ONE

Bottom of the ninth in Tibet.

Recovering from the virus he had smuggled past the TSA on the flight from Australia, he was painfully amused (and achingly satisfied) that the Dalai Lama was in town for a few days to spread the good word on compassion. He was going to be making a presentation at Q West field, a bureaucratic boondoggle of a sports arena if there ever was one, tomorrow afternoon. On the same day the Seattle Mariners, playing less than a nine iron chip shot from Q West in Safeco Field, another colossal tribute to the rampant and out of control capitalistic entertainment movement, where it is somehow acceptable to vend peanuts for five and hot dogs for seven dollars, would be competing for what is referred to in the industry as, "butts in the seats", with His Holiness.

I was once a baseball fan, he admitted, but since the great players strike of 1984, no more. It's a business, and they're after my dough. I was just another number to tack on to the attendance figures so that the marketing department could justify another rate increase. I got tired of the players striking because $200,000 a year wasn't enough, while the homeless camped literally outside the stadiums in cardboard shelters panhandling for spare change.

So I said adios to baseball long ago, baseball the business, not baseball the game. There was still a beauty to the game that was unmatched by its cousins of the grid, the hardwood or the ice. And today this wondrous irony and perfect paradox is in sharp focus. The Zen of baseball with the Buddha hitting cleanup. A doubleheader of mindfulness. A meditation on the infield fly rule. Here and now, hit and run.

He was also pleased, and said in an earlier letter, that as a result of the Dalai Lama outdrawing the M's 55,000-30,000, that there was hope for us all yet. Maybe we are finally beginning to understand that compassion is more important than the suicide squeeze.

Or, as he recalled a joke his pal Eddie the Tie once shared: "What did the Dalai Lama say to the hot dog vendor?"

MAKE ME ONE WITH EVERYTHING.


Top photo: The Dalai Lama delivering opening remarks at the 35th meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Bottom: M's skipper Rene Lachemann delivers a diatribe to ump in 1984 in the Kingdome, where Q West now stands. Back then, hot dogs were a buck two fiddy.