Packer's Scavenger Hunt Papers Landed in the Nationals' Bullpen

I have been lost in a school for less. I once spent an open house trying to find the auditorium and came out, twenty minutes later, in a kitchen.

The eighth graders get a scavenger hunt too, on their trip to Washington, DC. Or at least one advisory did. In the 2021 commencement speech, one of the two senior speakers remembered that his advisory "gave up on our scavenger hunt" and went to the Washington Nationals game early, during batting practice, when players toss balls into the stands.

He looked over and saw two classmates jumping for a ball from a player. A ball came flying up to them. And the papers the group needed for the scavenger hunt and for the evening's activities slowly drifted through the air and "straight into the Nationals' Bullpen."

For all anyone knows, a relief pitcher spent that evening holding the itinerary for a Brooklyn eighth-grade field trip.

The speech does not say whether anyone got the papers back, or how the evening went without them, and I have no intention of finding out. It is better this way. The advisory set out to find a list of things, abandoned the list for a baseball, and lost the list to a baseball team. That is a perfect scavenger hunt.

The rest of the speech was in the same spirit. The two seniors noted that theirs was the first class to have a full year of school and graduate during a pandemic. They listed what they had been through: Zoom, Covid, protests, and about 243 pictures of a teacher's puppy. One compared senior year to the final season of Game of Thrones. The other asked whether he had watched it. "Not a single episode," he said.

So Packer runs scavenger hunts for adults so they won't get lost, and for children so they'll learn their way around a city. The adults find what's on the list. The children, four years later, were still telling the story about the bullpen at graduation.

At our house the youngest runs the scavenger hunts now. She hides the clues. Last Sunday the final clue was in my coat pocket, and the prize, she announced, was my car keys, which I had been looking for since Thursday.