Fenway Church

The way my husband said the words left no doubt as to their meaning.

"This is what church should be like."

Not: "This is what church should be like." He was not saying that he was not in church but if he were, it would ideally resemble his current setting.

He was saying that he was already in a place of joy, wonder, worship, and gratitude.

That is to say, he was sitting in a loge box right behind third base at Fenway park, on a clear spring evening as the last sunlight glinted on the Boston skyline.

The park--a small sporting venue, intimate by the standards of today's modern super-stadiums, irregular in shape and contour, much loved and even imitated by recently-built arenas that have yet to capture the essence of "Friendly Fenway Park"--was sold out, the crowd a shouting, happy mass who seemed to feel as my husband did: that they had arrived at a place of accord and peace, a place of cheer and sacraments, with Fenway franks and "Sweet Caroline" only two examples of an array of sacred rites in which to partake.

Even the presence of the occasional faithless dolt and sacrilegious buffoon failed to dent the sense of reverence and expectation that threaded the air like incense.

Good thing, too, because Dieter and I were equally ignorant of what was going on.

"What happened? Why are we applauding?" Dieter asked.

"There was a pitch and then a bunt, but the bunt was a foul," I told him.

"Right... so why are we clapping?"

I sought to achieve a priestly invulnerability to rational inquiry as I intoned, "It's a mystery we should not question," but Dieter wasn't buying it.

"You don't know," he divined.

"I don't know," I confessed.

My husband looked out over the diamond, his excitement washing in like waves at the beach. Suddenly, he jumped up, along with everybody else, and a thunderous roar of delight went up.

The big screen said it was a double, and noted that Microsoft would be giving money to charity to commemorate it.

Looking at the score, I saw it was unchanged.

"What the hell?" I grumbled. "All that and we didn't even get a point?"

A woman standing next to us shot me a pitying look.

Another roar surged through the crowd, followed by a slumping moan as the guy dashing for second base was tagged out.

"Boo!" called my husband.

Dieter asked for an explanation, and my husband began, with frequent pauses to monitor the flight paths of various struck baseballs, sketched out an elaborate verbal diagram of strategies and contingencies, littered with technical terms like "pop fly" and "knuckleball."

I preferred a more Zen approach: allowing my eyes to settle on the shifting figures that crouched, leapt into sudden sprints, and dove feet-first into bases, I sought a gestalt understanding, a moment of clarity when the noise of motion would resolve into a harmonious and elegant system of force and counter-force.

Until I noted #18; he was a hunk. The so-called "big picture" shrank from view.

"I hate crowds," my husband was telling Dieter. "But not a crowd like this, where everybody is just so happy! Even when they're losing, a Red Sox crowd is having a good time."

He went on to note how it's always possible to tell when a game is on at Fenway park. "It's like the entire city starts to fall toward Fenway," he told Dieter. "Everybody is moving toward on goal, one center of attention and devotion. It has to be the crowd for a Sox game coming together."

Well, either that, or a zombie attack, I reckoned silently... but didn't say out loud, mindful that where zealots gather, a fatwah or a pogrom is never far behind.

I certainly didn't want to be the one to turn the happy congregation into howling mob. I'd gladly leave that to the three bloated twits up above, fans of the other team I supposed, who kept sloshing their beer onto the crowd below, and dropping popcorn and empty cups, eliciting growls, stares, and shouts of that traditional Bostonian blessing, "Fuck you!"

A ball sailed over our heads and crashed into the crowd, sending up a spray of what looked like peanut shells. The crowd around us hooted.

The sight enlivened Dieter. "I need peanuts," he decided. After several minutes of clambering over seats and pushing past spectators, with the occasional beer sloshing onto his new jacket, he made his way to the concourse. The last we saw of him was his red hair receding into the river of humanity that swirled endlessly, its eddies disrupted and reformed by the perambulations of a cadre of hawkers who called out their chants like vespers:

"I got jacks here! Cracker-jacks!"

"Get yer dawgs!!"

"Rally monkeys! Ral-ley mon-keys!!"

"Do you want a rally monkey?" my husband asked me. One look at the hideous thing, leering like Hanuman in the aftermath of a frat party long gone South, and I knew I'd be having nightmares that night.

A peanut guy came past, and I thought of Dieter making his pilgrimage to some distant shrine of snacks: he might just as well as stayed put, handing his money to a line of palms that would have shuttled his alms to the hawker and returned his bit bit of provender, and even his change, intact: a profound and faithful transaction made in a sacred space where not even money-changers would dare to cheat a fellow.

A packet of peanuts made a rough landing in someone's lap nearby. "Gotta keep yer eye on the bawl!" shouted the vendor, to raucous chuckles all around. Well, devotion it was, if sometimes a bit rough and tumble.

Alas, Dieter, who could get lost in a good-sized shoe closet... and did, once, when he was dating a fashion model... but that's another story, or three, and in his defense he had just been at a rave and was dehydrated and flying on ecstasy or some such party condiment; and the Victoria's Secret leggings that served as a blindfold, together with the L.A.-cop strength handcuffs he was wearing at the time also impeded him to no small degree...

A Red Sox batter let fly and the ball rocketed away, players suddenly scrambling around the field and my prayer for my now long-overdue cousin evaporating in the heat of a moment in which sporting history might be made. The crowd's spirited tumult of many tongues pitched into urgent ululations and then mounted into a primal scream of pure excitement; suddenly it all came to a head as a rock and roll tune burst from the loudspeakers as everyone threw their hands up and my husband bellowed, "YEAH!!"

Suspicious, I looked at the score: this time, it ticked up a point. Well, that only seemed proper after such a fuss.

What was I saying? Oh yes, Dieter, who was never blessed with what one could call a sense of direction, was long gone and never to find his way back. I did get a text message a few hours later informing me that he'd taken a wrong turn somewhere in the vicinity of grilling Italian sausages and ended up out on the street and, from there, found his way to a seedy dive where drinks were only three bucks, and lap dances were only moderately more pricey.

I smiled for my cousin, knowing that he, like all others in their varying strains of faith, had found his way to a place of bliss and rapture.