to do, I took a sip of my beer and began counting the number of people in different sections of the upper deck as the organist pounded out robust renditions of ballpark favorites. While taking in the stadium’s emptiness—some sections had as little as nine fans sitting in them—I noticed that the LED scoreboard ringing the upper deck had a glaring mistake on it. Instead of the logo for the Minnesota Twins illuminated beside the batter’s name, which was displayed between home plate and first base, there was the unmistakable stylized KC insignia of the Kansas City Royals. “Looks like the White Sox can’t get anything right today,” I said, after pointing out the error to a man who was stretched out four rows behind me, his feet draped over the chair backs in front of him. I had interrupted a discussion that he was having with his two twenty-something-year-old sons about purchasing a tiny house that had been fashioned out of an old school bus. The three of them were spread out along the row, sitting two seats apart from one another. All were either bald or had their heads shaven, and each sported unique facial hair: the father, a thick, furry push-broom moustache; the oldest son, a comically overgrown hipster beard; and the youngest—he must have been all of twenty, this kid, and that’s pushing it—a sketchy-looking Fu Manchu, his sparse, fine whiskers barely perceptible to the naked eye. It was a pathetic attempt, really.

“The scoreboard operator must have taken the day off like the rest of the team,” Mr. Push-Broom said as he and his two sons peered up at the sign.

“How’d you see that?” Sketchy Fu Manchu asked me, squinting into the sun, his coarse yet squeaky voice perfectly suiting his thin, pinched, rat-like face. “Jeez, you sure are observant.”

“Holy smokes! No kidding,” agreed his brother, the bearded Boy Wonder. “I wouldn’t have noticed that in a million years.” He took a bite out of his hotdog and a blob of mustard dripped onto his dense bushy growth, joining the bits of onion and breadcrumbs that were already nesting there. I’m willing to bet that if you were to go rooting through his tangled mess, you’d have also found a tomato wedge or a slice of pickle or a hot pepper. Or a petrified chunk of Velveeta. Or, quite possibly, all the above. “Hey,” he said to me. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about tiny houses, would you? You know, the kind that are made out of ambulances and buses and shipping containers and stuff like that? Me and my little brother here are thinking of going halfsies on one.”

***

It took two more innings for the scoreboard to be corrected and by that point the score was 10-0 and I was standing at the beer taps of a bar that overlooked left field. I had just ordered my second beer of the game, using a White Sox gift card that my friend John had given me, when the barmaid, a short, plump woman with brown curly hair down to her shoulders, announced that her bar was the only place in the ballpark that didn’t take gift cards.

“Oh, well,” I said, slipping the gift card back into my wallet. “That’s all right. I guess I’ll just get one somewhere else, then.” Maybe it was because of the big, stupid grin I had plastered on my face as a result of how much fun I’d been having or maybe it was because I then began to whistle contentedly to myself, but as I started walking away, the barmaid called after me, saying, “Hey, wait a minute. What puts you in such a good mood today? Sure can’t be the score of the game.”

I turned around and told her that I had just booked a vacation to Ireland.

“Well then, I can’t let you leave here empty-handed, now can I?” Then she proceeded to pour me a beer, and when I held up my hand as if to say, No, really, don’t worry about it, she waved me off. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s the least I can do for not taking your gift card. Besides, it’s the last game of the season. What are they going to do? Fire me?”

I couldn’t believe my luck. “Thanks a lot,” I told her. “This day just keeps on getting better and better.”

***

Free beer or no free beer, there was only so much of a 10-0 game I could take, and in the bottom of the sixth inning, I headed for the exits. As I was walking to the L, a Black man approached me, asking if I would like to buy a chocolate bar. He was in his early thirties, I’d say, and was holding a laminated sheet with the bars pictured on it. “I’m helping my son raise money for his school team,” he explained.

“Sorry,” I told him. “I don’t have any cash on me. Just plastic.”

He said that was OK, he took Venmo as well.

“Man, I don’t even know what Venmo is,” I said, which was true. I’d heard the word before but had no idea what it meant. “I mean, I still have a Hotmail account.”

The man laughed. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Sixty-one.”

“Well, you sure don’t look sixty-one. More like forty-one, if you ask me.”

For the third time that day, I thanked someone sincerely, and then said, “Oh, and by the way, if I did have some money on me, I’d definitely buy something off you—and I don’t even really like chocolate.”

The chocolate-bar man rolled up his sheet and tapped it into his palm. “I know you would. You got yourself an honest face.”

Wow, I thought as I watched him hustle over to an overweight man in a Sox jersey who had just stepped out of the ballpark to have a smoke. I’ve got to start going to more baseball games if this is the way I’m going to be treated.

I checked my phone for the time and seeing as it was only five thirty, I decided to cap the afternoon off by having a Guinness on my balcony. No, scratch that, I quickly corrected myself. After the day I’ve had, I think Chicago deserves most of the credit. And so I changed my mind: a pint of Guinness, like Ireland itself, would have to wait. Instead, I’d have a shot or two of Jack Daniel’s and toast the good old U.S. of A., or, more specifically, Chicago, and America’s boring-as-hell, but very picturesque, national pastime. Then I’d raise a glass to all the people who helped make this wonderful day so enjoyable: the young fellow scanning tickets, those oddballs in the stands, that generous barmaid, this guy here selling chocolate bars. They’d all been super-friendly and really, really kind to this Canadian, the super-excited one with an Irish passport who, as it just so happens, is also lucky enough to hold a green card and make his home here, in Chicago, Illinois, for the past ten years. Cheers. Slainte.

– Michael McGrath