The Ticket Was for Baseball. The Trip Was the Adventure

I’m getting close to two dozen baseball games this season, spread across six different ballparks, and Friday night brought me back to Dodger Stadium for the sixth time this year and, for the fourth time, by train. By now there are parts of the trip that have become familiar, but this one was different almost from the beginning. I bought my ticket through SeatGeek, which I had never used before. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about putting yet another app on my phone, but I liked the way it helped identify the better values around the stadium instead of simply presenting a sea of available seats.

As it turned out, I stumbled into a very good deal. Someone had listed four seats together in Section 9 on the field level, on the third-base side and only slightly off home plate. Another buyer purchased three of them, leaving behind a single seat—the aisle seat. I found it while hunting around for the best combination of location and price and paid $100 including the fees. Later, the woman sitting beside me told me she had paid $181 apiece, plus fees, for the other three seats. Row P put us only a few dozen rows from home plate. These weren’t merely good seats; they were fabulous seats, and apparently there are advantages to being the guy shopping for one leftover ticket.

There was another bargain involved this time. Since my previous train trip to Dodger Stadium, I applied for and received the senior fare, which reduced my $1.75 ride to 75 cents. There are, apparently, some financial compensations for getting older. It also changes the economics of a trip to Dodger Stadium. Parking alone is $45, and getting there and back probably consumes another $15 worth of gas, even before calculating the actual mileage cost of operating the car. Call it $60 just to drive and park. Looked at that way, taking the train meant that, comparatively speaking, about $40 bought the baseball ticket and another $60 bought the privilege of sitting in traffic and parking my car. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, the train seemed like the better bargain.

I left home around 4:30 and rode to the Chinatown station. From there, it is roughly three-quarters of a mile to the stadium entrance, with most of that distance going uphill. Fortunately, Southern California had cooled considerably during the week, so the climb wasn’t particularly difficult. Near the entrance to the parking lot at the bottom of the hill, I stopped for about ten minutes and talked with two members of the security staff, one a retired police officer and the other retired from corrections. Then I finished the walk up the hill and into the stadium.

My ticket also included access to the Stadium Club, someplace I had never visited before. I asked an usher where it was and, after she pointed me in the right direction, I asked whether it was any good. She laughed and told me she didn’t know, but I could come back and tell her. So I went upstairs to investigate. It was packed, even though the game was still an hour away, and the buffet was $70. The food looked good and smelled even better. I’ve eaten in the Dugout Club before, where the food is fabulous, so I have little doubt that the Stadium Club buffet was very good as well. If I had been there with someone, sitting down for dinner might have been worth the wait and the price. Alone, though, I decided that a draft beer, a Dodger Dog and some peanuts sounded more like a baseball game anyway.

I took them down to my seat and spent much of the next hour doing something I have increasingly come to enjoy: watching a ballpark slowly become a ballpark. When you arrive early enough, most of the seats are still empty. The grounds crew is working, players and stadium employees are moving around, ushers are getting into position, and people begin arriving first in ones and twos and then in streams. The noise gradually builds as this enormous empty place fills with people and takes on an entirely different personality. There is something satisfying about simply sitting there with a beer and a hot dog and watching the whole thing happen.

Eventually, the woman who had purchased the other three tickets arrived with her children. She was pleasant, and occasionally she would ask me about a play or something happening on the field. One of the kids wanted to be closer to the dugout, and I pointed out that where we were sitting had another advantage: we were in prime foul-ball territory. We didn’t catch one, but several came close enough to send people around us scrambling. That is part of the entertainment of sitting that close. You aren’t simply watching the game from a distance; every once in a while, the game comes looking for you.

The Dodgers beat the Washington Nationals 5–3, although they seemed determined to make the ending more interesting than necessary. The game itself, however, probably won’t be what I remember most. I was glad to see Will Smith back behind the plate. They call him America’s Catcher, and I have always thought catchers deserve more credit than they receive. A baseball team can run a parade of pitchers to the mound, but somebody has to crouch behind home plate and catch all of them. During last year’s seven-game World Series, the Dodgers used plenty of pitchers, but Will Smith caught every pitch. From where I was sitting Friday night, I was close enough to watch him work, and that is one of the things great seats give you that television cannot quite reproduce. You begin noticing the work inside the game.

The best example came during the seventh-inning stretch. Tens of thousands of people were standing and singing while the Nationals took the field, but down near the Dodgers’ dugout was Mookie Betts, who was due to bat. While almost everybody else was participating in the spectacle, Betts was working. He took practice swings, settled into his stance, stretched, swung again and prepared himself for his next at-bat. With all that noise and activity surrounding him, he appeared to have blocked out everything except what he was about to do. Sitting that close, I found myself watching him prepare rather than watching the seventh-inning entertainment. We tend to notice talent when someone performs, but sometimes you have to get close enough to notice all the preparation that comes before it.

After the Dodgers finished off the Nationals, the stadium prepared for a drone show and opened the outfield so fans could go onto the field. I decided I had seen enough and started back toward Chinatown. The return walk is considerably easier because gravity is finally on your side, and I made it from Dodger Stadium to the station in 18 minutes. By then it was completely dark. The route crosses the freeway on a pedestrian bridge and winds down a corkscrew-shaped ramp that compensates for the considerable difference in elevation between Dodger Stadium and Chinatown. There was a homeless man sleeping along the way, but there were also plenty of other people making the same walk back toward the train.

When I reached the platform, something clearly wasn’t right. A train headed toward downtown was sitting motionless on the tracks with passengers aboard. Four police officers were gathered toward the south end of the platform, and then I saw another four coming from the north. One of them was a Detective III, identifiable by the insignia on his uniform. You can take the cop out of the department, apparently, but you can’t stop him from noticing things like rank insignia. Then came the announcement that train service had been stopped because of police activity.

Soon the officers divided into teams and went down onto the tracks. A police helicopter appeared overhead, followed by fire engines and additional emergency personnel. Eventually, we could see what all the commotion was about. A man was perched on one of the structures near the tracks, and initially, from the platform, the whole thing was frustrating. Everyone had someplace to go. The trains were stopped, people had just spent hours at a baseball game, and the natural reaction was to wonder why the police didn’t simply go down there and get him off whatever he was sitting on. Then it became apparent why they weren’t doing that. He was threatening to jump.

Once we understood that, the scene looked considerably different. Police officers were negotiating with him while firefighters positioned equipment nearby. A ladder truck arrived, and eventually they inflated one of those enormous rescue cushions underneath him—a giant firefighter bouncy house, for lack of a more technical description. Whatever impatience existed on the platform had to yield to the reality that, for the man down there, this was not an inconvenience or an interruption to his evening. Whatever had brought him to that pillar had brought him to the edge of something much more serious, and the police and firefighters were going to take whatever time they needed to try to bring him down safely.

For the rest of us, that meant waiting. We stood on the platform for about an hour with no real idea when the trains would begin moving again. People started arriving from Union Station because they had apparently been told that trains weren’t running there either and to walk to Chinatown. Eventually, I noticed people drifting toward a train that had originally been headed in the opposite direction. I asked what was happening and learned that they were going to reverse it and send it back toward Pomona. Since San Dimas was in that direction, that became my ride home.

By then, of course, everybody needed the same ride, so the train was packed. It also seemed to be moving extraordinarily fast. Maybe that was only my perception because I was sitting backward and watching the world rush away in the opposite direction, but it felt as though the operator had decided all of us had already waited long enough. Something else had changed during that hour on the platform, too. People were talking to one another. Many of us had just attended the same baseball game, and then we had stood together watching the same strange emergency unfold. By the time the train finally started moving, we had acquired a shared experience. Strangers who normally would have sat quietly staring at their phones were talking about the game, the delay, what had happened at the station, where they were going and how they were getting home. For much of the 45-minute ride, conversations bounced around the car among people who probably never would have spoken to one another otherwise.

I finally walked through my front door about seven minutes after midnight. I had left at 4:30, so I had been gone almost eight hours for a baseball game. Yet when I thought about the evening, there wasn’t much to complain about. I had found a terrific field-level aisle seat for $100, taken the train for practically nothing, walked through Chinatown and up the hill to one of America’s great ballparks on a beautiful, cool Southern California evening, eaten a Dodger Dog with peanuts and a draft beer, watched Will Smith work behind the plate and Mookie Betts prepare for an at-bat, and watched foul balls sail into the seats around me. The Dodgers won 5–3, and then getting home became an unexpected adventure of its own.

That may be part of why I have gone to nearly two dozen baseball games this year instead of simply watching them on television. Television gives you a better view of almost every pitch, along with replays, statistics and commentators explaining what you missed. What television cannot give you is everything around the game: the train ride, the walk, the people you meet, the retired cops you talk to on the hill, the woman beside you who paid almost twice as much for her ticket, the kid hoping a foul ball comes his way, or the chance to notice Mookie Betts quietly taking practice swings while nearly 50,000 other people are singing. It certainly cannot give you an unexpected hour on a Chinatown train platform followed by a midnight ride home with a car full of strangers who, because of what you have all just experienced together, aren’t quite strangers anymore.

None of that was part of the plan when I bought the ticket. I thought I was going to Dodger Stadium to see the Dodgers play the Nationals, and I did. But somewhere during this season of ballparks, trains, long walks and baseball games, I think I have begun to understand that the game is only part of why I keep going. There is something to be said for leaving the house, going somewhere, and allowing the evening to become whatever it is going to become. Sometimes you get a great seat, a cool night and a Dodger victory. Sometimes the train home gets stopped for an hour. Sometimes you spend the ride back talking with people you didn't know two hours earlier.

You buy the ticket for the baseball. The rest is the adventure.

Working With Time: The Tools of a Finite Life

The Level: The Finite Life

Freemasonry introduces the Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge early in the Entered Apprentice Degree, and because it explicitly deals with the division of time, it is easy to regard it as Masonry’s principal lesson in time management. We are given twenty-four hours. We are taught that those hours have different purposes. The obvious lesson seems to be that a well-ordered man should budget his time accordingly.

But perhaps Masonry’s more important lesson about time comes later. The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge tells us how time might be divided; the Level eventually forces us to confront the fact that the amount of time available to us is finite. The Level teaches equality, and we normally understand that equality socially and morally. Yet there is another equality that no wealth, office, reputation, education, or accomplishment can overcome. We are all upon the level of time.

That realization becomes increasingly difficult to avoid as we progress through the degrees. The lessons move us from the possibilities of a life before us toward an increasing awareness of mortality. By the Third Degree, mortality is no longer an abstraction. The master craftsman himself is cut down before the Temple is completed. Yet the Temple is completed after his death.

There is something profound in that distinction. The craftsman is finite, but the work need not be. We naturally become attached to the things we build and sometimes imagine ourselves indispensable to them. We speak of our lodge, our career, our business, our organization, our charitable work, our family, our project. Yet eventually someone else will pick up the tools. The work may continue without the workman.

That is what gives the Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge its urgency. The Gauge will measure twenty-four inches today and twenty-four again tomorrow. What it cannot tell me is how many more times I will be handed the Gauge. The Level tells me the number is finite. The Gauge asks what I intend to do about it.

The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge: Categories, Not a Time Card

Once the Gauge is placed beside the Level, its lesson changes. It becomes less useful to think of its divisions as a Masonic time card. The three divisions do not require three mathematically equal portions of eight hours each, nor does life permit such an allocation every day. They are better understood as broad categories into which a finite life must somehow be ordered.

There are seasons for different allocations. During harvest, the farmer may rise before daylight and continue working until dark because there is a harvest to bring in. At another time, illness or exhaustion may require far more refreshment and repose than usual. There are moments when the need of a family member, a Brother, or another human being properly displaces almost everything else. Life cannot be lived successfully by insisting that every day must look exactly like the day before it.

The question presented by the Gauge, then, is not whether I divided today's twenty-four hours equally. It is whether, given the season of life in which I presently stand, I have measured my finite time wisely.

This is also where Masonic symbols can begin to interact with one another. I am not suggesting that the ritual formally assigns the meanings or relationships developed here. The ritual does not tell us that a particular pillar corresponds to a particular division of the Gauge or that one working tool must always be interpreted through another. Rather, this is one of the possibilities that emerges after learning Masonry across its degrees. We learn the symbols separately, but eventually we can place them beside one another and ask whether one illuminates another. We learn Masonry by degrees, but eventually we must begin to understand it as a whole.

Service: Making the Interior Life Visible

The first broad category is service: service to God, assistance to a distressed worthy Brother, and service to our fellow creatures. These need not always be understood as unrelated obligations competing for separate blocks of time. The Entered Apprentice is taught to look beyond distinctions between the high and low, rich and poor, and recognize a common relationship under one Almighty Parent. That common origin carries with it obligations toward one another—to aid, support, and protect.

Service to God, therefore, need not end when prayer ends. There is a sense in which service to God's creation becomes an expression of service to the Creator. Caring for a family member, helping a Brother, feeding someone who is hungry, teaching someone who needs knowledge, serving a community, or simply giving another human being the time he needs can all make an interior moral commitment outwardly visible.

This is where the pillar of Beauty becomes interesting. Again, the ritual does not specifically assign Beauty to this portion of the Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge. I am putting two Masonic teachings beside one another and asking what happens when they are allowed to speak to each other.

The Greek concept of kalon gives us a useful way to think about Beauty. Beauty need not be confined to physical attractiveness or ornamentation. It can reach toward what is fine, noble, admirable, and worthy. That suggests a formulation useful to our Masonic purposes: Beauty is goodness made visible.

Brotherly Love can remain an interior conviction. Relief can remain an abstract principle. Truth can remain something we profess. But service gives those principles form in the world. It allows another person to experience what otherwise exists only within us. If the principles of Masonry have actually shaped the man, then somewhere beyond the lodge room there ought to be visible evidence of that transformation.

Perhaps, then, one test of the service portion of the Gauge is a simple question: What beauty does my use of time make visible?

Refreshment and Repose: Maintaining Strength

Refreshment and repose are often reduced to sleep, but that seems unnecessarily narrow. Human beings require restoration in many forms. Sleep certainly matters, but so do food, exercise, recreation, companionship, contemplation, recovery, and occasionally simply doing nothing productive for a while. These activities are not necessarily interruptions of useful life. They maintain the instrument through which useful life is accomplished.

This allows another conversation between Masonic symbols. Strength can illuminate refreshment and repose. Again, this is an interpretive connection rather than a ritual assignment. Strength cannot simply be expended indefinitely. It must be restored. A man who continually consumes his physical, emotional, and intellectual resources without replenishing them eventually discovers that determination alone cannot overcome exhaustion.

Refreshment and repose therefore need not represent weakness or withdrawal from our obligations. Properly measured, they make the fulfillment of those obligations possible. Strength is not merely demonstrated by how long we can continue working. Wisdom may sometimes require us to recognize when continuing the work will diminish the quality of the workman.

Vocation: When Knowledge Becomes Wisdom

Vocation is similarly broader than employment. A job may provide income, but vocation can become the place where knowledge is repeatedly tested against reality. The inexperienced craftsman learns rules. The experienced craftsman learns why the rules exist. He begins recognizing problems before they fully develop. He learns which apparent shortcuts create greater problems later and which efficiencies are the legitimate products of experience. He acquires judgment.

Knowledge is essential, but knowledge alone is not wisdom. Experience places knowledge under pressure. Mistakes reveal deficiencies. Correction produces understanding. Repetition develops judgment. Over enough time, knowledge tested by experience may begin becoming wisdom.

That gives us another possible relationship between the Gauge and the pillars. Wisdom can illuminate vocation because vocation is one of the great laboratories of practical wisdom. The question is no longer merely what I know, but what experience has taught me to do with what I know.

A job begins becoming a vocation when knowledge, tested by experience, becomes wisdom.

This also reminds us why time cannot be removed from the process of becoming. There are things that can be explained in an hour but understood only through years. Information can be transmitted quickly. Judgment usually cannot.

Opportunity Cost: Every Yes Contains a No

Once we accept that time is finite, an unavoidable consequence follows: every choice has a cost. An hour given to one purpose cannot simultaneously be given to another. Every yes therefore contains a no.

Economics gives us a useful term for this: opportunity cost. The true cost of a choice includes what must be surrendered in order to make it. Applied to time, this becomes a remarkably powerful question. What does this hour cost me?

That question is more demanding than asking whether an activity is worthwhile. Many things are worthwhile. Work is worthwhile. Masonry is worthwhile. Family is worthwhile. Service is worthwhile. Exercise is worthwhile. Recreation is worthwhile. Study is worthwhile. The difficulty of a finite life is that worthwhile things compete with other worthwhile things.

The question therefore becomes not simply, “Is this good?” but, “Is this sufficiently good to justify what I cannot do because I have chosen to do this?”

That is where the remaining working tools become useful. The Gauge has established that the resource is limited. We now need instruments for deciding what deserves that resource.

The Square: Test the Decision by Virtue

The Square provides an intellectual test. Masonry teaches us to square our actions by the Square of Virtue, and the four cardinal virtues give us a useful framework through which to examine the choices competing for our time: Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude.

An action rarely exists in only one moral dimension. Something may appear courageous while being profoundly imprudent. Something may seem prudent while requiring injustice. Something may be pleasurable but lack temperance. Something may appear temperate only because we lack the fortitude to do what circumstances actually require.

The Square therefore invites us to test our proposed use of time from more than one direction. Does this action demonstrate prudence? Is it just? Is it temperate? Does it require or display appropriate fortitude? We need not claim that satisfying two virtues mathematically guarantees the other two. Rather, the more completely an action stands square against the virtues, the greater confidence we may have in the judgment that produced it.

The Square asks: Does this use of my time square with the kind of man I am attempting to become?

This is primarily an intellectual exercise. We examine the action, consider consequences, compare it with virtues, and determine whether the angles are true. But intellectual justification is not sufficient. A man can become remarkably skilled at constructing arguments for what he already wants to do. We therefore need another instrument.

The Plumb: Searching for a Standard Beyond Ourselves

The Plumb introduces something exterior to us. A builder does not determine vertical by preference. Gravity establishes the line. The craftsman brings his work to that standard and discovers whether it conforms.

Moral life is more complicated because the correct line is not always as immediately visible as a suspended weight. Nevertheless, the Plumb gives us a powerful way to think about alignment. It asks whether my life is aligned with something beyond my own desires, convenience, or rationalizations.

There are at least two ways we can fail the Plumb. The first is obvious: we recognize the proper line but deviate from it. We know what should be done and fail to do it. Correction means bringing ourselves back toward an established standard.

The second failure is more difficult. Sometimes experience, reflection, faith, or greater understanding reveals that what we thought was the proper plumb line was itself mistaken. Growth then requires more than correcting our conduct. We must correct our understanding of the standard against which the conduct is being measured.

That possibility requires humility. We are not only imperfect builders; we are imperfect interpreters of the plans. The search for the correct Plumb may itself be part of the work.

The Plumb therefore asks a different question from the Square. The Square asks whether I can intellectually justify my action according to virtue. The Plumb asks: Am I actually aligned with a standard greater than my own preference?

The Compasses: Boundaries That Concentrate Passion

The Compasses introduce another dimension. If the Square is largely intellectual and the Plumb concerns alignment, the Compasses deal with boundaries. They remind us to circumscribe our desires and keep our passions within due bounds.

It is easy to understand boundaries merely as restrictions. But boundaries can do something more interesting: they can concentrate energy. Water spread indiscriminately across the ground may become a swamp. Confined within banks, it becomes a river. A lens concentrates scattered light. Discipline can do something similar with human passion.

A man interested in everything may accomplish very little. Vocation often develops through progressive narrowing. We discover what deserves our attention, eliminate distractions, deepen our knowledge, accumulate experience, and focus our passions within increasingly meaningful boundaries. Proper circumscription does not necessarily weaken passion. It can intensify it.

The same principle applies to good things. Work requires boundaries. Recreation requires boundaries. Service requires boundaries. Masonry itself requires boundaries. Something can be intrinsically worthwhile and still occupy more of the Gauge than it properly deserves. A noble activity allowed to expand without limit can crowd out other legitimate obligations.

The Compasses therefore ask: Where does this good thing properly end?

That may be one of the hardest questions in a finite life. Our greatest problems do not always arise from choosing between good and evil. Sometimes they arise from choosing among several goods when there is not enough time to pursue all of them.

The Common Gavel: The Act of Deciding

Eventually contemplation must end.

The Gauge has measured. The Square has tested. The Plumb has sought alignment. The Compasses have established boundaries. At some point the craftsman must act.

Here the Common Gavel becomes particularly meaningful. The Gavel removes what is unnecessary from the stone, but the larger family of Masonic imagery surrounding the gavel also carries the unmistakable quality of decision. The Master's gavel calls attention, marks transitions, directs the lodge, and brings deliberation to an end. Its sound means something has happened. Thought has become action.

The Common Gavel can therefore be contemplated as the act of deciding what remains and what must be removed from a finite life.

This returns us directly to opportunity cost. Some things must be knocked away—not necessarily because they are evil, but because they are not sufficiently important. A finite life cannot contain every possible pursuit. Every additional commitment occupies part of the Gauge. At some point we must decide what belongs in the work and what does not.

There is also a less obvious danger. Indecision itself consumes time. We sometimes imagine that refusing to choose preserves our options. It does not. While we deliberate indefinitely, the Gauge continues measuring. Time spent avoiding a decision is itself an allocation of time.

The process can therefore be reduced to five movements: Gauge it. Square it. Plumb it. Circumscribe it. Gavel it.

Measure the demand upon the finite resource. Test the choice against virtue. Seek alignment with a standard beyond yourself. Establish proper boundaries. Then decide.

The Gauge establishes the limit. The Gavel enforces the choice.

Masonry Is Filled With Time

Once we begin looking for time within Masonry, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere. The three steps can be contemplated as youth, manhood, and age—not three separate men, but one man progressing through time. The progression itself matters. The man standing upon the final step carries within him the man who once stood upon the first.

Masonry also teaches by degrees. That structure acknowledges something important about understanding: some knowledge requires progression. A man can hear ritual for the first time and understand its words, yet hear the same words decades later and discover something entirely different. The ritual may not have changed. The man has.

That is also why placing symbols in conversation with one another becomes increasingly fruitful. The Entered Apprentice initially encounters one collection of lessons. The Fellow Craft adds another. The Master Mason adds still more. Experience then begins building bridges between them. The Level starts speaking to the Gauge. Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty begin illuminating its divisions. The Square, Plumb, Compasses, and Gavel become ways of interrogating the choices made within the time the Gauge measures.

Even the intellectual journey of the Fellow Craft points repeatedly toward measurement, relationship, motion, proportion, space, and time. Arithmetic considers number. Geometry gives number spatial relationship. Music requires proportion unfolding through time. Astronomy brings measurement, motion, space, and time together on the grandest observable scale. The Mason is continually being asked to understand himself within larger orders and relationships.

We learn Masonry by degrees because we live life by degrees.

The Ashlars: Construction Requires Time

The Rough Ashlar provides another reminder that transformation requires time. No stone becomes finished because the craftsman intends to perfect it. Intention begins the work; repeated labor accomplishes it.

Character develops similarly. One decision rarely transforms a man. Habits emerge through repetition. Judgment develops through consequences. Virtue becomes reliable through practice. Mistakes must be recognized and corrected. Edges are removed gradually. Surfaces are tested repeatedly.

We sometimes become impatient with this process because we can imagine the finished product long before we can create it. We know the person we would like to become. We may even know what must change. Yet knowing the shape of the Perfect Ashlar does not eliminate the labor required to move the Rough Ashlar toward it.

That labor consumes the Gauge.

Character is constructed decision by decision, habit by habit, hour by hour. The uncomfortable reality is that the supply of hours is limited. We therefore cannot postpone the work indefinitely while assuming there will always be another day upon which to begin.

Someone Else Picks Up the Tools

That brings us back to where we began: the Level and the finite life.

The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge measures the hours available today. The Level reminds us that the number of days upon which we will receive those hours is limited. Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty help us contemplate what our vocation, restoration, and service might produce. The Square tests our choices against virtue. The Plumb searches for alignment with a standard beyond ourselves. The Compasses establish boundaries around our passions. The Gavel requires us eventually to decide.

And then the Third Degree reminds us that even the master craftsman eventually puts down his tools.

Yet the Temple is completed.

Perhaps that is not merely a reminder of mortality but a lesson about the proper relationship between mortality and meaningful work. The fact that I cannot finish everything does not mean there is no reason to begin something. The fact that I will not see every consequence of my service does not make the service meaningless. The fact that another man will eventually occupy my chair does not diminish the importance of how I occupy it today.

Indeed, good craftsmanship may partly consist of leaving work that another craftsman can continue.

A lodge survives its Master. A family survives its father. Students continue after the teacher is gone. Institutions outlive their founders. Acts of kindness produce consequences their authors never witness. Ideas pass from one generation to another. Someone else picks up the tools.

The great Masonic lesson of time, then, may not be time management at all. It may be the disciplined allocation of a finite life.

The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge measures twenty-four inches every day. What it cannot tell me is how many more times I will be handed the Gauge. The Level tells me that number is finite.

That leaves a more difficult question than how efficiently I manage my schedule.

Knowing that someday I must put down my tools, what deserves the time that remains?

Height Magnifies Deviation: Responsibility Reveals What Already Exists

I was recently working on a Masonic meme built around the Plumb. The words were simple: “Outcome, Not Intention.” The image was equally simple—a plumb suspended beside a stone wall. Yet deciding exactly how that wall should appear raised a more interesting question than the one I had started with. Should the wall be obviously straight? Should it be visibly crooked? Or should it remain ambiguous enough that the viewer had to bring his own experience to the image and decide what the Plumb revealed?

That question stayed with me because of what happens when a wall is only slightly out of plumb. Near its foundation, the deviation may be almost impossible to see. Continue building upward along that same line, however, and the consequences of the original error become increasingly apparent. The deviation itself has not changed. If a wall rises at one degree from vertical, one degree remains one degree. At one foot of height, that error produces a horizontal displacement of only about one-fifth of an inch. At ten feet, it is a little more than two inches. At thirty feet, it exceeds six inches. Nothing happened to the original angle; the wall simply grew taller. Height magnifies deviation.

That is an operative lesson easily understood by a craftsman, but the speculative lesson interests me more. I began thinking about the progression of a Mason through the chairs of his Lodge and eventually toward the East. Each step brings additional responsibility, greater expectations, more complicated problems, and usually more people affected by his decisions. What if the increasing height of a wall provides a useful metaphor for that progression?

What if responsibility works upon character as height works upon a wall?

Greater responsibility does not necessarily create defects in character. It can reveal what was already there. A Mason may possess a measure of impatience when he begins his journey. He may be somewhat disorganized, dislike criticism, have difficulty delegating, desire recognition more than he realizes, or become stubborn when challenged. He may even have a tendency to confuse disagreement with disrespect. With little responsibility, those characteristics may have relatively little effect upon anyone beyond himself. They are small deviations close to the foundation, difficult to see and perhaps easily dismissed.

Then the wall begins to rise. A Mason accepts an assignment. Later he becomes responsible for a degree or committee. He occupies a chair. Other men begin depending upon him. Eventually he may become a Deacon, then a Warden, and perhaps one day Master of his Lodge. With each step, the work becomes more complicated. Decisions affect more people, communication becomes more important, and mistakes carry greater consequences. The character deviation did not necessarily become greater; the structure surrounding it did.

A man who is mildly disorganized may successfully manage a simple task involving two or three people. Give him responsibility for a complicated event involving twenty people, multiple deadlines, money, facilities, and outside organizations, and that same disorganization becomes far more visible. Impatience that once produced an unpleasant conversation may eventually affect an entire Lodge. An excessive need for control may remain largely invisible until a man finally possesses enough authority to exercise it. A sensitivity to criticism may seem inconsequential until leadership requires him to hear criticism regularly and respond to it constructively.

The same principle should also work in the other direction. Increasing responsibility can reveal patience, courage, humility, restraint, generosity, sound judgment, and an ability to bring men together that smaller tasks never demanded. Height magnifies alignment as surely as it magnifies deviation. The point is not that advancement makes men worse. The point is that increasing responsibility places more of the man where it can be seen.

This gives the progressive chairs of a Lodge a meaning beyond advancement toward the East. Each chair can be understood as another course of stone added to the wall and another opportunity for a Mason to discover whether his work remains upright. The Junior Deacon encounters responsibilities he did not have while sitting among the Brethren. The Senior Deacon encounters others. The Wardens confront questions of leadership, judgment, preparation, personalities, and responsibility that were not present earlier. Ideally, each position should reveal something about the man occupying it.

Advancement, then, should not merely prompt the question, “Am I ready for the next chair?” There is another question that may be more important: What has this chair revealed about me that I should correct before I build any higher? If the purpose of progression is partly personal development, advancement without reflection can become a missed opportunity. We can become very good at performing the duties of increasingly important positions without becoming equally skilled at examining what those positions are revealing about us.

This is where the Plumb becomes particularly important. The Plumb does not condemn the wall, nor does it know anything about the intentions of the craftsman who built it. It does not praise him when the work is upright or ridicule him when it is not. It simply establishes a reference independent of the craftsman’s opinion of his own work. He may sincerely believe the wall is straight. He may have worked extraordinarily hard upon it. He may have encountered difficult circumstances while building it. None of those things move the plumb line.

That may be one of the more difficult lessons contained within the symbol because we are remarkably capable of judging ourselves by our intentions. We know what we meant to accomplish. We know the pressures surrounding our decisions, the information available to us at the time, and the reasons we chose one course rather than another. Because we possess all that internal information, we can usually construct a convincing explanation for ourselves. The Plumb possesses none of it. It simply checks the work.

Yet speculative Masonry presents a difficulty that the operative craftsman does not face. We are simultaneously the craftsman and the material upon which we labor. We are attempting to examine character through the very character being examined. If my judgment is part of the problem, relying exclusively upon my judgment to identify the problem presents an obvious difficulty. An external reference therefore becomes essential.

Where do we find that Plumb? Certainly, Masonic teachings provide standards against which conduct can be considered. Experience provides another. Sometimes failure becomes the Plumb because the consequences of our conduct become impossible to ignore. Sometimes the reactions of those around us tell us that something is no longer aligned. Sometimes another Brother becomes the Plumb by telling us something we would rather not hear. The difficulty is not merely finding the instrument. It is developing the willingness to use it when the deviation is still small enough to correct easily.

There is another problem as a Mason progresses toward the East. Advancement itself can begin to look like evidence of alignment. A man is appointed to a chair. He performs adequately and advances. He becomes a Warden. Eventually his Brethren elect him Master. Each successive step can understandably feel like confirmation that the wall must be straight. After all, if something were seriously wrong, why would he continue to advance?

But advancement measures advancement. It does not necessarily measure character.

In fact, increasing authority may make honest measurement more difficult. People often become increasingly reluctant to criticize those who occupy positions of authority. A Brother may recognize a developing problem but decide that confronting it is not worth the resulting conflict. Another may worry that criticism will be interpreted as personal hostility or disloyalty. Others may simply decide to wait because a Master’s year eventually ends. The irony is difficult to miss: at precisely the point where a man’s deviations can have their greatest consequences, the people around him may become least willing to point them out.

Then comes the East. The Master’s chair represents the greatest formal height a Mason reaches within his Lodge, but it also places his character under extraordinary strain. Authority, tradition, personalities, expectations, finances, ritual, disagreements, schedules, candidates, officers, and the ordinary unpredictability of human beings converge upon one position. Decisions that were once theoretical become immediate. Leadership qualities that could once be discussed abstractly must now be practiced in front of everyone.

The chair does not necessarily create arrogance, insecurity, impatience, stubbornness, resentment, or an excessive need for control. It gives those characteristics room to become visible. At the same time, it can reveal strengths that were equally difficult to see before. Patience becomes meaningful when patience is difficult. Humility matters differently when a man possesses authority. Restraint means more when he has the power to impose his preference. Leadership becomes something other than an idea when other men actually depend upon his judgment.

That may be one of the greatest opportunities presented by the East. A year as Master can teach a Mason things about himself that he could have learned nowhere else. If he takes those lessons seriously, the experience becomes much more than successful administration of a Lodge. The East becomes another working place upon the unfinished stone. The danger comes when the authority of the chair is interpreted as proof that the work upon the man occupying it has somehow been completed.

I have come to wonder, however, whether the greater test may come after the East. Becoming a Past Master presents a peculiar challenge. For a year, a man has occupied the highest chair in his Lodge. Men have risen when he entered. He has presided over meetings, made appointments, controlled agendas, rendered decisions, and carried both the authority and responsibility of the office. Custom and protocol have reinforced his position throughout that year.

Then his year ends, and another man sits in the East. The former Master must now learn a different kind of discipline. He must advise without governing. He must disagree without undermining. He must watch another Mason make decisions differently than he would have made them. He may even have to watch a new Master make mistakes he believes he could prevent. Most importantly, he must surrender authority he has become accustomed to exercising and accept the same customs and protocols that now restrain him from continuing to govern.

Perhaps that is where some of the smallest deviations become most visible. The impatient man may discover that he cannot wait for the new Master to learn. The controlling man may struggle to relinquish control. The man who became accustomed to recognition may discover that he misses it. The man who interpreted his year in the East as confirmation of superior judgment may find it difficult to accept that another Brother now possesses the same authority he once held. A characteristic that was barely visible near the foundation may now stand several inches away from the line.

This may also be where a failure to apply the Plumb earlier becomes particularly costly. If nobody ever challenged the deviation—or if the craftsman refused to look when they did—the journey through the chairs may actually reinforce it. Every advancement can be interpreted as validation. Every conflict can be remembered as evidence that someone else was unreasonable. Every criticism can be dismissed as disloyalty. Instead of using increasing responsibility to discover where correction was necessary, the Mason can use his advancement as evidence that no correction was ever needed.

He reached the top of the wall without discovering that it was out of plumb.

There is something particularly unfortunate about that outcome because the journey through the chairs offers so many opportunities for exactly the opposite result. Every new responsibility can reveal something that simpler work could not. Every difficult personality can test patience. Every disagreement can test restraint. Every mistake can test humility. Every success can test ego. Every increase in authority can test whether a man understands the difference between leadership and control. Properly approached, the progression toward the East is not evidence that the work upon ourselves is finished. It provides progressively more demanding work through which we can discover where that work remains.

The Past Master may therefore face one of the most revealing stages of all. He has reached the height, exercised the authority, and completed the formal progression. Now much of the external structure that guided and restrained him has changed. What remains is the man and whatever lessons he chose to take from the journey. If he learned to keep the Plumb beside his work, his experience can become a tremendous resource to those who follow him. If he did not, the very experience intended to develop him may instead have strengthened his certainty that everyone else should continue building according to his line.

The lesson is not that men should fear advancement or that responsibility inevitably exposes some hidden moral failure. Quite the opposite. Greater responsibility offers a remarkable opportunity for self-knowledge. It places our judgment, temperament, discipline, humility, and relationships under conditions that smaller responsibilities simply cannot reproduce. It allows us to see ourselves at greater scale.

The operative craftsman does not wait until the wall is complete before applying the Plumb. He checks as he builds because correction becomes increasingly difficult as additional courses are laid upon an existing deviation. Perhaps the speculative craftsman should approach his own development in much the same way. We should not wait until the consequences of a defect become so large that everyone can see them. We should continually compare our conduct against something more reliable than our own intentions and remain willing to hear when another person sees a deviation that we do not.

There is no shame in discovering that the work requires correction. That is why the working tools remain beside us. The greater danger is continuing to build because the first few courses looked close enough.

We should not fear building higher.

We should fear building higher without keeping the Plumb beside the work.

Heckling the Boys of Summer

It should have been just about a perfect night for baseball.

After weeks of Southern California heat, the temperature had dropped perhaps twelve or fourteen degrees. By the time the game settled in, it was somewhere in the high 70s, with just enough of a cooling breeze to remind you why summer evenings and baseball have always belonged together.

I was at a Single-A game between the Buzzards and the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, the Dodgers and Angels farm teams respectively. Calling it a rivalry might be overstating things. The Dodgers and Angels have the Freeway Series at the major-league level, but that's more geography and marketing than Giants-Dodgers blood feud. Still, these were two local organizations, there was a decent crowd—maybe 30 or 40 percent of the stadium—and the game itself turned out to be a good one.

My seat was four rows behind the visiting dugout.

Unfortunately, somebody else was sitting in it.

A woman was in my seat, with her husband and child beside her. I looked at my ticket. Then I looked at the section and row. Then I checked the ticket again, because my first assumption was that I had made the mistake.

I hadn't.

“I think you're in my seat,” I finally said.

Her husband explained that they had moved because there were plenty of empty seats. The game had already started, so I wasn't particularly interested in making an issue of it. I said I was going to get a hot dog anyway and would be back.

“Well, we'll move if you come back,” the woman said, rather indignantly.

If I come back?

I had apparently interrupted their enjoyment of my seat.

I went for my hot dog. When I returned, they moved. A little later they moved again because, unsurprisingly, the seats they moved into belonged to somebody else.

It wasn't a major incident. Nobody got into an argument. Nobody called security. It was simply weird, and it started an evening during which I increasingly found myself wondering what had happened to some of the little courtesies that once seemed to be understood at a baseball game.

People came and went throughout the game, which is normal. What wasn't normal—or at least shouldn't be—was stopping in the aisle and standing there having conversations while blocking the view of everyone behind them.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned about this. At the theater, you don't wander down the aisle in the middle of a musical number and then stand in front of the audience while deciding where you're going to sit. Baseball makes it even easier. Every half inning provides a natural break. That's when you get up. That's when you come back. Of course, sometimes an inning goes on forever, a kid has to use the restroom, or somebody needs another beer. Life happens.

Just don't stand in the aisle having a conversation while everyone behind you is trying to watch the game.

Speaking of beer, there was another offense against civilization.

No draft beer.

None.

Cans.

A baseball stadium without draft beer strikes me as fundamentally wrong. There are some traditions that do not require extensive analysis or historical research. Baseball stadiums ought to have draft beer. Period.

Still, the game was good.

It went back and forth and remained tied through much of the evening. There were home runs. There were good defensive plays. There were errors and missed opportunities. There were the little unexpected moments that make minor-league baseball particularly enjoyable. You are watching professionals, but you're also watching young players learning how to become better professionals. Sometimes they make a spectacular play. Sometimes they don't.

As the game went on and the crowd began thinning, however, individual voices became easier to hear.

That's when the heckling really started.

I understand heckling. It's baseball. I understand booing an umpire after a questionable call. I understand riding an opposing player a little. I understand cheering wildly when your team turns a double play and sitting quietly when the other team does it.

What I don't understand is booing good baseball simply because the other team played it.

The Quakes would make a genuinely good play—a crisp double play, for instance—and some fans would boo. Why? You don't have to applaud the opposing team, but a great play is a great play. A great catch is a great catch. If a pitcher is mowing everybody down, you may desperately want somebody to hit him, but you can still recognize that you're watching somebody pitch a hell of a game.

At some point I think being a baseball fan ought to include actually liking baseball.

Then an outfielder dropped a fly ball.

He probably should have caught it. He knew he should have caught it. Everybody in the stadium knew he should have caught it.

That's baseball.

But a couple of spectators decided that wasn't enough.

“My grandmother could have caught that!”

Then came variations on the same theme. Somebody could have caught it with his eyes closed. Somebody else could have made the play. None of it was particularly original or funny. It just kept coming.

And from four rows behind the dugout, I was close enough to see something you might not notice from farther away.

The players could hear them.

Several turned around and looked toward the stands. At one point one of the players near the railing appeared ready to pay a little more attention to the people yelling at them. Then a teammate's hand came into view and touched him on the back, redirecting him toward the field.

Don't.

Turn around.

Get back to baseball.

That moment stayed with me.

Afterward, I started looking into heckling because I wondered whether maybe I was the one who had it wrong. Maybe I had become too sensitive to something that has always been part of the game.

And, as it turns out, heckling has a long history in baseball. Minor-league baseball may actually be one of its natural habitats. Smaller crowds and intimate stadiums put spectators close enough for players to hear them. Fans talk to players. Players occasionally answer back. There have even been minor-league hecklers who became recognized characters at their home ballparks.

So the problem wasn't heckling.

It was the kind of heckling.

Good heckling requires some wit. Give the opposing left fielder a ridiculous nickname. Remind him about something funny that happened three innings earlier. Get under his skin without becoming vicious about it. Better yet, get him to turn around despite himself and smile. That's interaction. That's entertainment. That's part of the peculiar intimacy that makes minor-league baseball different from sitting among 50,000 people in a major-league stadium.

“My grandmother could have caught that” isn't exactly Oscar Wilde.

More importantly, there is a difference between bringing yourself into the game and trying to diminish somebody who is playing it.

These are Single-A players. They're professional baseball players, certainly, and professional athletes don't require protection from criticism. But Single-A is developmental baseball. These are young men trying to get better at something extraordinarily difficult. Some will eventually walk onto the field at Dodger Stadium or Angel Stadium. Many won't. The error isn't an aberration from what we've paid to see. In some respects, development is what we've paid to see.

The dropped fly ball is part of why that player is there.

He doesn't need somebody four rows behind the dugout to tell him he missed it. He knows.

And perhaps that was why the heckling bothered me more than I expected.

The woman sitting in my seat. The people standing in the aisle blocking everyone's view. The fans booing a genuinely good play because the wrong uniform made it. The people screaming at a young outfielder because he dropped a baseball.

They're different things, certainly. None is particularly serious. But by the end of the evening they seemed connected by the same small assumption: that my enjoyment of the ballpark matters more than everybody else's.

A ticket gives you quite a bit.

It gives you a seat—assuming somebody else hasn't decided it's theirs.

It gives you the right to cheer. It gives you the right to boo. It probably even gives you the right to heckle.

It doesn't give you the ballpark.

Through all of this, there was still a baseball game going on, and it was a pretty good one. It went back and forth. For much of the evening, neither team could put the other away.

In a way, my evening went back and forth with it.

Good game. Bad experience.

Home run. Somebody blocking the aisle.

Good defensive play. Booing.

Warm summer evening turning pleasantly cool. No draft beer.

Good baseball. Mean-spirited heckling.

Back and forth.

Eventually the Quakes beat the Buzzards, 8–6.

I suppose my experience followed the same trajectory. There were enough good moments to keep it close. The baseball itself certainly did its part. The weather was terrific. There were home runs, double plays, errors, kids in the stands, hot dogs and all the familiar ingredients of a summer evening at the ballpark.

But in the end, the experience went into the loss column.

Maybe there's no great lesson in that. Maybe I'm simply getting older and less tolerant of people who don't understand that they're sharing a public space with everyone around them. But I don't think the answer is to turn baseball into church. Cheer loudly. Boo the umpire. Give the opposing left fielder a hard time if you've actually got something clever to say.

And when somebody makes a great play, even wearing the wrong uniform, recognize good baseball when you see it.

Most of all, if a twenty-something kid in Single-A drops a fly ball, remember one thing before you tell him your grandmother could have caught it.

He already knows he dropped it.

And for God's sake, somebody put draft beer back in the ballpark.

That last line works for me because it prevents the essay from ending self-righteously. It returns to the humor and gives the reader a little wink after what became a fairly serious observation about courtesy.

When Memories Become Museum Pieces

There is something strange about walking through a museum and suddenly realizing that one of the artifacts isn't really history to you. You remember when it was new.

Today I took my youngest grandson to the American Military Museum in South El Monte, California, better known as Tankland. The nickname is appropriate—there are certainly plenty of tanks—but it doesn't begin to describe the place. Spread across roughly seven acres are about 100 pieces of military equipment spanning more than 80 years. There are World War II Sherman tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, trucks, ambulances and equipment extending into the early part of the 21st century. There are aircraft as well, including a Huey helicopter gunship from the Vietnam era.

It was already hot when we arrived around 10 in the morning, and there wasn't much of a breeze. Most of the collection is outdoors, so this probably wasn't the ideal August morning for wandering around seven acres of old military equipment with a three-year-old. Still, we made our way through it, stopping whenever something caught our attention, and with that much machinery around you, something always does.

Oddly enough, one of the things that stayed with me most wasn't a tank at all. It was a Higgins boat. We've all seen them in the old films, landing craft racing toward a beach, the front ramp eventually dropping and the men pouring out. Standing beside one is different because what strikes you is just how insubstantial it seems. It was, after all, largely a plywood boat.

Then you try to imagine being one of the Marines or soldiers hunkered down inside it as that little boat bobbed and pitched in the open water, racing toward an enemy-held shore. Machine-gun fire was coming from ahead, artillery shells were exploding around them, other landing craft were moving alongside them, and men were being wounded and killed. Everyone inside knew that eventually the ramp in front of them was going to fall and they would have to go forward. Between them and everything happening outside was a relatively thin piece of plywood.

We tend to make the machinery of war enormous in our memories—battleships, bombers, tanks and artillery. Yet thousands of men went toward some of the most heavily defended beaches of World War II inside something that, standing beside it today, looks remarkably small and vulnerable. It was one of those moments when an old machine stops being an exhibit and you begin thinking about the people who were once inside it.

A little farther along, I found something else. Sitting among the tanks, artillery and military vehicles was an old LAPD truck: Rescue Vehicle No. 2. That one I didn't have to imagine. I remembered it.

The rather harmless words Rescue Vehicle painted on its side disguised what most people associated these vehicles with—the battering ram. I remember when they were introduced, and I even remember the newspaper coverage about them. More importantly, I remember seeing one work.

I remember watching that massive vehicle move up on a residential house with the long metal ram extended in front of it. I watched that ram drive through a door and rip the door away. There was nothing subtle about it. There was the tremendous crash of metal and wood giving way, the noise of the vehicle and officers moving in, shouting, "Police! Police!" It was noise, movement and adrenaline, and that is how the machine remains in my memory.

Rescue Vehicle No. 1 had the ram mounted on it the last time I saw it at the Los Angeles Police Museum, operated by the Los Angeles Police Historical Society in the old Northeast Station in Highland Park. I don't know whether it is still displayed there today. But here was Rescue Vehicle No. 2, parked among the tanks, quietly deteriorating in the hot Southern California sun.

That was the part that struck me. In my memory, the machine is moving toward a house. I can hear the crash when the ram hits. I can hear the officers shouting as they move inside. At Tankland, there are no officers, no doors being ripped from their frames, no urgency and no noise. There is just an old vehicle, its paint aging under the sun, parked among a collection of other machines whose working lives ended long ago.

A few minutes earlier, I had stood beside a Higgins boat and tried to imagine the Marines and soldiers hunkered down inside as that little plywood craft carried them toward an enemy shore. Now I was standing beside another silent machine, except this time I didn't have to imagine what it sounded like. The Higgins boat represented a history I could only try to understand. The rescue vehicle carried a memory I could still hear.

My three-year-old grandson, of course, understood none of that. To him, we were spending a hot morning with Grandpa looking at tanks, helicopters, trucks and other very large machines. Perhaps his presence made the experience a little more meaningful to me, though, because he was looking at old machines while I was beginning to think about the memories attached to them.

Somebody once rode in that Huey. Somebody once worked inside one of those tanks or drove one of those military ambulances. Frightened young men once hunkered down inside that plywood landing craft as it carried them toward a beach where other men were trying to kill them. Every one of those machines was once new, every one of them once made noise, and every one of them once had people around it who understood exactly what it was, what it did and why it mattered. Now they sit quietly in rows.

Maybe that's what eventually happens to all of our memories. The noise fades, the people disappear and the urgency is forgotten. What was once frightening, exciting, important—or simply part of an ordinary working day—eventually becomes a story, a photograph or an old machine slowly deteriorating in the sun. Another generation walks past it and wonders what it was used for, while someone from an earlier generation can still remember how it sounded.

Tankland is worth visiting simply for the collection. Admission is inexpensive—only a few dollars—and you can easily spend an hour or more wandering through it. You can't climb on the vehicles, for obvious reasons, but you can get close enough to appreciate their size, their construction and, in the case of that Higgins boat, their surprising vulnerability.

For me, though, the most interesting things weren't necessarily the biggest. One was a plywood boat that made me think about the extraordinary courage required to ride toward an enemy shore with almost nothing between you and the gunfire. The other was an old police vehicle that required no imagination at all. I remembered its noise and movement. I remembered when it was something new.

I went to Tankland to look at history. I hadn't expected to find one of my own memories slowly becoming part of it.

Baseball at the Big A

There are two very different ways to watch Major League Baseball in Southern California. One involves traffic, expensive parking, expensive tickets, 50,000 people, and enough noise to make every pitch feel important. The other involves thirty bucks for a club-level seat next to the broadcast booths, easy parking, a hot dog, a beer, an entire row mostly to yourself, and hecklers who know the players can actually hear them.

Welcome to Angel Stadium.

This was my second trip to the Big A this year, and once again I was reminded that if your primary objective is simply to watch a baseball game, Angel Stadium may be one of the great bargains in professional sports. My ticket was about $30. Club level, excellent view of the field, close to the broadcast booths, good sight lines, and just enough proximity to foul-ball territory to remind you to pay attention.

And the cheap seats can be had for around ten or twelve dollars. Think about that for a moment. For roughly the price of lunch, you can walk into a Major League Baseball stadium and spend an afternoon or evening watching big-league baseball. If you like baseball and don't need luxury, Angel Stadium is simply a good trip.

Of course, there is a reason the tickets are inexpensive. Angel Stadium wasn't exactly packed. I'd guess considerably less than 20 percent of the seats were occupied. That makes getting in and out remarkably easy, although Anaheim deserves some credit. This is a city designed to move large numbers of people around Disneyland, the convention center, Angel Stadium, the Honda Center and everything else without turning every event into a transportation crisis.

Parking at Angel Stadium is also roughly half what I normally expect at Dodger Stadium, and the tickets can be a fraction of the price. But there is a tradeoff. A baseball stadium with nearly 50,000 people reacting together is an experience. The cheers, groans and boos roll through Dodger Stadium in a way that 10,000 or 15,000 people scattered around the Big A simply cannot duplicate.

On the other hand, a mostly empty stadium produces something else: professional-grade heckling. When there isn't a wall of crowd noise, one determined fan can project remarkably well, and baseball stadiums are built to carry sound. Those players could hear these guys. I am certain of it.

The Great Beer Crisis

It was 96 degrees when I arrived. Naturally, after finding my seat, I went looking for the traditional necessities of baseball: hot dog, peanuts and a draft beer.

The hot dog and peanuts were easy. The beer became an adventure.

One club-level concession that normally served draft beer was closed. At another, I was informed that because of the heat on that level, the draft system was producing massive quantities of foam. Apparently the expression on my face communicated that this explanation, while scientifically fascinating, did not solve my immediate problem. I was also somewhat persistent.

Eventually a manager appeared, and what followed was perhaps the finest example of customer service I have encountered at a ballpark. The man brought out what appeared to be a five-gallon bucket and began draining foam so he could coax one actual beer out of the system for me.

It wasn't as ice cold as I would have preferred on a 96-degree afternoon, but after watching the effort required to obtain it, I wasn't about to complain. I had my beer. I had my hot dog. I had my peanuts. Baseball could begin.

Baseball Delivered to Your Seat

Angel Stadium has also entered the age of app-based eating. There are QR codes at the seats. Scan one and the menu comes up, and if you're already using MLB's Ballpark app with your tickets, the system knows where you're sitting. You confirm the seat, order your food, and an Angel Stadium employee delivers it.

Throughout the game I watched employees carrying orders directly to fans. I didn't use it. Part of going to a baseball game, at least for me, is getting up and wandering around the stadium a little.

I also checked out Brewery X on the club level. It was cooler inside than outside, although on a day that hot it wasn't cool enough to make me want to spend an hour sitting there instead of watching the field. And there was plenty of room everywhere.

Then I Solved the Mystery of “Day-O”

There was something I had noticed during my previous visit. Every once in a while, the stadium sound system would blast something that sounded very much like “Day-O!” And the crowd would answer: “Day-O!”

I immediately thought of Harry Belafonte and The Banana Boat Song. Daylight come and me wanna go home. But why were Angels fans suddenly doing Harry Belafonte between pitches? Nobody explained it, and this happened several times.

Then, somewhere around the sixth or seventh inning, the sound played again and I happened to look at one of Angel Stadium's enormous video boards. There was the word:

HALO.

Oh.

They're not saying Day-O. They're saying HALO. As in Angels. As in a halo.

Mystery solved.

It only took me two trips to Angel Stadium and six or seven innings of concentrated investigative work. Retirement has apparently not completely destroyed my observational skills.

And Then Comes the Rally Monkey

There is another Angel Stadium tradition that requires considerably less detective work: the Rally Monkey.

Late in the game, when the Angels have runners on base and there is the possibility that something might happen, the Rally Monkey appears on the giant video boards. In this game, the Angels had a couple of runners aboard late, I believe when the game was tied in the ninth, and suddenly there he was, running around on the screen while the stadium tried to will the Angels into bringing somebody home.

But the Rally Monkey isn't confined to the video board. Look around the stands when he appears and you'll see people screaming and waving monkeys over their heads like rally towels. The stadium sells the little monkeys dressed in Angels uniforms, but some fans have apparently decided the factory version isn't sufficient. You'll see all kinds of homemade, knitted, dressed-up and otherwise customized monkeys being swung over people's heads.

It's wonderfully ridiculous.

And it is completely Angel Stadium.

Every ballpark needs things that belong to that ballpark. The Rally Monkey is one of those traditions that would seem strange almost anywhere else but makes perfect sense at the Big A. When the Angels threaten to rally, out comes the monkey, up go the stuffed animals, and for a few minutes even a lightly attended stadium gets considerably louder.

The monkey didn't deliver the victory this time, but you can't blame him for trying.

There Is Still Such a Thing as Baseball Etiquette

I had an end seat and, for most of the game, essentially had the row to myself. Perfect. Until one of the best plays of the night developed and the people in front of me decided that this precise moment would be an excellent time to stand up and work their way into their seats.

I missed part of the play. Fortunately, Angel Stadium's giant screens gave me the replay, but I maintain that baseball needs something resembling opera rules. You enter between innings. You do not wander down the aisle with the bases loaded. You do not make six people stand up while the count is 3-and-2. And you absolutely do not decide that the middle of a developing play is the proper moment to locate Row C, Seats 7 and 8.

Perhaps I am the last man in America who believes in baseball etiquette. So be it.

Four Home Runs and Free Baseball

The game itself was worth the trip. There were four home runs, some excellent defensive plays, plenty of offense and, as the sun disappeared, the temperature finally fell from the mid-90s into the low 80s. A slight breeze arrived, and suddenly it was one of those nearly perfect Southern California summer evenings for baseball.

And nine innings weren't enough.

Cleveland eventually walked away with an 8–6 victory in the tenth, but I got an extra inning of baseball for my thirty dollars. Hard to complain about that.

Angel Stadium also does home runs well. When the Angels put one out, the giant video boards come alive and fireworks go off beyond the outfield. Between the fireworks, the Halo chant, the Rally Monkey and those enormous screens, the Big A has developed its own collection of traditions. They're different from what happens across town, and that's probably exactly as it should be.

Dodger Stadium still wins the atmosphere contest for me. The organist, the music between pitches, and especially the sound of a nearly full stadium reacting together create something the Big A simply cannot duplicate when most of its seats are empty.

But Angel Stadium wins some categories rather decisively. It's easier and cheaper. Parking is simpler, getting out afterward is painless, the sight lines are excellent, and thirty dollars can buy a genuinely terrific seat. And if you don't care where you sit, ten or twelve dollars can simply get you into a Major League Baseball game.

That's what I keep coming back to about Angel Stadium. It's just a good baseball trip. You don't have to make a major financial or logistical commitment out of it. Buy an inexpensive ticket, park without taking out a second mortgage, get yourself a hot dog and a beer—even if somebody has to sacrifice a five-gallon bucket to produce it—and watch some baseball.

So I'll take both Southern California experiences. Give me 50,000 people roaring at Dodger Stadium when I want the spectacle. Give me the Big A when I just want a beautiful summer evening, a good seat, a hot dog, some peanuts, a hard-earned draft beer, professional hecklers, four home runs, a Rally Monkey flying over somebody's head, and ten innings of baseball.

Sometimes that's all a baseball trip needs to be.

Herod Couldn't Stop Listening

Author's Note: This essay is an effort to think through a difficult human and leadership dynamic by examining an ancient story. I am not comparing myself to John the Baptist. I possess neither his righteousness nor his calling, and I certainly make no claim to being a messenger of God. Nor should anyone recognize another person in these pages and conclude that I am describing him as wicked, corrupt, or evil. I do not believe that. What interests me is something much narrower and more human: the psychology of a relationship in which one person is repeatedly drawn to a voice that challenges, frustrates, and sometimes condemns his choices. That dynamic strikes me as remarkably familiar. So, with all appropriate humility about the comparison, I want to explore a fascinating question: Why couldn't Herod stop listening?

There is something about the story of Herod Antipas and John the Baptist that I have always found more interesting than its gruesome ending. It is easy to remember the banquet, the dance, the rash promise, and John's head arriving on a platter. Those images are so dramatic that they can obscure a much quieter and, for me, much more fascinating detail.

Herod listened to John. More than that, he apparently kept listening to him.

This was not a comfortable relationship. John had publicly condemned Herod's marriage to Herodias, telling him plainly that it was unlawful for him to have his brother's wife. Herod responded by imprisoning John. Yet Mark tells us something remarkable about what happened afterward. Herod feared John, recognized him as righteous and holy, protected him, and continued hearing him. Depending upon the translation, Herod was perplexed or disturbed by what John said, and yet he still listened gladly.[1]

That contradiction fascinates me.

Herod had solved the practical problem. John was behind bars. The troublesome preacher no longer had the freedom he once possessed. Herod had political authority, guards, wealth, status, and the power of the state. John had a prison cell. Yet apparently Herod kept going back to hear what the prisoner had to say.

Why?

Perhaps the answer tells us something important about leadership, truth, and the peculiar relationship that sometimes develops between a leader and the person willing to tell him what he does not want to hear.

Power has always had a problem with honest counsel. The higher someone rises in an organization, the easier it becomes to become insulated from uncomfortable information. People surrounding leaders have interests of their own. Employees want careers. Political allies want influence. Friends want relationships preserved. Volunteers want appointments. Subordinates want advancement. Even good people learn which subjects produce irritation and which opinions receive approval. Without anyone deliberately designing it, a leader can gradually find himself surrounded by increasingly agreeable information.

John wanted nothing from Herod. That may have been part of his power.

John was not looking for an appointment. He was not seeking promotion. He was not asking Herod to invite him to dinner. He did not need access to the palace, and he certainly wasn't tailoring his message to preserve it. There was very little Herod could offer John that would cause John to change what he believed was true. That makes a person extraordinarily difficult to control. It may also make him extraordinarily compelling.

Perhaps Herod kept listening because John possessed something that becomes increasingly rare around powerful people: independence. Here was a man who apparently did not care whether Herod liked what he said. John knew where he stood. He had drawn his moral line and wasn't moving it merely because the person standing on the other side happened to be the ruler of Galilee.

Herod could reject John's conclusion, but he could not easily dismiss the man who delivered it.

There is a leadership lesson buried there. Sometimes the person who frustrates us most is also the person whose opinion we continue seeking. We may disagree with him. We may resist his recommendations. We may become irritated when he points out something we would rather leave alone. We may even create distance between ourselves and him. Then, strangely, we find ourselves asking again what he thinks.

Why would anyone do that? Perhaps because somewhere beneath resistance there is recognition. We recognize that this particular person is not calibrating his answer according to what will please us. We may not believe he is always right. He almost certainly isn't. But we believe we are going to receive what he actually thinks.

That has value.

There is also an important distinction between hearing counsel and following it. Leaders sometimes repeatedly consult people whose advice they seldom take. From the adviser's perspective, this can become maddening. If you keep asking what I think, why do you keep doing something else? But perhaps that misunderstands what the leader is seeking.

Sometimes an adviser is not being used as an instruction manual. He is functioning as a reference point. The leader wants to know where the boundary is, even if he ultimately decides to cross it. He wants the dissenting opinion in the room. He wants to know what someone without the same incentives sees when looking at the problem.

Perhaps that was part of what John represented to Herod. There is no indication in Mark that John's message became more accommodating because Herod kept listening. John apparently continued being John, and Herod continued being Herod. One possessed political authority; the other possessed moral independence. Their relationship existed inside the tension between those two forms of power.

Then other people entered the equation.

Herodias did not share Herod's fascination with John. Mark tells us that she held a grudge against him and wanted him dead. For a time she could not accomplish that because Herod protected him. Then came Herod's birthday banquet, Herodias's daughter, the dance, and Herod's spectacularly foolish promise to give her whatever she requested. After consulting her mother, she returned asking for John's head.[2]

This is where the story becomes an extraordinary study in leadership. Herod did not want to do it. Mark says he was "exceeding sorry." But he had made his promise publicly, surrounded by important guests. His nobles were there. His military commanders were there. The leading men of Galilee were there. To refuse the request would require Herod to retreat publicly from his own words.[3]

Nobody physically forced Herod to order John's death. That distinction matters. Herodias created the pressure. The daughter delivered the demand. The assembled guests created the social environment. Herod's own rash promise created the trap.

But Herod gave the order.

That is one of the harder lessons of leadership: other people can maneuver us toward a decision without relieving us of responsibility for making it. Leaders create—or at least tolerate—the environments surrounding them. They choose whose voices receive access. They decide which behaviors are rewarded. They establish whether disagreement is safe or costly. Eventually, that environment begins exerting pressure back upon the leader.

At first, a leader may tolerate the person who says uncomfortable things. He may even value him. But over time, others may find that person troublesome. Perhaps they resent his influence. Perhaps they dislike his criticism. Perhaps his presence complicates decisions they would prefer to make without resistance. The cost of continuing to listen begins to rise.

That is when leadership becomes difficult. It is easy to value honest counsel when the counsel costs us nothing. The real test comes when listening threatens a relationship, an alliance, our popularity, our convenience, our pride, or something we have already publicly committed ourselves to doing.

Herod could listen to John while John was merely troublesome. At the banquet, John became expensive.

Herod chose the room.

That doesn't necessarily make Herod incomprehensible. Quite the opposite. It makes him painfully human. Most of us know the pressure of having said something we wish we could take back. Most of us understand the embarrassment of reversing ourselves publicly. Most leaders eventually discover that doing the right thing can require disappointing people whose approval matters to them. Herod faced precisely that moment and failed it. The consequences were irreversible.

There is another side to this story, however, and it concerns the person giving the unwelcome counsel. The truth-teller can make a mistake of his own. He can begin believing that because someone repeatedly asks for his opinion, he has become responsible for the other person's decisions. He can continue explaining, warning, persuading, arguing, and returning to the same subject because surely, eventually, the other person will understand.

But counsel does not transfer responsibility. The adviser owns the advice. The leader owns the decision.

There comes a point when the person who has spoken must relinquish the outcome. He can explain what he sees. He can warn about consequences. He can refuse to flatter. He can even say the same uncomfortable thing more than once when asked. But he cannot live another person's life or exercise another leader's judgment.

Perhaps that is one of the most difficult boundaries for experienced leaders to accept when they become advisers to other leaders. Experience allows us to recognize patterns. Sometimes we can see the collision coming because we have already survived one ourselves. We naturally want to reach for the steering wheel.

But it isn't ours anymore.

There is a final detail in Mark's account that gives the story an almost haunting conclusion. After John's death, reports about Jesus began reaching Herod. People offered different explanations for who Jesus might be. Herod had his own answer: "It is John, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead."[4]

Think about that. Herod had finally silenced John. The prisoner was gone. The troublesome voice could no longer challenge him. There would be no more uncomfortable conversations and no more inconvenient moral judgments from the cell. Yet when another powerful voice appeared, Herod heard John again.

That may be the most profound part of the story. Removing the messenger does not necessarily remove the message. We sometimes imagine that discomfort originates in the person who causes us to confront something we would rather avoid. Remove the person, and perhaps the discomfort will disappear. Stop asking his opinion. Exclude him from the conversation. Reduce his influence. Surround ourselves instead with voices that are easier to hear.

But if the uncomfortable voice touched something we already suspected might be true, silence does not solve the problem. The voice becomes internal.

Perhaps that is why Herod couldn't stop listening in the first place. Somewhere beneath the irritation and perplexity, he recognized something in John that he could neither comfortably accept nor completely dismiss.

That is why every leader needs at least one person who can say no, who can say, "I think you're wrong," or ask, "Have you considered what this will cost?" Every leader needs someone who does not need the leader's approval badly enough to alter the answer. Such people are rarely comfortable companions to power, but they are enormously valuable.

The responsibility works both ways. The adviser must remember that honest counsel does not make him righteous, infallible, or responsible for controlling the outcome. The leader must resist the equally human temptation to confuse discomfort with disloyalty.

Perhaps that is why thinking through this ancient story has left me more at peace with some experiences of my own. Human relationships that once seemed contradictory make a little more sense to me now. A person can value honest counsel and resist it at the same time. He can seek an independent voice while also finding that voice deeply frustrating. He can distance himself from the person offering unwelcome advice without becoming indifferent to what that person has said.

More importantly, I am reminded of the boundary between counsel and responsibility. If someone asks what I think, my obligation is to answer as honestly and fairly as I can. What happens afterward belongs to him. I need not persuade him, rescue him from a decision I believe is mistaken, or carry responsibility for consequences that are not mine. Understanding that does not resolve every disagreement, but it does make the burden considerably lighter.

Herod possessed virtually every form of worldly power available in his circumstances. John possessed almost none. Herod could imprison him, and eventually Herod could silence him.

What Herod apparently could not do was stop listening.

And in the end, even after John was gone, Herod could not stop hearing him.

Notes

1. Mark 6:17–20. The textual tradition is particularly interesting here. The King James Version says Herod "did many things, and heard him gladly," while several modern translations render the passage as Herod being greatly perplexed or puzzled by John and nevertheless continuing to listen to him. Either reading preserves the central paradox: John's words troubled Herod, yet Herod remained drawn to hearing him.

2. Mark 6:21–25. Mark portrays Herodias as harboring the desire to kill John before the banquet and presents the daughter's request as originating with her mother.

3. Mark 6:26–28. The Gospel explicitly connects Herod's decision with both his oath and the presence of his dinner guests. The text therefore supports interpreting social standing and public embarrassment as important elements in his decision, although the broader psychological interpretation developed in this essay is my own.

4. Mark 6:14–16. Herod's later identification of Jesus with the executed John provides the basis for the concluding reflection about the persistence of John's voice in Herod's conscience. The claim about Herod's internal psychology is interpretive rather than something the text explicitly states.

Historical Note: The first-century Jewish historian Josephus independently records Herod Antipas's execution of John the Baptist in Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII. Josephus emphasizes Herod's fear that John's influence over the population might lead to political upheaval rather than the banquet narrative found in the Gospels.