Monday 20th July 2009 – The Games People Play

When you don't know your way around, and you need to do some shopping, supermarkets make life easy.  They may not provide the best, but they can usually be relied on to stock something like what you want, or allow your eyes to fall on some acceptable substitute.

Since Walmart has occasionally hosted my on-the-road overnight stops, and since I actually have a Walmart Atlas to help with that, I looked up the nearest one.  It was only twenty-odd miles away. That isn't far to go shopping these days in rural America.

So there I was in Boonville, with Dulcie egging me on to the very, very end of Main Street.  And there it was.  Except it wasn't.  It didn't seem to stock hardly anything I wanted.  What could be wrong?  I asked a bright young man in the uniform.  "Oh", he said, "that'll be in the new store".  And where would that be?  "Oh, it doesn't open till next month". 

But he was kind enough to point me at the competition, which I wouldn't have found otherwise.  So I got what I needed.

 

Later that night, there seemed to be some sort of party on somewhere (or so the barman claimed) because there was only one other person there.  But he turned out to be an ex-slow-pitch-softball player and umpire.

He had also worked for most of his life in the local grain elevator, so I got to ask a question which had been bubbling inside me as saw them dotted all over the landscape:  how do they work?  What goes on inside?  And he explained in great detail.  But don't panic, I won't go into it here. It involves lots of diagrams and hand-movements, so I will save it for more personal moments.  I'm sure the world is just full of grown-up ladies dying to know how a grain elevator works.

 

Slow-pitch Softball, something I had never heard of, seems to be very popular.  In Softball, which, at least on TV seems to be the exclusive preserve of girls, the pitching has to be underarm.  But these girls, at least on TV, can pitch underarm at astonishing speed.

The point of slow-pitch appears to be to ensure that the batter can hit the ball.  I once, myself, attempted to introduce some ladies to an exercise program called "co-operative badminton", where you lost points if your opponent missed the ball through your fault.  Slow-pitch softball sounded a bit like that.

It also appeared to be played by grown-up men, who indulged in all the machinations and skulduggery you might expect from grown-up men playing games.

My companion had been on the point of leaving when I arrived, but he stayed much longer.  He may not have been much the wiser when he left, but I certainly was.