Wayward Landlubber

     I went to a triple A baseball game a couple Saturdays ago. After a year of limiting my social contacts to a few people, I was eager to be part of a crowd. A small crowd, as it turned out, but a crowd none-the-less.      It has been the better part of a lifetime since I've attended a baseball game. And then only a handful of times. Once in the mid-to-late 50s, my family went to a Portland Beavers baseball game. In the early 1970s I went to a few Portland Mavericks games. I have written about that time. Later, in the early 2000s, I had a girlfriend who was passionate about baseball. She had an autographed picture of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers in her breakfast nook. She offered to take my two kids and I to a Beavers game, we went but my kids had no interest. Neither of them had ever shown an interest in sports, though Quinn did crew as an undergraduate. They chose the academic path for their lives. I chose to encourage that. I met a guy in a bar in Novembe...

     When I was a boy we would often go on Sunday drives. I remember once, driving east on I-84, as we passed The Dalles dam, dad pointed out where Celilo falls and village used be, buried as it is beneath several hundred feet of water behind the dam. Dad proudly told of how the village was removed to its present location and I was too young to question his pride in our white nobility.    Fast forward fifty years to March 7, 2007. My son Aidan and I were driving to Celilo for a commemoration of that day so long ago. His brother was with the high school drama club in Ashland and I wanted Aidan to get a taste of Howard Zinn history, a historian whose book, A Peoples History of the United States, Aidan had recently read. The event was put on by the Confederated tribes of Warm Springs and the public was invited. We drove east on I-84 out of Portland on a crisp mid-morning, much like our family drives when I was Aidans age.      There is a state park o...