Let me tell you a story. A story that I like because it's about me and my frickin' awesome afternoon. Kelly and Kaelyn were in Lexington this weekend while I had a slew of events to keep me busy here in Cincy. I spoke at the little country church this morning and, since I had all my Echo tasks for this evening's service completed, I went to watch the Reds play the Brewers this afternoon. Ironically, I applied sunscreen before I left only to spend the entire afternoon soaked by rain.
As I'm thinking about, I realized that I'm totally comfortable going solo to places now. Before I got married I had never eaten alone in a restaurant. Now I'm go to movies, ballgames, and restaurants by myself and enjoy the communal solitude. I always used to wonder why people would go places all by there lonesomes. Now I'm that guy.
Anyway, I've mentioned before that the Reds allow ministers to get a free ticket to games [Bob Castellini is a very good man], and they'll give you the best seat available so I was fifteen rows behind the Reds dugout. Even though the rain drove many fans to take shelter I had an awesome seat and decided to stay put.
My perseverance meant that I ended up getting soaked; I'll most likely be sick tomorrow. And, of course, the game went into extra-innings and I had to get home and change before church. So I missed an epic comeback which included back-to-back home-runs and a Ken Griffey Jr. game-winning single.
All of that should have made my afternoon somewhat miserable. But one brief moment made it absolutely glorious.
In the seventh inning Reds-killer Bill Hall came to the plate and fouled one off over my head. Years of observing foul balls ricochet off an upper-deck wall back to the seats below led me to track this ball which indeed hit above and started to head back towards me. It was actually heading a row or so behind me. There was a guy between the ball and me and he had a perfect line to catch it. But years of observing people drop sure-thing foul balls led me to back him up just in case.
And wouldn't you know it, the ball went right between his hands. He absorbed any of the momentum the ball had and I two-handed it.
Yep, I snagged me a foul ball.
Sure, it wasn't a cool catch, but in over twenty years of going to ballgames and I had never even sniffed a foul ball.
I decided long ago that if I ever caught a ball I'd give it to a kid. What point is there in keeping a non-home-run ball anyway [especially from stinkin' Bill Hall]? And if I brought it home to Kaelyn, she wouldn't have cared. There was a couple two rows in front of me with their grandkids at the game and I handed their grandson the ball. All in all, I didn't have the ball in my possession for more than five seconds.
So the kid has the baseball . . .
. . . and I have this story.
And I'm happy.