Game Three of the World Series is on television. I’m sitting outside on my porch with a cat in my lap. It’s chilly outside.
I’m watching a portable TV, rooting for the Atlanta Braves. And while I know I have been writing a lot about baseball lately, like most hapless Braves fans my age, I’ve been waiting over twenty years for this game.
Earlier, I set up the television on the porch with an extension cord so I could watch the game while grilling burgers. Old school. Because this is what the men from my childhood did.
They’d watch a ten-inch screen, outdoors, sip from longneck bottles, and grill fatty beef over charcoal briquettes.
To this day I don’t know why those men watched ballgames so intently. Baseball is essentially a kid’s game played by very rich twenty-year-olds and has no real bearing on the immediate future. But there you are.
Those old men sat on the porch to watch games and scream at the TV as though their health depended on it. Therefore, so must I.
No matter
how old I get, why is it that I always feel like I’m imitating my parents? I once heard it said that we are all just thirteen years old, just trying to make our dad proud. I believe that.
Anyway, tonight I can hear the ballgame playing from the house next door, blaring through the thin mobile-home windows. My neighbor is an old woman who has two small dogs that resemble cotton balls with eyes.
These animals are currently yapping at a pitch that’s shrill enough to affect the migratory patterns of birds. This incessant yapping drowns out the televised game and adds a special touch to tonight’s World Series. A game which, in case I didn’t mention it, I have waited upwards of twenty years for.
ANNOUNCER: There’s the wind up…
NEIGHBOR’S DOG: Yap! Yap!
ANNOUNCER: Aannnnd the pitch…
DOG:…