This one took me a long time to write, even though I had plenty of time and no other responsibilities to keep me from it. Quite the opposite, in fact: the time between this 1-0 win over the Rockies and the next game wis well over two weeks – the longest break I’ll have all year. The Giants leave for the All-Star break and then go on a road trip that starts off as a triumph and ends in, if not disaster, at least disappointment – a five-win streak turns into a six-loss skid, and the Giants come home in disarray, tired, bruised, and baffled. And the whole time, I’ve been promising to put down the story of the last home game before all of that and putting it off instead.
It was a good game, a tight duel for a win that came at the right time, when the Giants had lost a couple of games to a Rockies team they should have been pummeling, but the truth is I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. Not because it wasn’t worth the time or the regard, not even because Mike and I spent a lot of the time wandering around the park, although we did. It was because I was just having too good a time with Mike to pay attention to what I should write about later. I made no notes and maybe thought no thoughts. I took a couple of pictures, and even though they are unremarkable, I will show you a couple of them, just to break up the blocks of text. I sat down and wrote this about an hour after I got home from the game:
“Mike’s wife told him before he left the house that he wasn’t allowed to talk about Ted Lasso during the game. Mike is a good and dedicated husband and I’m not an enabler – mostly – so we didn’t talk about Ted Lasso at the game. We talked about it in the car, though. Mike thinks Ted and Michelle end up getting back together. I think he’s wrong, but I have a soft spot for people who believe in romance – or maybe just people who Believe – so I’m not going to argue the point with him too much.”
And that was all. About once a day over the next two weeks, I had an idea bout how to continue, but none of them turned into anything useful or clever or funny or informative, and now it is the 25th of July and I have to write up the Athletics game and I can’t do it until I finish this, because I told myself I wouldn’t miss any games or post them, out of sequence, and now it’s midnight and I’m up against it – I have to finish the game from the 25th before I see the one on the 26th, and I have nothing to say about the game from the 9th.
I do have some things to say about having friends, though. This post is maybe just a shout-out to Mike – we’ve known each other for about four years now, and somewhere in the pandemic, we got to being friends and not just acquaintances. I guess that happens when you stop just running into each other in the same places and start going to places just so you can hang out with each other. That doesn’t happen a lot after a certain age, or at least it hasn’t happened a lot to me, although this project of taking people to ballgames was in some ways a method of trying to make it happen. Still, it’s rare and it’s precious when it does happen. I have a lot of friends from earlier years – some from high school, more from college, some from the Renaissance Fair, fewer from my job history, and I treasure them all, but the ones who have come in the last five years or so are special because they’ve been intentional and not just the result of right-time-right-place luck.
Mike makes an effort. He calls up and says “What are you up to?” and we hang out, and it’s not because we’ve been doing it since high school or we lived near each other. I’m given to understand, because I read stuff, that men have trouble forming emotional bonds with other men after a certain age, and I can’t say that’s wrong, but I can say it’s not impossible. I can also say that when it goes right, you get yourself a Mike.
Here’s to you, my friend.
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