Faux Monster

The replica of Fenway's famous "Green Monster" which stands out in Left Field here in Portland, and gives our young players something to swing for.

So, we finally got a chance to use the tickets we'd won the other night in the Trivia Contest over at Bingas. Kurt and Lynne couldn't make it out again from Seattle (obviously), especially since they already had other plans to celebrate their wedding anniversary (number 27 -- as well as the first wedding eeremony I ever performed as an ordained clergyman to boot); but Erik drove up from Connecticut for a long weekend ahead of a meeting he has next Tuesday in Boston, and to round out our party I invited my soon-to-be-former Landlord from the walk-up West End apartment I love so much but am giving up at the end of the lease this month, along with the President of the Governing Board at church and her husband, the Building and Grounds Chair, and who just so happens to be the contractor who renovated my apartment and put me in touch with my landlord in the first place.

So it was a bit of a working outing, but not really. More like a quick summer check-in and catch-up. Erik and I arrived at the ballpark early to watch batting practice and make certain that we were one of the lucky 1000 souls who received a Justin Pedroia bobblehead on "Bath Savings Institution Justin Pedroia Rookie of the Year Bobblehead night." That made for a great opportunity later in the evening to practice an act of random generosity when I gave our spare bobblehead to a kid dressed in a Dustin Pedroia jersey (and ball cap and mitt) who had driven with his family all the way from Connecticut themselves in hopes of getting a bobblehead, but hadn't quite arrived in time. A lot of the Red Sox's younger players came up through Portland in the past few years: Pedroia, Josh Beckett, Kevin Youkilis and my personal favorite, Jacoby Ellsbury, who not only played college ball at Oregon State University (two-time college World Series Champions: Go Beavs!) but is also (I'm told) the only American Indian currently playing in the Major Leagues.

Anyway, I suppose on one level it was a good thing that the game itself was so bad: Sea Dogs were down 10 runs before they had a single hit, while our opponents (The New Hampshire Fisher Cats -- a Toronto affiliate) were hitting better than .500 against our starting pitcher. Don't know whether that statistic held up, since I ran out of gas and left after the seventh inning stretch, but it didn't look like our guys were going to pull it out any time soon. Still, it was a great outing: good weather, good company, food was (unfortunately) only OK -- even for the ballpark -- a disappointment that was compounded by the fact that I couldn't drink a beer (because of my narcotics). A sausage dog (which tasted a little metallic...a plain hot dog with yellow mustard probably would have been a better choice), some french fries (which were actually pretty good), a diet Coke and later, some soft-serve Ice cream topped with whipped cream and jimmies, served up in a small plastic Sea Dogs batting helmet. So between that, and the bobble-head, and my own Sea Dogs ball cap, I'll have plenty of souvenirs of the game. Even if I can't tell you the names of any of the current players, or what the final score was.

Is there some sort of profound spiritual lesson here? Oh, probably several actually. But don't ask me to spell them all out for you at this time of night. The thing I'm wrestling with right now is whether it is a mistake for me to show my vulnerability to some of my key lay leaders by leaving the game early when I started to feel run down, or if I'm actually demonstrating a different kind of strength by being comfortable with that vulnerability, and listening to it rather than trying to "soldier through" and paying the consequences later. I'm definitely going to try to do this again though soon, and as often as possible. "Take Me Out to the Ball Game...."