Poem for Sunday

Needle's Eye
By Dan Chiasson

I wish I were as big as a basketball hoop.
It is actually painful to be this fine.
It is like squinting for no reason,
all night, choosing the pain of squinting
over going to sleep. And yet
what does it matter how big
a target you are? Someone somewhere
will invent a game to make you hard to hit.

--------

The high point of my day was sitting in Oriole Park at Camden Yards along with 85% of the city of Boston, or so it seemed, watching Manny Ramirez hit his 500th home run. I was rooting for the Orioles, though we were with my parents and in-laws, three out of four of whom were rooting for the Red Sox as best antidote to the Yankees; I'm sorry Baltimore didn't win, but glad we were there to see Ramirez hit that milestone though my eardrums may never recover and Adam -- who was also rooting for the Orioles in a section packed with Boston fans -- was really irritated that the home birds were booed repeatedly in their own stadium.


Manny Ramirez and pitcher Chad Bradford watch as the ball soars to the pitcher's right and into the right field stands.


I didn't bring the SLR for fear of rain, so I don't have the world's greatest photo of Manny in the moment -- this is enlarged from the photo above it -- but you can clearly see that it's him. *g*


This scoreboard slogan from before the game? Don't believe it...


...these fans were a better reflection of the mood at the stadium, where Red Sox fans seemed to outnumber Orioles fans at least two to one!


David "Big Papi" Ortiz had a good game too; he and Dustin Pedroia hit back-to-back home runs in the third inning.


It was a beautiful evening for baseball after a rainy morning -- clear and cool despite the sold-out crowd.


And although the Orioles lost 6-3, those lower statistics are really the story of the day.

In general we had a nice afternoon in Baltimore after a morning of thunderstorm and tornado warnings from the National Weather Service. During a lull in the rain, we took the kids to Toys R Us to get special Darkrai Pokemon downloads for their Nintendo DS games -- there was some sort of special event to get the Pokemon via wi-fi at the store. at a special event. It was still drizzling a bit when we got to Baltimore, so we went to the Maryland Science Center and watched the Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure in IMAX 3D, which was terrific -- the story of a Dolichorhynchops trying to survive enormous predators in the North American inland sea of the Cretaceous period. We also had ice cream at Harborplace and saw the four-masted topsail schooner Juan Sebastian de Elcano, visiting the Inner Harbor from Spain. Ship photos later...Sunday is the Washington Folk Festival and Ocean Orchestra is kicking off the festivities!