Lessons Learned

Over the last several days, I learned

> how America spends its weekends (and money). Hint: visit the premium outlet stores. It's the affordable alternative for families wanting to escape the confines of their dwellings. It's where ordinary folks embark on a pilgrimage to find bargains and deals and soon find themselves in debt, having cleared out the clearance sections of Coach, Banana Republic and Gap along the way. It's where Ma & Pa Middleclass, their five kids, Granny and Aunty Uphilda train during the off-season in preparation for next summer's vacation to an overpriced amusement park. An outlet mall is the perfect place to practice. There's an abundance of strollers and a scarcity of open parking stalls and benches. Late hours are kept, lines are long, restrooms are strategically hidden and prerecorded announcements are multilingual and saccharine. The outlet mall is also where I happened to find carpenter jeans priced at 2 for $25 and a Haydn CD with two symphonies for just $3. So, I'm not complaining. I'm just explaining where you can find America (and me) on the weekends.

> good baseball players who are short aren't short; they're scrappy. If I were a ballplayer, sportswriters would mock my inability to play and call me short. And that's if I was lucky enough to be noticed in the first place. If I were any good, the same sportswriters would avoid overt references to my stature and simply call me scrappy, which is the adjective they're required by law to use to describe players possessing less than seventy-two inches of height and the rare ability to reach base consistently. The journalist who writes an article about a player like Ichiro Suzuki, Craig Counsell or David "Sparkplug" Eckstein without describing him as scrappy or alluding to his scrappiness is a journalist who quickly learns the price of omission is his or her byline. By the way, after St. Louis won the World Series last week, the League chose Eckstein, the Cardinals scrappy shortstop, as the series MVP. Maybe in honor of his well-deserved award, he'll receive a temporary reprieve from the adjective. Of course, it could be worse. At least writers aren't calling short players scrapie, which I understand is a fatal viral disease that afflicts sheep.

> Daylight Saving Time (DST) doesn't mean one gains an hour. It means one recoups the hour one lost six months ago. DST is a sleight-of-hand magician that slips a quarter from your pocket and attempts to amaze you as he produces it from your ear with flourish. Where he slips the flourish from is anyone's guess and a matter best left to somebody else's imagination.

As far as I can tell, DST also means it gets darker sooner. Yesterday, I was basking in the morning light streaming through the window, enjoying my morning stoup of coffee and reading my neighbor's morning funnies, when it dawned on me the sunlight was fading. I rushed to the front door for a better look, but by the time I reached it, I couldn't see a thing and had to grope the darkness for the doorknob. A sudden gasp and slap to the face told me I had found it. I wrenched the door open and stepped outside to see the last of the sun dip behind the western hills. Since I was still clutching the funnies and had already read my favorite strips, I decided to take advantage of the blackness. The blackness, wise to my dalliance with the darkness, would have none of me, so I dashed over to my neighbor's driveway, tucked the comics back in with the classifieds and raced back to the house before anyone was the wiser.