Number 13
Puck and I were discussing Dad’s daily morning devotion at the breakfast table. Topics of the morning included children pestering their parents. Puck contemplated the many times he had pestered his own dad in his “entire seven year existence.”
“And sometimes Dad gets mad for very ‘hypodelic’ reasons,” he explained solemnly to me.
Somehow I got the idea the lesson had sunk in.
Go-carts were on the menu that mid-afternoon. With Francis home for most of the day, Puck had a buddy for fun and games, including Puck driving Francis all the way down the mile-loop and back behind the wheel. This time, he came back smiles.
Carrie-Bri and I had a date with my 13th game of the season, and Carrie’s 7th. Towers of white and gray puff began to spread over the city landscape as we drove east.
With another set of seats high up in section 434, we paused first to take in some of the storm rumbling in the southeast. Thunder ripped through the sky during the national anthem. A few minutes later, the tarp was out. Purely on principal. Not a drop of rain, but a severe weather advisory trumped the actual radar, which the sell-out crowd watched from the big screen. What other city offers weather radar for the fans?
Uncle Rico arrived as usual, wearing #5. So was Carrie. We noted the unusual volume of 5s in attendance that evening, signs that forgiveness was slowly making a comeback.
Forty-five minutes of delay and one inning in, it did rain. Two-minute gully-washer. Tarp removed for the second time. Then another downpour. This time, they didn’t bother with the tarp. Good thing, too, because the rain disappeared about thirty seconds later, to roaring applause, allowing the Cardinals and their four recent All Stars to continue the 8 1/2 innings of shut-out baseball till almost eleven o’clock. I began to deliberate with myself just how late to stay. I was getting a sore throat out of nowhere; was a little too full of Wheat Thins and mini Nutter Butter cookies. Still…
“I’d like to see a walk-off,” I told Carrie. “Haven’t seen one of those yet.”
Two minutes later: boom. Matt Adams did it again. Carrie summarized the walk-off homer nicely (a first since David Freese’s famous Game 6), just above the deluge of 40,000 screaming fans.
“Yeah! Plumpkin!”
I’m sure he’d love us.