Inter-

We went to the theatre a while ago, my husband and I. Say it the posh way, thee-ate-er. We left the children in the capable hands of a babysitter and took our cue to pretentiously discuss Beckett and Joyce on the metro into town. We even had a drink before the show. We'd never have had the audacity to book ourselves tickets for something like that - a real play, at night, in the city, no less - but we'd won the tickets so we had to go.

It's been so long since I've been to a live production of anything other than a tantrum being thrown that I'd forgotten all the things that make theatre such a different experience from a movie, even though on the face of it you might think they're much the same. This was a great example, though: a very intimate production, in the round, so that watching the audience opposite us react was as much part of the play as watching the actors. And being so close to the protagonists that you could reach out and touch them as they went by (if you wanted to; of course, I would never do such a thing) and admiring the grace and speed with which the actors moved the sets and props around between scenes, like a dance.

I love those moments when they're between selves; they're not quite in character yet, but they're about to be. The curtain call is the same, of course: it's the actors, not the characters, who are bowing to our applause. I strained to see if I could hear them speak as they went by, because the play was done with British accents and I'm sure the actors were American - but I didn't catch any hint of their real selves' voices to lift the veil a little further. I think this is why I love the blooper reels on a DVD so much: it's not just because they're funny, but because we see the actors being themselves just for a moment.

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I am between selves at the moment, I think. With the kids in camp for six hours a day, parenting is not the immersive experience it has been and will be for the rest of the summer, but I'm not quite sure what else it is I do; other than rush around getting last-minute things I might need for BlogHer. Once I'm there, I'll be a new self, or an old self - a new old self, perhaps. A professional amateur blogger, doing whatever it is such people do, in the company of many many others. A writer among writers, or a mommy-on-vacation. A woman among women (and some men, but not many, I'd say), without children.

Just me, Sheryl Sandberg, the Pioneer Woman, thousands of other women, and Queen Latifah too.

Getting to first base

At some point a long time ago, in my teenagehood, I suppose, I met the terms "first base," "second base," and so on - in a romantic sense, let's say. In a book or a film or something. I had a vague idea of what they referred to, but I wasn't so hot on the specifics. A lot of questions remained unanswered for many years: Which way did the sequence go - was "first" the very beginning or the final target? (First is the winning place, after all.) But then if first was the start, how many bases were there - was this an open-ended thing? Could you define your own bases, perhaps, to infinitely frustrate the boys?

The problem was that while I read American books and watched American films, I had no knowledge of American sports. Sure, I've seen Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, I can say something came out of left field or talk about home runs, but I'd never actually been to a baseball game. And those phrases, it turns out, about the bases - they're talking about baseball. Well, except when they're not, obviously.

And then. Dash took up baseball this season. He's playing "machine pitch," which is what they do for the seven- and eight-year-olds. It's slightly harder than T-ball (where the ball is propped up on a stand to be struck) but easier than expecting the kids to pitch a hittable ball as well as hit it - a machine sends the balls at them in what's supposed to be a steady stream of nicely centered, not-too-fast pitches.

Looking good

But after a couple of practices, B. pointed out to me that the poor boy has no notion what he's meant to be doing, beyond the hitting and the catching (which are not as easy as they look). He's never even watched a game on the TV, never mind in real life. So we decided we should take in a game.

I've never been one for sports, really, and I'm lucky enough to be married to a man who is also not very interested in watching the game, whatever game it might be. I'm pretty sure that the only time I've ever been to a professional sporting event before, it was (ironically enough) an exhibition game of American football in Dublin that we got free tickets to, and it was incredibly boring and totally incomprehensible.

Maybe I had lumped baseball with football and decided that it too would be incredibly boring. Maybe I felt that not going to a game was the last bastion of not being American that I wished to hold out on. Maybe I just had no reason and no interest. But however it came about, after ten years in the country, yesterday I finally went to a real actual proper ballgame.

Looks authentic, no?

Not the big leagues, of course. We started small, with a minor league game close to home - but still professional baseball. The weather was just right - warm enough but not too hot or sunny. The game was well-attended but not too crowded. Dash wore his shorts in case they needed an extra player at the last minute.

Dash demonstrates his swing

The genius of the people who plan these things, though, is that they understand that baseball is sometimes not the most thrilling of spectator sports. So it's not like you're watching Federer serve at Wimbledon, being shushed by the umpire if you sneeze. The place had lots of families, babies, dogs (is that a thing, or was it a special bring-your-pooch-to-the-game day yesterday?), and the players just did their thing regardless of whether my children were running up and down or clambering over the seats or wailing because their giant ice-cream cone was dripping all over their hands. 

"Need some help with that?"

And when they got too bored to keep watching, and we'd done the pizza and the ice-cream and refused the cotton candy, there was a carousel and a bouncy castle and pitching and hitting games right there to help parents donate even more dollars to the nice baseball people, and then hot dogs and popcorn. Not to mention the between-innings competitions and adorably bad pre-game show and requisite toe-curling rendition of the national anthem. And I think I'd even have quite enjoyed watching the baseball players if I'd had more than five minutes to pay attention to what they were doing.

We stayed for about an hour and a half before calling it quits just as a sprinkle of rain was beginning. I think we'll probably do it again, it was that good.

What's more, I would probably be able to reliably go back in time and let my teenage self know what was what with the bases. Just in case she ever needed to know.

Geo

The children are ... where are the children?... upstairs, maybe getting dressed, maybe something else... it's Sunday morning, Paul Simon is crooning about a train in the distance, and I feel I should be waxing lyrical. Maybe it's the fault of the music, maybe it's the day, I don't know. The husband is out running, checking out part of the route for his marathon in a couple of weeks' time.

I can't write to music, though; at least not music with words, and I don't really see the point of the other sort. I mean, it's nice, but if I'm just going to try to shut it out so I can concentrate, then I may as well not turn it on. I've never been one of those people who studies with music in the background. Maybe it's because my house was always quiet, so I didn't need to drown out other people to get my homework done. Another of those unnoticed advantages of onlychildhood.

If you gaze out the window for about ten minutes, concentrating hard, you might just catch a snowflake surruptitiously sneaking out of the sky. It's too warm for snow, but for some reason that's what the atmosphere wants to give us, so beyond the bare branches is the colour of nothing and now and then something escapes in the form of a six-sided crystal. I don't know why.

It was doing this yesterday too, when we pulled ourselves out of our Saturday-morning decline/recline and stopped putting on the kettle for another cup of tea and remembered that we have a national park five minutes down the road so there's no need to drive for half an hour and pay a king's ransom to get into a zoo or something. We went geocaching instead.

The kids know about geocaching. They know that sometimes we find little plastic boxes in the woods and sometimes they have toys in them. You're supposed to take a little thing and leave a little thing. We hadn't brought any little things to leave. So we took a pterodactyl from the first box, with B promising to run by and put in something else in return the next day. Then we exchanged the pterodactyl for an orange not-T-Rex in the next one, and finally went home with a green lambeosaurus from the last one. Mabel is particularly pleased because she has a tiny blue lambeosaurus already, who must have been missing her mommy.

Finding the first one went like this:

B: Look, I think this is it.
Mabel: Toys, toys!
B: Not toys. A cache.
Mabel: It's not cash, it's toys.

We had to admit that it was. Anyway, we were outdoors and the children were walking on their own feet and nobody complained and we found nature-y things like rotten logs and deer droppings and a hollow tree trunk and a lot of sticks and it was really quite nice and we should do it again.