Best Job I Ever Had

Larry Dierker was doing the “color” during today’s Astro’s game against the Reds. He brought up an interview he'd done years earlier for his Sunday baseball column in the newspaper. He mentioned the name of a ballplayer, one I had never heard of, or for that matter, neither had the other announcer. I couldn’t tell you his name now and I heard it only fifteen minutes ago. The ball player had been up to the “bigs” for a “cup of coffee” one year. In one Saturday game he’d done very well, a home run and several RBI’s. Dierker asked him, “Was that your best game ever?”, commenting on that brief major league stint from some twenty years earlier in his youth.

“No, the best game I ever had was in Alabama when I was in Triple A”. (I’m winging it here on details because up until this point it was just someone talking in the background while I was paying attention to the Astro’s game.) “There was a pop fly hit near the 1st base line that went into the stands where I caught it. I landed in the first row on top of a young lady. I was worried that she might have been injured and asked her a couple more times; but she said she was alright. The next inning I went over and asked her again, still worried that she might have been hurt. Then in the next inning I asked her out on a date and a little later on we got married.”

The best job I ever had wasn’t the twenty years with the Houston Police Department or the twenty five plus years I’ve been a locksmith. Those don’t match up, not even close to the job I had working in the commissaries of the Astrodome when I was a kid in high school. I was the “soda boy”; filling up tray upon tray of soda for the vendors to take out into the crowds. It was there that I met my “popcorn girl”, Lucy. She often worried that those lousy looking uniforms didn’t help with her looks and wondered what I saw in her.

The supervisors of our commissary wanted to play match makers and got a couple of tickets to a movie for us. We had some ice cream at an old Rexall drug store downtown, the kind that may not exist anywhere now. It had a small dinette on one side where we could sit and talk before the movie. I remember getting half way down the block towards the movie house when it dawned on me that I’d forgotten to pay for the ice cream. You might say I was distracted at the time, running back to the drug store so they wouldn’t think I was avoiding payment.

The old movie house had the “art deco” look to it; fancy carpet, chandeliers and there was some kind of elaborate wood work trim to picture frame the viewing screen. It was an old Doris Day movie, “Capri”, not much of a movie as I recall. The movie house has long been torn down and replaced. “Capri” came on the television last year and Lucy and I sat there laughing at how goofy most of it came off; holding hands as we sat on the sofa together. Now that I think of it, “Capri” may have been the best movie I ever saw, never said it was well made; just the best movie I ever went to. Come July it will have been 34 years we’ve been married; that and the 4 years we dated off and on before that make her my life long companion.