steps up to bat, bottom of the fifth and the are down. The game was intense, my team was losing, so I did what any kid who didn’t know anything about baseball would do. I looked at the scoreboard. Back then, I was just beginning to learn and venture into the mystical world of reading and writing. To me, the classic scoreboard was nothing but a jumble of numbers and letters. To this day, I still don’t understand baseball, but what I do know about baseball is all on the scoreboard.

I clambered over dozens of cheering baseball fans, spilling popcorn over them. When I had finally managed to crawl over the entire ‘M’ section of the stands, I was down to half of my popcorn. Craning my neck, I spotted my grandpa among the fray of foam fingers and cheese hats. With a mental sigh of relief, I plopped down onto the somewhat warm safety of my chair. That’s three outs and the home team is up to bat. “Darn, I missed the first half of the fifth.” In doing so, I had completely lost track of the score. Trying not to look bad I didn’t ask my grandpa for the score. Bad idea… Because of my ignorance and lack of baseball knowledge after the next ten minutes of giving hints and clues that I had no idea what was going on I really had no idea what was going on.

Behind me, a man returning from the concession stand with and extra large bag of popcorn sat down beside his friend. In the process of sitting down, spilling a quarter of his popcorn on me, wiping his seat off and leaning forwards to catch his tipping bag of overflowing popcorn, he asked for the score. Surprisingly, I had managed to pick this out from the screaming and yelling of others and my yelp as a flood of overly buttered popcorn assaulted me. In return, his friend had replied, check the scoreboard, pointing at the big black square in the sky.

I had to do this very precise, as not to draw attention to myself, but be specific and clear enough that my grandfather knew to what I was point at. Cautiously, I played my move. It was a spectacular move. Forgetting about my bag of popcorn sitting in my lap, I lifted my arm which in turn knocked the popcorn bag into the air, at which I grabbed at while pointing to the scoreboard. To sum it up, it was like me flailing my arms as I dumped my popcorn on the head of the person in front of me while mindlessly burgling incoherent sentences. You'd have to see it to believe it.

Magically, as if he was some sort of wizard, my grandpa was able to decode my babbling and apologize to the person in front of us at the same time. Slowly, he explained every detail of the scoreboard to me, but like they say, in one ear, out the other. I didn’t care about any scoreboard, I just wanted the cold hard facts, the good stuff. (The score) Through my grandfather’s elaborate explanation, which wasn’t that elaborate seeing as he had to tell it to a five year old, I picked out the score and to my surprised I tuned into the part of how to find it on the scoreboard. To this day, I still remember the score it was that game, on that cold, chilly, popcorn filled day, but I’ll never remember how to read the rest of the scoreboard.