Doris Kearns Goodwin

I went to the Red Sox game with Chef Walker last night. It was the first baseball game that I paid attention to all year. We ate at the Lower Depths beforehand. The Chef had three plain Jane Fenway franks with tater tots and I had a black bean burger with a salad. He taught me how to keep score manually. When we arrived at his seats in the Friendly Fenway bleachers (three drunken fistfights near us) I took out my pen and scored the game. My aunt, the Yankees fan, says the game of baseball is like watching paint dry. She means to say it is a slow game. The pitcher’s mound is similar to a lava dome rising inside the crater of an active stratovolcano. Stratovolcanos rebuild their own summits. Scientists are watching, and they say the next catastrophic eruption, or home run, is not a question of if but of when. But everybody knows its more likely to happen in a hundred years than it is today.

The game moves fast enough that keeping score is a challenge. You’d think five Diet Cokes would be enough caffeine to maintain an accurate strike/ball count. You’d be wrong. I struggled to learn the system and mark down each play. When I messed up, Chef Walker would grab the scorecard and pen, fix it, and call me stupid. This helped motivate me to do better. Every player on the field is assigned a number; when the ball is ripped up the middle to the shortstop, who throws it to first base, that out is recorded as 6-3. A double play, or fielder’s choice, or error, can complicate matters quickly. If a player strikes out swinging it’s a K, looking is a backwards K. In the middle of the fifth, I went to buy the chef a beer and urinate. In line for the men’s room, I had a realization about love. No matter how special I think a woman is / how right she seems to be for me, there will always be hundreds of other men pushing to get at her. Like half-drunk sperms. At least I know how to keep score.