Went for a walk in Durham
and found some classic Americana
If you know baseball, and baseball cinema, you'll recognize the entrance to the original Durham Bulls ballpark. It’s across from a fine little establishment called The Blue Note, where old friends and I gathered for lunch and reacquaintance Saturday. We left in a hurry, trying (and failing) to beat a deluge back to our airbnb. So it wasn’t ‘til I came out the next morning for a walk that I discovered how close we’d been to a piece of baseball film iconography. We were just beyond the left field foul pole.
Maybe you'll also recall the scene in the film "Bull Durham" when the coach berates his players for being "Lollygaggers"... which is why my old grad school pals and I have started to call our annual meetup at a designated minor league baseball venue a Lollypalooza, and ourselves a
The opening “Church of Baseball” scene is pretty good too.
We started doing this in 2017, converging first on Nashville from various far-flung places in the southeast U.S. (just two of us reside in middle TN). In subsequent years (missing only the first pandemic summer of '20) we've been to Chattanooga, Asheville, Huntsville, Lexington, Knoxville (Kodak TN), and now Durham.
For next year we're talking about Greenville SC, home of one of this year's newest Lollygaggers. And the year after, now that we've picked up a Minnesotan (seems like that's suddenly a trend, since today is Tim Walz's veep candidacy debut), we may have to think about getting on a plane to St. Paul. After that, Fred, Durango?
Everyone should make a point of keeping up and meeting up with old friends through the years, especially the later ones. It really is like stepping back in time, for a weekend. It's a good and happiness-inducing thing to do.
And thanks to Younger Daughter for taking good care of the pooches in my absence. Maybe she needs a tee-shirt that says
My dad went on an iconic baseball pilgrimage and all I got was:
