At the baseball game

The last time I'd been to Keehi Lagoon was to stand in a dry field a listen to Barack Obama deliver a hastily organized stump speech. He seemed tired, laying out his statements by rote. There were myriad layers of security: cops, SWAT team members, the undercover guys all in the same green aloha shirts, and a coast guard ship sat in the lagoon. After speaking, Obama began to shake hands. I installed myself behind the first line of people; being short, I could see nothing, so I stuck my arm through a gap, hoping someone would shake it. At one point I saw a face appear in the gap. It was Michelle Obama, leaning over to see whose hand she was shaking. A bit later on, another hand shook mine, but no face appeared. Today I was there for a baseball game. Sangha plays for a men's league, and today's game was on a dusty, dry, hard field in the sun at the end of the airport runway, near the nondescript spot where Obama had spoken. The opposing team's pitcher was a middle-aged guy with a close-to-accurate excruciatingly slow change-up. I swear it was his only pitch, but it fooled every hitter. When the other team's third baseman, number 14, came to bat, I heard his teammates call him Bryce. I went to the other dugout and asked their coach for Bryce's last name. Raschelle the Kaiser nurse's son, the boy adopted from Sangha's orphanage, whom we'd met when he was a baby, when his lips appeared too long for his mouth. Sangha called him "baby rice." He hit a towering triple to left in the next inning.