We went to a game and the Mariner's won!

Baseball is a sport I can like, in theory and in person once a year. I don't like to watch sports, but I enjoy a live baseball game now and then. Baseball is the American pastime. I don't know what football is, but that game somehow symbolizes the gross materialization and big-time mechanization and the general excess of thoughtless American living. Conversely, there seems to be an elegance to baseball, a dedication to simplicity, that I like and that represents the essence of Americaness that I identifiy with. (Also, the field is one giant zen garden, what with all those people rushing out there and raking the dirt between innings. No wonder Japanese people love the game—it's got Shinto!)

One game a year in our fine newish stadium is a good thing. I like to watch the game and I like to make happy purchases at the concession stand about every two innings. Mmm-mm. Yeah.

Pam scored cheap tickets from her batch of scientist coworkers. Way up high behind home plate, I mean way up high, we looked down on the action amid a cluster of conversations about science. Sprinkled between motivational jingles and the sportscasting were words like "clinical trials," "cancer," "prostate," and "publishing."

In front of us was a family of die-hard fans, the type of people that keep score on little white cards even though every possible game statistic appears in tiny white bulbs on a display two stories tall. Upon our return from the concession stand, garlic fries in hand, Pam said that Andrew and I had missed the hydroplane races, that hokey distraction that gets the crowd rooting for RED! BLUE! GREEN! boats in a completely fake boat race on the DiamondVision. Pam said we hadn't missed much because you always know which one is going to win. She said, invariably, one will drop behind and that will be the one that'll come back at the last second. At that revelation, the die-hard fan woman in front of us turned around and snapped, "That isn't always true!" like Pam had just shattered a myth the size of Santa.