A baseball synchro

The Curse of the Billy Goat was a sports-related curse that was supposedly placed on the Chicago Cubs in 1945 when Billy Goat Tavern owner Billy Sianis was asked to leave game 4 of the World Series against the Detroit Tigers at Wrigley Field because of the odor of his pet goat. He was outraged and allegedly declared “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more.” The Cubs went on to lose the World Series and haven’t been back…until now.

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Seemingly unrelated, in the early morning hours of  Oct. 17, I dreamed I was in a hotel in France with a friend from college, nicknamed Rabbit. The hotel was like a maze and had a Bohemian flavor with lots of interesting and unusual people staying there. In the dream, I was sleeping and woke to find two bear cubs romping around in my hotel room. They were like big furry, friendly dogs.

When I woke up for real, I was puzzled by the dream. In a sense it was a flashback, because I’d gone to Europe in 1975 with Rabbit and we’d spent a month in France before heading to Spain and Morocco. But what were these bear cubs about?

It wasn’t until hours later that the baseball link occurred to me when I read that the Chicago Cubs had been shutout in their last two games.  I’m not a huge baseball fan, but was aware that the  Cubs were attempting to break a 71-year curse and win the National League pennant and move on to the World Series. But, at that point, it was looking like the curse was still in place and the Dodgers were on their way.

I still keep in touch with Rabbit and he is a huge baseball fan, and a Cub fan. So all the elements of the dream started coming together. Except why were there two bear cubs in my room?

Just an hour or so ago, (Saturday night) the Cubs won the pennant with a 5-0 victory, breaking the curse. Maybe that accounted for one cub, and I’ll go out on a limb and say the other cub represented a win in the upcoming World Series. We’ll see if it was a prophetic dream, and if I correctly interpreted it.