I decided to take Sara to a baseball game last Sunday. She's 5, and I thought it was high time we did some sports-related bonding. I'm not a sports aficionado, and I've never been to our local university baseball park, so it was as new for me as for her. Admission was $5 for each of us, which seemed cheap enough. I wasn't really sure how long the game would keep her interest. How naive of me. The steps from the entrance gate led right up to.... the clown. The clown was making things out of balloons. I could make a long story short by saying that she left the ballpark an hour later in tears, but wait- there's more. It was finger-in-the-mouth, the-world-is-an-awful-place-and-Daddy-is-the-MEANEST-howling-gut-wrenching-my-feet-are-NOT-moving-on-their-own tears. These were the kind of tears that Alice-in-Wonderland must have cried and went swimming in.

Mostly we were having a marvelous, though somewhat costly time. We had cotton candy ($3), coke ($2), popcorn ($3), and peanuts ($4). Did you know that Coca Cola doesn't taste sweet at all when you're washing down cotton candy?

The funny thing is that the balloons were free. The nice clown seemed to be enjoying himself. While twisting the balloons into elaborate objects, he was doing magic tricks and amusing the adults by making PG-rated double-entendre. The first time we went to him, he made Sara a pink teddy bear, and made a little ball disappear. The second time, he made her an Aubie tiger (school mascot) using his last orange balloon. The third time.. oh, wait... there was no third time; that was the problem.

Clutching the teddy bear and the Aubie in separate hands, Sara observed a little girl wearing a pink and blue balloon flower bracelet. Such an object is completely entrancing, of course, to any 5-year old girl, and MUST be had at all costs. Now Sara's pretty clever, and she knew quite well that decorum dictated one balloon creation to a child, and she only got two because she was really cute. When she said she wanted to get close and watch how he made the bracelets, I actually fell for it. By this time there was a line of little girls having balloon bracelets made, but we were off to the side carefully studying the deft fingerwork and skillful artistry of the creator. Yeah, right.

It began to dawn on me that something was wrong when I suggested we go back to our seats and watch the game, and she stared quietly at the ground. Thinking this was a good time to introduce the concept of fairness and balance in the universe, I pointed out that she already had two balloon creations from the nice clown, and some other child wouldn't get one even if she were somehow able to trade on her cuteness for yet another one. She didn't buy it. From deep within, I drew upon my vast resources of daddy-ness and decided this was a TEACHABLE MOMENT. It sure was. I learned that teachable moments are in the eye of the beholder. I learned that theory and practice are quite different. I learned that it is very hard to get a wailing 5-year old from a baseball park, across a busy street, through a vast parking lot, and into a car while carrying leftover popcorn, peanuts, cotton candy and two balloon creations. I also re-learned what I already knew: it is possible to have a perfectly wonderful time on a Sunday afternoon with my daughter, even if she does cry over things that seem silly to me, because what she remembers days later is not about the balloons, but about the two of us sitting under a tree in the shade near the entrance gate, stuffing huge wads of cotton candy into each others' sugar-rimmed mouths, and laughing without a care in the world. When we had all the cotton candy we could possibly stand, she wiped her very sticky fingers on my shirt, gave me the messiest kiss imaginable, and said "I love you, Daddy." She can cry over balloons all she wants to.

Incidentally, we did watch the game for a few minutes, and she was very intrigued. She wanted to know how they were able to write letters on the grass. She shares my interest in sports.