A Few More Last Things

Somehow, I managed to stay awake till the end of that 14 inning disaster up in New York, Monday night. Well, not a blow-out disaster, but a loss is still a loss no matter how you slice it. Didn’t get enough sleep, obviously. Sometimes I think the fans work too hard for their own good.

Driving Puck to school that morning, he reminded me of that one time I witnessed the Busch Stadium Streaker of 2012. I don’t know why this has become one of his memories, but it has.

“Why was he running around like a naked man?”

“To get attention, I guess. He wasn’t from St. Louis at least.”

“Was he from French? Or Spain?”

“No … somewhere else in Missouri, I think. They sent him to jail that night though.”

“Was he in jail for a year?”

“Ha. No.”

“What if they let him stay in jail for a hundred years and then they had to pull out his dead body at the end?”

Boys.

I had two jobs that day: answer the lengthy chain of phone calls in the school office for an hour while bagging up inhalers and medicine to send back with kids at the end of the school year, then attend the volunteer meeting for Field Day which took place half an hour later in the cool shade of the front lawn and nearby sports fields. In the end, all I had to do was monitor a water table while burning my face in a deceptively toasty patch of sun while the bagpiper piped on and on from the other side of the pines.

Puck’s Green Team was swept that afternoon by the Blue Team: Penny Drive, Spirit Week, and Field Day. Everything. Puck could not have cared less, sitting with his buddy on the front steps slurping down a green apple Minute Maid push-pop popsicle.

“So … it didn’t bother you?” I asked later.

“Nope. There was no prize.”

A few hours later, Puck and I were sitting in the cool auditorium of First Baptist St. Charles for the final Snicketts choir concert. After Linnea-Irish was introduced at the end with the other graduating seniors (announced as “Lucy” to Eleda’s “Ethyl”, and vice versa for Eleda’s brief bio), the remaining siblings (sans Rose, preparing to leave for North Carolina on business) climbed the steps to join the choir for one last round of the seven-fold a cappella “The Lord Bless You and Keep You”. Funny how twelve years after the fact you can still remember all the cues and tricks to singing it right.

And yet one more era done in the books.