Hii-ojiichan would have liked all this baseball fuss.

How fast can you get away from work, scoop up your best partner in crime, attempt to cross the border in one spot and find yourself foiled...scoot downriver a few miles kinda sorta out of your way to try again, drive the most backwards way to the ballpark ever, cursing the whole time, park the car, walk to the stadium, find a perfect place to enjoy the game, and then finally relax with the warmth of the sun on your face? We can do it all in less than three hours.

It should have taken us an hour.

After leaping hurdle after hurdle, determined to make best use of Grandad and Baachan's generosity/baby thievery, we made it to the Sox game down at Comerica Park...with 20 minutes to spare. That's even stopping at the Will Call window to pick up our tickets...yes, indeed...stand in awe before our impressive get-me-to-the-game-on-time abilities.



We stood in front of Charlie Gehringer, in our usual spot along the rail. It seems like each season we find a new statue to feel most comfortable under. This year it's Charlie. We settled in and soaked up these surroundings that should be fully soaked up after all these years but wonderfully aren't.



We just love this place. Enough so that when the smiling ticket attendant at Will Call typed our name into the computer his eyes widened and the old boy smiled, "You're name's in here a lot sir," he said.

"Yup, it is," I responded.

"Good for you," he added with a grin. "Now get in there and have some fun."

"I'll give it my best," I quipped.

He handed over my tickets, and we walked through the gate grinning. If you walk through the gate of a baseball stadium and you're not grinning then you should probably be off somewhere else trying to enjoy yourself. It's just a theory, and it's probably wrong, but baseball is for happy people. Like these two grinning idiots...



Of course, with all that hullaballoo (perhaps the greatest word in the English language, right behind filibuster and acquiescence) weighing us down before we even got to the ballpark we were perfect examples of what a baseball stadium can do to a soul. All that green grass, and those looming light standards, all those people...it's the best kind of medicine, you know, besides real medicine.

And what did we do almost as soon as we settled in? We talked about Zoey. From where we stood, Hideki Okajima (岡島 秀樹 ) was warming up right below us in the Boston bullpen and our precocious little Sakura would have given the Spring air just one little Zedder sniff and known immediately that there was a Yomiuri Giant standing no less than 50 feet from her.

Her Hii-ojiichan"(ひいおじいちゃん) would be very proud.