Ahh, Designated Writing Time. It's a rare commodity lately, just slightly less in demand than Designated Napping Time. We're coming off a whirlwind Memorial holiday weekend--complete with around 45 miles on the bike, a tee-ball barbecue, and a few thousand trips up Those Goddamn Steps--and the parts of my body that had been merely cranky are now in full revolt. My lower back is chronically throbbing, I have a pinched nerve that sends little shivers of numbness down my left arm, and my hip is still wonky from when I was playing tag with TwoBert and threw myself down a slide that was a bit narrower than I anticipated. I have a physical next month (on Friday the 13th, aptly), and when my GP gets through prodding I fully expect him to call a factory recall on most of my torso.
Aside from physical gripes, though, you'd have to work hard to top the weekend. On Saturday, Robert and I saw the Yankees and Mariners from the upper deck of Yankee Stadium. (The tickets were a gift from the sitter, who, though from Oregon, has turned to the Dark Side and loves to fuel Robert's Pinstripe Worship.) The panoramic view was the coolest thing ever! And we got a program with Derek Jeter on the cover, which was the coolest thing ever! And the vendor threw that bag of Cracker Jacks from like 200 feet, and Daddy caught it and it was the coolest thing ever! And you can see the new stadium being built next door, and it has YANKEE STADIUM engraved in gold on the side and it's the COOLEST THING EVER!
We also took turns scoring the game, and if you had seen this boy, one leg folded over the other, tongue out, carefully coloring diamonds for the 18 runs we saw, you might have just plain fallen over dead from the awesome. You might even have fallen onto the Lout Brothers two rows beneath us, who expressed every displeasure with buckets of choice expletives. F-, C-, D-, and S-bombs flying like a swarm of mad honeybees toward Robert's ears.
I spent most of Sunday on my bike, on the first big ride of the season. I'd put off lugging that thing up and down Those Goddamn Steps for too long, and enough was enough. Twenty-five miles later, bike on my shoulder, thighs boiling, I met Michael Emerson in my stairwell. He was attending a party on the top floor, and when I recognized him I said, "The last time I saw you, didn't somebody knock you flat with a rifle butt?" He was very nice and chatty, and every bit not a slippery, scheming crazygazer locked in a primordial war with a megalomaniacal British plutocrat. Though he sure looked it.
Monday was more biking (because I temporarily lost my mind) and then the highlight of the weekend: The big, baseball-based, come-as-you-are, pay-what-you-want, hey-have-a-beer cookout at the tee-ball diamonds. This was, hands down, the most profoundly low-stress gathering of parents in the history of molecules. Even the nuttiest stage parents, the ones who wear their own jerseys and run the bases with their kids, saw the opportunity to just chill the eff out and enjoy the moment. The Tee-Ball Commish made it all happen, and he is a genius. Full stop.
OK, so right at the end of that paragraph my cell rang, and when I answered I realized I have completely lost my voice. (This is what happens when you sit quietly, reading and writing for three hours.) If this is the by-product of burning my candle at every end over the long weekend, though, it was worth every lost decibel.
