Although I have watched the Cubs and White Sox for years, it was not until I read Friday’s Tribune that I grasped the true significance, hidden meaning and enduring grandeur of this ongoing cross-town series between Chicago’s two juggernauts.
But the story was not about baseball. It was about cicadas.
The article by staffer Ted Gregory bore a headline “As cicadas expire, the nose knows it.” If I may hack into his fine bit of reporting, I don’t think it would be a stretch to transfer the piece from the Metro section into the sports domain and adjust accordingly to “As Cubs and White Sox expire, the nose knows it.”
Alas, the similarities are frightening. I am not about to assign one team as males and the other as females because such a designation is immaterial. Besides, that would be unfair to cicadas, for their mission lately has been to produce despite any and all obstacles, such as inclement weather, wounded wings and other competitive forces that might bug them. In other words, whatever it takes.
Point is, the cicadas, like the Cubs and Sox, created a palpable buzz this spring, on either side of town, attacking our sensibilities with wanton disregard for how our lives would be affected. As Gregory noted, the cicadas are relatively benign. But they emit so much noise they are impossible to ignore and, if we aren’t careful, will cause us to lose sleep or even enter our living rooms.
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Eventually, usually when it’s too late to comprehend what hit us, we realize the racket was really about nothing. The cicadas disturbed the peace and made it more difficult to perform daily chores, such as cutting our lawns or driving our cars or sitting down for dinner with the family. But in the end, the bark of the cicadas is more formidable than their bite, and if you haven’t caught our drift by now, check the standings in the National and American Leagues.
What’s remaining, after a few weeks of anticipation and hysteria, is a mess. It’s not even July, and the cicadas are basically dead, gone to the dogs or the birds, while rendering our neighborhoods, regardless of social strata, scarred and our nerves frayed.
However, say this for the cicadas. They also stink, because, according to Gregory, they leave behind “carcasses oozing an appalling yellowish goo.” But at least the cicadas are done with. After one more sweep of the driveway, or one more crank of the leaf blower, we won’t have to deal with three more months of their incessant zigging and zagging in no particular direction with no apparent purpose.
Now that it’s over — with the cicadas, anyway — we will not be tempted or coerced to invest precious time or valuable dollars in their behalf. They had their fling, and they did their thing. But it’s over. They were lovers, not fighters, and give them their due. Unlike some higher forms of life, they sure played hard. Wouldn’t you, if you had sex only once every 17 years? Then again, what if you hadn’t won a World Series in 98?
The cicadas, for all the annoyance they precipitated, never blamed Chip Caray or Steve Stone or a newspaper columnist for their fate. Also, the cicadas were a source of protein, not a recipe for heartburn. You can turn off the radio or TV now — we recommend before the ninth inning — and hear only a soft summer breeze. Best of all, next spring the cicadas won’t be back. It’s part of nature’s recycling.
Ready or not, though, the Cubs and Sox will return, also recycling, and promising loudly again to make good, not goo.