Thursday, August 25, 2005

Not About Baseball

I paid $5 to get half a day of work off to go the Twins/White Sox game today at noon. Work was willing to give me the half day if I was willing to buy my own ticket. I was more than willing. I bundled myself up and parked my car over at Fort Snelling only to find that a.) 10,000 other people were boarding the train at the Mall two stops before me and taking up all available space and b.) several thousand more were boarding at the Fort Snelling Park and Ride and trying to fit into the three leftover spots not really available on each car. The fact that I had to wait in line behind a guy for over ten minutes while he had his kids feed $10 in quarters into the boarding pass machine, until I finally gave up and went and found the six-hour ticket booth, might have been bareable had I known I'd be waiting through three trains for one that had wedging room. But my time was not wasted. A nice old gentleman sat down next to me and began to tell me stories about being a writer and going to watch the Millers play with his wife for the ticket price of $1 when he was in grad school. I really wanted to listen to him, I really did - I like interesting people - but he was spraying residual food from his mouth onto me the whole time. Not flecks, mind you, but little pieces of chewed food that caught in my arm and leg hairs. I had to bury myself in the SCORM documentation I had with me until he finally ignored me, sometime after a thesis about how Silva's feet hurt.

The game itself - extra innings - we lost - but fun - I've never sat in the sixth row.

However, when I went to avail myself of the trough in the men's room, I ended up right next to a poster for Kids n' Kinship. What struck me was that there wasn't any sort of affiliation listed on the poster, it cast itself as pretty much a big brother-type program. If you look at their core values at their website, they don't have any affiliation either - you have to go to their PDF under "Our Christian Mentoring Heritage". There you can see that they're gospel-centered Lutheran seminarians. Not that I have a problem with Lutheran Seminarians -- particularly if they're actually helping inner city kids and doing positive social work (and McKnight and several other organizations believe they do) -- unless they're trying to outreach to me personally, I was just very surprised not to see the religious affiliation prominently listed. However, I must admit that the terms "Kinswomen", "Kinsmen", "Kinship" and "Kinfamily" are really creepy in a Klan sort of way, particularly as they postdate the Klan, the Kingdom Oil link that references them is disturbing for its blend of prayer intercession and strategic giving, and their partnering with my school district and city ("Admission is $5 per person. You must have a photo ID to enter. Proceeds to benefit Kids-N-Kinship. More... City of Eagan © 2004."), considering the religious affiliation, is rather peculiar. I hope the lack of a blatant affiliation means they're no longer religious-oriented and not preaching, though the Kingdom Oil link seems strange if that's the case. Heads up for my friend Erik - they also have their roots in Fergus Falls.

1 comment:

Robin said...

That reminds me of trying to take the T when there was a baseball game at Fenway. My stop was the second on the green line, and it was already sardine-land. One day we were going out of Newton and down a few stops to our favorite Indian restaurant, and by the time we smushed ourselves to the front of the train we missed our stop. WE sware like sailors and inappropriate grabbed a few people on our way to the door. Luckily, like all good Red Sox fans they were drunk already and didn't notice.