Life of Wry

I don’t think today’s was the last River Cats game Jim, Peter and I will ever go to.. I mean, there’s always next season and Peter will likely be home over the summer, and it’s very possible we’ll go to a game … I just don’t know, don’t want to think about it.**

But today’s was the last game of this season. Thus my title.

Having not gone to any this year (on second thought, we saw a game, I believe, the day Peter was honored with that All-City distinction last spring (so sweet)), we were entirely unfamiliar with the players and fairly uninvested in the outcome (they lost).

It was nice to be sitting in a shady section on a warm day, though, eating lots of ballpark food…

Hotdogs, beer (me), Red Vines… plus those hot peanuts they serve–here’s a particularly large specimen…

and cotton candy…

(kind of disgusting but so, so good.)

Jim ordered a chicken fajita bowl (I think it was called). He was in agony for the first hour of the game while trying to recover from a small bite of a VERY hot chile pepper. I tried a small corner and understood immediately his pain. Lesson: stick to standard ballpark fare.

He did recover..

Besides sitting between my two most favorite people on the planet, which makes me insanely happy, I saw a new thing at the game that was also very smile-worthy:

Dinger now has offspring. Dingettes? Little Dingers? They are a really cute addition to the many (many!) game extras.

~~

** Quite out of the blue, as we were watching pre-game player warm ups, I lost it. I was thinking about the game Peter pitched here last spring, the one he started and went five innings, and how they won the game.. it was probably his best outing of the entire season and happened on the big fancy Raley Field.. so wonderful. I was also thinking, in general, about Peter’s lifetime of baseball and how that was over and how much it had shaped his life, our life, how beautifully it served him. I was touched by the way the guys threw balls back and forth, how comfortable they were with the ball, the environment, each other. I saw a guy double clutch and that did it. Peter was a double clutcher, I loved his double clutch. I just started to cry.

He didn’t see it. Good.

I enjoyed his commentary a few times during the game, in particular on a failed bunt play in which our guy was thrown out at third, caught way off the bag… as he’d planned to score but didn’t get the bunt he expected. Loved hearing him comment on the pitching. I’m dying to know how he’s processing it all–his life in baseball, his years as a varsity pitcher, the ups and downs, the friendships. Is he proud of his accomplishments? Does he think of himself as a baseball player? I so wonder if he’ll miss it. I so wonder if he’ll play club ball next year at UCSD.

Deep breath.