Sunday we went to see the Cleveland Indians take on the Mariners with my dear Uncle Hank and Aunt Leana. Leana’s my mom’s older sister. Hank was in the Navy and stationed in Bremerton when they met at an Elvis concert here in Seattle. He went on to a career as a welder and lived and worked in Alaska for a long stretch of the seventies building the Alaska Pipeline. He’s from Ohio and that’s where they settled and had kids. It’s been more than thirty years since I saw any of my cousins on that side.

I saw Hank and Leana out here for the first time in many years just about ten years ago when my folks treated them and my mom’s other sibling and his wife to an Inside Passage cruise up to Alaska. Hank has always reminded me (and my mom) of my grandpa Richardson, my mom’s dad. He’s a big, gentle man who literally always has a joke on his lips.

Sometime in the past five years as I got interested in baseball Hank caught wind of this or I was reminded of his interest or something and we started texting each other during the season during games we know the other guy’s watching. We went to a game together here, Indians at M’s also, a couple years ago with his son-in-law and had a great time. Hank had a ball unfurling his at-least seventy-year knowledge of baseball to me and I loved hearing very second of it. I’m delighted to have found a way to connect with him and Leana like this at this stage in their lives. Tomorrow we’re gonna try to take the ferry over to Bremerton to see what we can see with regard to Hank’s base and so forth, and later take a look at something at Seattle Center.

It’s keeping me pretty busy because I’m still trying to cram in running, walking the dog, taking care of the house stuff, and running errands that crop up like this craigslist pickup I had today out in Maple Valley. I’m hoping to be able to hit the Yankees midday game on Wednesday too, but want to be oriented to their wants and needs while here. The Wednesday game is a Tanaka start and it will positively kill me if I can’t make it. I could with ease convince them to go, but they will want to buy god tickets and the whole MLB ticket-price scam revolves around charging more for the Yankees than anyone else and I am resistant to involving them in that. Now if I see 3 or four tix on craigslist for under $30, that might work.

But of course I’m going to be away from computing devices all day on Tuesday so…