I haven’t seen Michael in at least twenty-five years, which means that he and I are both not far off twice as old as we were the last time we were in the same place. There is a lot to reminisce about, but we pretty much manage to skip it entirely – only at the very end of the evening do I bring up the place where we met – Comic Relief, where I worked and he shopped in the mid-1990s. Even that is a brief coda to the night; there is even more catching up to do, but we don’t do that either. Instead, we spend at least an hour and a half of the ballgame – an almost offensively quick 2:34 affair that ends on whatever one note short of a high note is – talking about Ted Lasso.

I had planned to say to Michael something along the lines of “So, tell me about the last 25 years of your life,” but he hamstrings the whole deal by asking, in the second inning, “Have you watched Ted Lasso?” He couldn’t have known what he was unleashing. An hour and a half later, he says he doesn’t regret it, and I can’t say that I do either. You can tell a lot about a man by what he thinks of Ted Lasso. Michael, for instance, expresses a belief that Rupert was maybe bound for some kind of redemption. Michael is a nice person and he wants to believe that Rupert could be redeemed, and that is a good quality to find in a person who has spent a fair part of the last twenty years as a pastor. I knew about the pastor situation because occasionally I see Michael’s posts on Facebook, but he does tell me a lot more about it once we get past Ted Lasso.

Once we’re past Ted Lasso, baseball interferes some – a 2-2 tie gets turbulent when the Giants allow four runs in the top of the ninth (arguably due at least in part to an egregiously bad hit-batsman call) and then score three in the bottom, which is unfortunately two shy of what they needed to win. After a spectacular June, they’ve been slipping some, but we knew the pace wasn’t going to hold up forever. WE can only hope things will even out. I hurry Michael through his accounting of his adventures in the 21st century, which include some downs but more ups. We get sidetracked by some theology, which then becomes the main track. At one point, I ask him something that elicits the reply “Well, there are a few answers to that, and I will start with the complex theological one,” which is just what I like to hear. Just as this not the place to spend too much time discussing anyone’s beliefs about Ted Lasso, it is also not the place for too much theological debate (not that we actually debated anything), so I will only say that Michael is very tolerant of what I am sure a less genial pastor would have felt were frivolous questions. He is also very willing to be sidetracked, which always makes for good conversation.

The national anthem tonight was performed by the United States Air Force Band of the Golden West, which consists of a flute, a French horn, an oboe, a clarinet, and I am not kidding a bassoon, which I honestly thought was an imaginary instrument made up by Peter Schickele until I was maybe twelve, in spite of having grown up with musicians. Michael says this is a woodwind quintet, and I have to believe him because he owns and plays a sousaphone, which I incorrectly identified as a tuba a few weeks ago (I believed that mistakenly calling a sousaphone a tuba was probably a less grievous error than mistakenly calling a tuba a sousaphone, although I can’t explain why). It was lovely and might be my favorite good anthem so far this year, although partly because they made some choices that in spots made it hard to recognize as the national anthem. I guess that’s what you get when a bassoon and a French horn have forty percent of the vote.

There are fireworks after the game tonight, and I would love to thrill you with photos of them, but photos of fireworks are mostly pointless, especially with my skills. I wish I could have documented these in particular – I feel like you don’t often see new fireworks, but this show involves some that look like spiky balls and some that look like a smug cartoon cat with too many whiskers. I get bored quickly with fireworks shows, and I often end up thinking at some point something like “That show represents several times the amount of money I paid for my tickets this year.” I always think they go on way too long, and the only way I can take anything positive away is to remember how much my sister loves fireworks and imagine the joy on her face when she sees them.

There was a truck sponsored by Topps, the baseball card company, outside the park when I get there at five; they’re giving away little knickknacks and packs of cards and stuff, and I stopped in to take a picture in the baseball card frame and play a pachinko-type game that nets me a little wooden baseball bat keychain trinket. Michael takes a picture in the frame too, although the shadows are not quite right and the photos don’t look great, but I’m used to that.

At the end of the evening I feel like I haven’t changed nearly as much from the guy who worked at the comic book shop in the 90s as Michael has changed from the guy who shopped there. I’m okay with where we both are, though.