I've made a list of things to write about, and I'm going to try to write a blog a day about them.

Back at the end of July, Anne and I drove down to Albuquerque to watch an Isotopes game on a Friday night. Friday was my one day off from the library over the summer. I worked six days a week, and the only reason I didn't work on Friday was because the library closed early enough that one of the full-time librarians just added a little extra to her shift rather than have me come in for two hours just to lock up.

We had been planning to go to a game all week, and I wanted to look up the players on the two teams to see their stories and their statistics, but of course I neglected to do it until the day of the game. I wanted printouts of the statistics, because there was no way I was going to remember who everybody is. I kind of think of baseball players as existing in more senses than one. They are people, born at a certain time in a certain place, with faces and accents and body types and personalities; and they are a corporeal form of their numbers, incarnations of their triple slash line. When a batter comes to the plate, I find it much more enjoyable to watch if I know who they and the pitcher are at least in this second sense, and if I know about them as people, well, even better.

Anyway, the printer in the house was running out of ink, and I didn't want to drive up to the St. John's library, which is in the other direction from the highway. Instead, Anne and I went to the public library by the house, the one that has the same feeling walking in as a public pool I went to growing up. The parking lot is stretched along a low brown-brick building with tall, reflective black windows. The strips of land by the curbs are full of clumpy grass, maybe a few bulb flowers and prickly bushes. There are posters on the outside walls near the entrance that must have been printed in the mid-seventies, and there's a shady courtyard between the library and an attached building that nobody's ever in.

I printed out the stat pages, read a few stories about each of the players, learned who was a prospect and who had been in the minors for fifteen years, and then we left. On the way out I saw a man who frequently used the public computers at the St. John's library, a man with scruffy dark gray hair and a big mustache, always smiling, always dressed in light-colored office clothes. He saw me and smiled, and I waved at him. Why do I mention this? It was the first time I had ever seen someone I met in the library, outside of the library, and I'd been working there for four years. I kind of imagined the non-college library patrons as being generated by the atoms in the air around the doors every time they came in, and then going back to the earth when they left. So no, they exist, they have homes and families, they shop and go other places around town, even if they are the weirdest collection of people outside a circus that I'll ever see. Just if you were wondering.

We drove to Albuquerque then, just as the sun was settling down after dinner with a nice drink and checking to see if anything was on television. We paid the parking lot attendant his $5, walked to the stadium to buy our tickets, found our seats just to the right of the left-hand batter's box about ten rows up. The game started, and the Isotopes pitcher--one of the only genuine prospects on the team, a 24-year-old named John Ely--proceeded to give up more hits than a boxer with no hands. With only one out, the Iowa Cubs just kept circling the bases like bears in captivity. Ely's ERA for this game so far was 108. (Seriously.) Then suddenly from a spotless sky, rain began pouring down, as though the sun had finished its drink, and then eight-thousand more, and finally it had to rush to the toilet to . . .

Anyway, the tarp came out, ten people running to spread it across the field, rolling the base for the largest Ho-Ho in existence. We were not under a roof, so we got up and went to the concession stands. The rain came down like somebody was pouring the entire ocean from a gigantic helicopter above the stadium. We stood in place next to a hundred other people, filling the walkways and the stairs, moving over the few inches available to us as people passed by, turning one way and then another trying to find a little more space.

We were standing near a beer stand where a group of ten people were chatting and laughing as though they were at a barbecue party. Every so often one of them would throw up his arms, a beer bottle in one hand, and shout, "ehhhhh!" And the whole group would follow his lead and let out a cheery "ehhhhh!"

The rain fell. The public announcer tried to say something but the speakers sounded like they'd maybe been colonized by ants. The stadium played rain-themed songs like "Who'll Stop the Rain?" and "Thunderstruck", and then they played them all again. "Ehhhhhhhh!" People shouted to each other to meet them by the ice cream stand. One woman told another how she had been planning to take her jacket but her husband made fun of her, and she was going to tell him, "See?"

Then the rain stopped, and the grounds crew ran around between the two dugouts with giant brooms, pushing the collected water down a set of stairs and presumably toward a drain. The big screen showed the Loony Toons baseball clip where Bugs Bunny single-handedly beats a team that looks like it's made up of Chicago gang thugs, pitching and then running to catch it himself, playing all nine fielding positions, making the final out by racing across town to the top of the Empire State Building to catch the furthest-hit ball of all time.

An hour went by this way, and then finally the P.A. came on, and it was possible to understand him. The ants had cleared out because of the rain, I guess. "The umpires have canceled the game due to unsafe field conditions. As it says on the back of your ticket, since this was not a complete game, you can take your ticket to the box office to receive a ticket of equal value for a later game." We went to the box office, got tickets for the following Friday, and started driving home. About ten minutes later, we heard a squeaking sound, then a staccato rumble, and the car became difficult to control. Anne pulled onto the shoulder, keeping an admirable sense of calm despite never having had this experience before. I went around to the side of the car, and of course found a flat tire.

My cell phone, meanwhile, was back at the house, charging. I'll continue this story tomorrow.