Douglas Whaley

Wrigley Field I grew up in a sports family [see “My Competitive Parents” at http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-competitive-parents.html ] and to this day watch a lot of sports [“On Being a Gay Sports Fan” at http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-being-gay-sports-fan.html ].   When I was newly out of law school and in my mid-twenties I moved to Chicago and, in my spare time, often went out to Wrigley Field to see the Chicago Cubs play.   This was a great time for watching a fabled group of Cubs: third baseman Ron Santo, first baseman Ernie Banks, pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, outfielder Billy Williams, and the manager Leo Durocher.   Wrigley Field was and is a wonderful ball park, and its fans in attendance are magical, always joining in lustily at the 7 th inning stretch for the singing of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”   Though the Cubbies failed to make the World Series either of the two years (1968, 1969) that I attended their games with some regulari

I had a heart transplant right before Thanksgiving in 2009 [see http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/01/about-that-heart-transplant.html ], and, as required by law whenever anyone has had such a life-altering experience, I promptly started a blog.   In the beginning I published two or more posts a week, but that was easy to do then because I had lots of topics at my disposal.   I’ve been given an interesting life (law professor, gay rights activist, former Catholic but now atheist, four long term relationships with both men and a woman (two of them marriages), father, owner of pets, novelist, tournament bridge player, and much more, and these things were the fodder for those posts.   But as the years went on I’ve mostly exhausted the stories from my earlier life and discussions of the philosophy by which I live, and the postings have trailed off in number quite a bit.   In recent years I’ve averaged two posts a month, the decline being not one of interest but of wanting to ma