School portraits / An eighth-grade trip, recalled in 2021
The evening plans have gone into the bullpen
Packer’s eighth-graders found something better than a scavenger hunt. Then they lost the paperwork.
The papers were floating into the Nationals bullpen. This was a poor place to keep them. They were needed for the evening’s activities, and the evening was still going to happen, however much more interesting the baseball had become.
Packer’s eighth-graders had gone to Washington. The Mignatti Advisory abandoned its scavenger hunt to reach the game early for batting practice. I can sympathize. A scavenger hunt asks you to find something an adult has decided you should find. A baseball player might give you an actual baseball. These are not evenly matched attractions.
In his 2021 graduation speech, Abe Rothstein remembered looking over at Amelia and India as they jumped for a ball. Up came the ball. Down went the papers the group needed for the hunt and the evening activities. Straight into the bullpen.
Imagine being the person who has spent a pleasant few minutes explaining that we should all keep hold of our things. You would want to be gracious about this. Children are excited; these things happen. You would also have several useful remarks arriving in your head at once. None of them would get a sheet of paper back over a fence.
I admire the ambition of a school trip. You take children somewhere new, arrange interesting things for them to do, and hope they will remember the experience. Ideally, they will remember the part you arranged. But memory is a difficult customer. It may pass straight over a carefully chosen educational opportunity and attach itself to the moment the plans left the seating area.
Years later, Abe was still telling this one. The scavenger hunt had done rather well, really. They had given up looking for things and acquired something else to look for.