There is a shadow economy going on at Giants games, a steady low-level barter system that consists of goods on one end and goodwill on the other. The quality and frequency of the gate giveaways is such that on several occasions, I’ve come to understand that one or another of the people who work at the park would like – for instance – one of the Hawaiian shirts, or the comic book, or a T-shirt; as a person with two tickets, I am often in a position to grant wishes, and I love being able to do a good thing for someone I get to see and banter with at every game. Today is not one of those days, though – the Hawaiian Foodie shirt, depicting various culinary options around the park, is both visually appealing and slinkily comfortable, and I am unwilling to give mine up, even though I have it on good authority that Ray wants one. Ray deserves one, but he’s not getting mine. I’ll tell you more about Ray later. For now, I’m just letting you know that today I’m being a little selfish.
Kat wants to keep her shirt too. She already has some Giants gear on, but she is up for more. Kat is the absolute acme of what Kruk and Kuip like to call the gamer babe – blonde and tanned, wearing a visor, carrying a scorebook, decked out in orange and black, including, now, today’s Hawaiian shirt. I asked her before the game if she was going to want the shirt, and she looked at me like I was crazy. Of course she wants the shirt. It’s nice to have an extra layer, actually – the sun is peeking through the clouds occasionally, but this isn’t going to be one of those games where the overcast magically clears away for the first pitch. It’s uncanny how that happens sometimes, like the sun is as aware as the seagulls are of when the games start and end. It’s not cold, but it’s not warm enough to get into the short sleeves yet either.
Kat has brought her scorebook. I am always impressed by people with scorebooks; I think that the way I feel about people with scorebooks is about the same way that illiterate people in works of fiction feel about people who can read – they are holders of an ancient arcana, and I feel slightly ashamed that I don’t entirely know how to decode their glyphs. Fortunately for my ego, Kat puts away her scorebook in about the middle of the fourth inning, saying that she likes keeping score but also gets distracted thinking about food pretty quickly. There are a lot of distracting things going on in this game, some on the field and some off. There’s a lot of scoring to start things off, but weird baserunning and pickoff throws, too, plays that one team or another might review but then don’t.
Jeff shows up after the first inning, so we are a threesome for a while; I’ve only mentioned Jeff in passing so far, but you’ll hear more about him, and from him, in weeks to come. I have started referring to him as my biographer, but he is really just a guy who has offered to have me on his podcast; he’s a mutual friend of mine and Myla’s (Myla was the guest who brought Doctor Gabby the Muppet a few weeks back). With luck, he’ll be writing a guest edition of the blog. He sits with us for three or four innings, after which we go down to check out the 415 and look for some food. Kat gets the very last of the bacon-wrapped hot dogs – we’d been talking about them all day and I wanted one, but I can get one outside. Back in our seats, we have time to pay attention to the game, which turns out to be very exciting. It’s kind of a back-and-forth affair, with the Giants surging ahead and then barely holding on in a nailbiter of a ninth to win 7-6.
Sometimes people ask me questions I know the answers to, and sometimes they ask me questions I don’t know the answers to, but I almost always have a guess or an opinion. My guesses and opinions might be wrong, but I’m not shy about offering them up anyway. I like to think I’m open to correction, though. It’s not often, however, that someone asks me a question I can’t rustle up any feelings about, or one that I can’t even begin to guess on. Kat manages both in one game. The first is “How do you feel about Birkenstocks?” I takes me along time to say “I have no opinion on Birkenstocks,” because I have to reach really deep to discover that I have never once thought about Birkenstocks and can’t muster up any feelings about them or people who wear them, which is weird for me. I’m not used to not being able to pontificate, even if it’s completely off the cuff. I feel like I might have failed a test. It turns out, though, that Kat has never run into anyone who doesn’t have an opinion on Birkenstocks, so we’re both in open water here.
The second question is even more baffling, because it is a deeply personal one, and I am absolutely taken aback by not knowing the answer to it. “before you take a drink of that soda,” she says, “are you going to inhale or hold your breath when you drink?” And I have absolutely no idea. Like, none at all. I take drinks, or one thing or another, like several hundred times a day, and I honestly don’t know if I do either of those things at all, let alone which one. Do you? Am I just criminally ignorant of my own body functions? When she asks, I try to think about what I do, and after about fifteen seconds of considering it, I’m not even sure I know how to drink anymore. Everything is up in the air now.
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