I'm at a baseball game with Vera, and our daughter, a little girl about one year old. She's walking but not talking yet, with blonde wavy hair.

The baseball park seems to be enclosed, and we've just moved far out down the 3rd base line for some reason. The roof there is low, and it turns into a gym building where there is a basketball court. But from here, we're facing the court, and the baseball field is behind us. I'm not happy with that, so we get up and move a little closer to the field, facing the game.

There are lots of foul balls coming into the area to our right, closer to the plate, and people keep scrambling to get them. I leave the daughter with Vera and sneak closer, hoping to catch a ball. One comes into our area and bounces around among the seats, and I manage to grab it at the same time as another guy, but I apparently have a better grip, and I get it from him.

Then he starts negotiating with me - would I give him a piece of it, for I think $40? Just tear off a piece. I look at it, and it isn't even like a baseball, it's more like one of those balls that falls off an oak tree. It's brownish and deflated and there is a loose piece that he suggests tearing off, just so he can have a part of it. I first suggest tearing the whole thing in half like a muffin, which it appears one could do, and then - oh, what the heck, I don't want this weird thing anyway, so I just give it to him.

A few minutes later, another foul ball sails directly at me, and I deftly catch it with a bare hand. The crowd seems amazed, and surprised it doesn't hurt, but the ball is soft. Like the other one, it isn't really like a baseball; this one is at least white, but it's all mushy. By molding it in a certain way I can make it spherical.

I go back to Vera and our daughter, and pick up the girl. It seems I haven't really established a connection with her, but she sure is a darling. The game is over soon and everybody gets up to leave.

As we walk out I run into Dave from work, and chat with him a bit. I ask him if he goes to a lot of these games, and he says that he'll go to all of them as long as they're here for the series, I think the playoffs (in real life, the baseball playoffs are ongoing). Then I see my old colleague Bob W., looking very skinny, leaning against a wall apparently preoccupied with something, just hanging out.