First off an update regarding my Taylor Swift Moments blog from two weeks ago.  My very loyal fans—Charlotte, Brian, and Hoover, who drove from Virginia to Bellingham for the signing in Bellingham—are now safely back home in Virginia.  Their last day of driving was a grueling fifteen-hour one, but they managed to make it home ahead of the storm that was forecast to hit the area over the weekend.  

Brian and Charlotte are a lovely couple in their fifties.  Prior to the signing, we shared a delightful meal at Bellingham’s Rock and Rye Oyster House.  That was my first visit there, but I expect it won’t be my last.

On the way home, Charlotte kept me updated on their progress, and that made me think of October of 2001 when Bill and I made a similar roundtrip journey. Earlier that year I had agreed to attend a book festival in Memphis in October, but then 9/11 happened.  When we should have been making travel arrangements for that, air travel was very much … well … up in the air.  That’s when we decided to drive—from Seattle to Memphis and back.

It’s a long trip.  As we went, we tuned into one radio station after another, but the content was all the same.  The wreckage of the World Trade Center was still smoldering, and that’s all anyone on the news was discussing.  

Earlier that year, while on tour in Boston, I was having a solo lunch in my hotel when a group consisting of a man and a woman accompanied by two girls, both of them not quite teenagers, walked into the restaurant.  When I’m in those situations, I tend to watch people.  In this case, it soon became apparent that the two adults were in the early stages of a romantic relationship while their two respective daughters were simply along for the ride, with the adults seated in one booth and the girls in the one next door.  While the adults were busy getting acquainted, what were the girls doing?  Both of them had their noses buried in individual copies of the most recent Harry Potter book.

I knew about the Harry Potter books, of course, but I had never read one  When my new book happened to come out at the same time one of those was published, I could just as well have stayed home rather than going out on tour.  But somewhere on Bill’s and my long drive between here and Memphis, we went into a bookstore and bought the first book in the Harry Potter series—on cassette tape, by the way.  At the time eight-tracks were over and CDs didn’t exist back. Neither did streaming for that matter.

For the remainder of the trip we spent the time being caught up in J.K. Rowling’s world.  When we went into restaurants, 9/11 was still the only topic of conversation, but at our table, Bill and I were discussing the rules of Quidditch and the many good-versus-evil goings on in Harry Potter’s young life. We finished listening to the last available book in the series at the time in a parking lot outside our hotel in Boise on our way home.  That was my first experience with audio books, and I was amazed how listening to stories helped the miles roll by.

Now please forgive me for going off on a tangent and deviating from the story you thought I was telling because, as it turns out, something else was happening in October of 2001—the Major League Baseball playoffs.  I am not a fan of baseball.  At Greenway School in Bisbee, Arizona, in the fifties, every October, at the insistence of the PE teacher, all students from fourth grade up were herded into the auditorium where we were required to watch and KEEP SCORE for each game of the World Series.

The TV set on the stage was a console and probably the largest screen available at the time—21 inches, but for someone who was severely nearsighted, the action on that sickly green screen wasn’t at all accessible.  I had to keep asking people what had happened so I could fill in my score sheet. The only words I remember the announcers saying during the course of those World Series punishment sessions and the ones that remain with me to this day were these:  No runs, no hits, no errors, and no one left on base.  

So on Bill’s and my Seattle to Memphis sojourn, while stopping for a meal at a bar/restaurant somewhere in Mississippi, we were astonished to see that not only was there a Major League Baseball game playing on the TV set over the bar, the Seattle Mariners were in it.  So we stayed and watched until it was over—and the Mariners lost.  And that’s the last time I watched a baseball game on TV, until this past week—some twenty-four years later.

Yes, Bill and I watched that FIFTEEN INNING marathon between the Seattle Mariners and Detroit Tigers from beginning to end. As soon as the Mariners won, I knew there was more baseball in my immediate future.  Over the weekend, we watched the first two play-off games between the Mariners and the Blue Jays, and I’m sure we’ll be watching the third one tomorrow at five PM.

So remember that old song?

Take me out to the ballgame.
Take me out to the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks
I don’t care if I never come back
Let me root, root, root for the home team.
If they don’t win it’s a shame,
‘Cause it’s one, two, three strikes your out
At the old ball game.

By the way, does anybody still eat Cracker Jacks and, if so, does each box still have a prize in it?