"I Know the Sun’s Still Shining When I Close My Eyes"

If you recognize the country song from which today’s title is taken you may have guessed where today’s blog is headed. Yesterday was a great day! It began with me remembering that it was Talk Like a Pirate Day. Any day that begins with in a hearty, gruff voice is destined to be great.

Post lunch, Mollie and I worked our way out of town via I-55. Three hours later, Andrew and I hijacked my mom’s car. Mollie and Annaliese accompanied my mother back to Oswego whilst me and ‘the boy’ continued on our way to the White Sox game.

Despite the historical fact that the White Sox tend to play bad baseball against terrible teams, or is it terrible baseball against bad teams, they managed provide a statistical outlier for our viewing pleasure. What did I just say? I think I just said they won. While the baseball was good for a change, it was not the high point of our stadium tour. Andrew had only a passing interest in the game, though enough to make the trip more worthwhile than just taking him to a park, so we spent much of our time wandering the park. We caught the game an inning or two at a time from numerous different perspectives. We sat in the lower bowl, halfway up behind the Sox dugout. We then meandered to the outfield to partake of some traditional baseball cuisine. The hotdogs finished, we visited the kid’s zone and ended our travels in a pair of decent seats in the upper deck. From that vantage point, we yelled encouragements to our team and had a spectacular view of the post game fireworks show.

My high point, though, came before the game even started. Having a young and exceptionally cute child makes obtaining a ball fairly easy. I caught the attention of a coach in the dugout and he kindly obliged. Soon after, as the players lined up outside the dugout for the national anthem, I tossed a quick ‘hello’ at my still favorite, though long retired, player now coach, Harold Baines. He gave a polite nod, stood for the Anthem, then I again caught his eye on the way back in. He accepted the ball Andrew had received and signed it.

To Andrew
All the Best
Harold Baines
#3

I must add here that Gordon Beckham was also kind enough to sign the ball on his way past Mr. Baines, and while he is the leading candidate to succeed Baines as my favorite player, it still pales beside my delight at the first autograph. The inscription by Baines is almost an exact duplicate of the ball I got from Harold when I was but a wee lad (wait, pirate day was yesterday, ahem, a young boy.) We now have a generational set of baseballs signed by my favorite player. Perhaps I should try to get one for my dad!

Arriving home (in Oswego) after the game, I was 'absolutely crushed' to find that my dad didn’t have a ride home from his poker game and I ‘had no choice’ but to go pick him up. This task would ‘obviously’ require me to stay while he played, so it was only ‘logical’ that I should also play. I found myself short $6 in the cash game before the second tournament started. The tournament went along fine; I was never in a desperate situation, though never quite comfortable. The hours wore on and the players dwindled to 4, to 3, to 2. I was heads up. I didn’t play spectacularly, I may have overcautiously given away a few smaller pots, but in the end, my pocked sixes found their way onto a boat and I had all the chips.

As a nightcap, I took a trip to Meijer’s to buy the milk for Andrew, a request my wife had made many hours earlier. I found the milk and graced the self-checkout terminal with my presence and money. I wondered at the day I was completing, at how many great things had transpired, I realized then that it had truly been a great day! A Meijer’s employee sent me on my way with what my tired brain found to be a fitting end to the day’s story: “Have a good morning.”