July 7-8, 1994. Half my life ago—22 years and 3 months to this day—I got into my 1985 bronze New Yorker and drove 874 miles from Newport News to Chicago with the singular goal of seeing a baseball game.

Architecture, pizza, Oprah—all things Chicago is famous for—meant nothing. I was going to soak in the sun on a weekday afternoon and keep score in the beautiful ballpark I knew only from TV. True, I was a lifelong Giants fan- but back then everyone’s default teams were Cubs and Braves. And everyone knows, you haven’t seen baseball until you’ve seen it played at Wrigley Field.

I wanted to know if was true that people could live in apartments and houses with views of the field. I wanted to know if the ivy really was that green, see firsthand the numbers posting up like magic from the hand-operated scoreboard.

And so armed only with an AAA map, I navigated my way through interstates 64, 70 and 90, until finally, I was on Lakeshore Drive—I’d made it.

The next day I arrived two hours early for the Cubs afternoon game against Houston. From my terrace reserve seats—that’s code for many, many rows behind home plate—I looked out to see a perfect diamond. All ballparks come with the crisp lines and immaculate grass— it’s the intimacy of a park like Wrigley that makes you feel like you can reach out and touch it. Words can’t do it justice. The Giants may have had my baseball heart but the Cubs had the field of my dreams.

I remember so little about the game itself. I remember the Cubs winning in the 11^th inning on a game-winning homer by Grace. Harry Carey was ill but the team played a recording of him singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to satiate the lot of us who craned our necks upward during the 7^th inning stretch.

After the game, I got back in my car, onward to a new life in California. There were many more stops planned along the way—Kansas City, Denver, Phoenix – but none were more empowering than this one. I couldn’t have known that two years later, I’d be one of Chicago’s newest residents, living a mile away from Wrigley myself, seeing the field every morning and evening during my red line commute. So many more memorable afternoons at Wrigley lay ahead of me, but this journey was about so much more than baseball and ivy. It was the spark that set off an addiction to road trips and adventure that continues to this day.

It’s Oct. 7, 2016, and the Cubs are still playing at Wrigley. Later tonight, they’ll face my Giants and I’ll watch with mixed emotions as I remember my former neighbors and friends. The white-haired Corona drinker who celebrates retirement by selling his garage out during home games. My former porch on Wayne Street. The neighborhood tavern I once worked at after games. The drunks who can’t find the el.  Oh- and the 7-eleven. I think I miss you most of all.