I'm Retired! Now what?

July 24, 2026

When hearing that the great singer and drummer of the Eagles, Don Henley was celebrating his birthday this week my mind suddenly filled with his song, Boys of Summer!  I’ve always thought that was one of the coolest songs ever recorded, but great musical hits of the 80’s aside, I started thinking of the real boys of summer, and I’m referring to those daring souls who take on the blazing summer heat to play the great American summer game of baseball!  For three years now, my little north Texas city of Sherman has had their own minor league baseball team, the mighty Shadow Cats.  Okay, we’re talking minor, minor, minor……very minor league here!  But it’s still kind of cool that we have a team, and being the somewhat, proactive sports fan that I am, I’ve been taking in at least one game of the hometown team since they first laced up their cleats back in the summer of 2024.  With a quick check of their schedule, I saw that they only had two home games left in the 2026 season.  With that thought, I figured if I wanted to remain a somewhat, proactive local sports fan, I had better act fast!  So I scooped up one of the game’s remaining tickets.  Okay, there was a boatload of remaining tickets, and I got to sit pretty much where ever I wanted to.

When I scooted into my pickup truck, a half an hour ahead of the 7:05 start time, the temperature on my dash displayed a toasty 108, but by the time I had reached the ballpark things had cooled down to a chilly 101.  The Shadow Cats play in the local city park right across from the park’s new playground.  The local high school used to play there, but with the introduction of BIG-TIME pro sports, the place now has a bar!  This means the rowdier sports fan can hoist up a brew in the local, city park!  There would be no beer guzzling for me though, and as I drug myself out of the blazing sun into the bar, I was basically pleading for water!  What was really cool was the fact that the bottle of water only cost me a mere $2.17!  This was pretty amazing considering the bottle of water I bought at the Chicago Cubs game a few weeks earlier at Wrigley Field cost me over eleven bucks!  I guess that doesn’t seem too crazy considering that my Shadow Cats game ticket, right behind home plate, was costing me a meager eight dollars while my Chicago Cubs ticket cost me a whopping $175!  It’s all for the love of the game, right?

The few bucks that I was throwing out for this game was nothing compared to the amount of sweat that was pouring out of my body.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and I had bought a seat on the top of the stands hoping that I might catch some kind of a breeze.  However, if there was any kind of breeze to be caught it had been snagged out somewhere in center field.  As I started bathing in my own sweat, I noticed how some of the local fans had brought their own portable fans.  Speaking of fans, my spirits were suddenly lifted when I spotted someone I knew sifting into the park!  As Ryan walked by the bleachers I gave him a wave, and I expected him to merely wave back and that would be it.  However, the second he saw me he launched up the steps to join me for a few minutes of catching up!

Ryan was one of my old supervisors, and of the 18 bosses I had during my career he was one of my favs.  The guy had started out in production, and then was given the opportunity to move up to a supervisor role and took it!  The guy’s degree had been in music, so with my bachelor’s degree in Radio, TV & Film (broadcasting) we bonded over having degrees that were basically worthless in our occupation.  However, he had the brains to do pretty much anything he wanted to, and he once told me that he had been accepted by West Point if he had chosen that direction.  He probably would have done great there.  Being a band kid, he already knew how to march.  Over my 37 years at work I’ve run into a lot of people who can talk music with me, but Ryan could really talk music with me.  Not only was he familiar with music ranging from classical to blues to jazz to rock, but with his music degree we could get really musically nerdy and discuss weird time signatures and funky key changes and all that dweeby, band kid stuff.

Since our plant had shut down a few months ago Ryan had been offered a supervisor’s job down in one of the company’s Dallas semiconductor fabs, and we did a little shop talk out in the heat.  Apparently, the adjustment part of his new job was still in full swing for him, but that’s pretty normal for any job I suppose.  I would imagine that the next time I see him everything will be all rosy jobwise!  For this particular evening he wasn’t at the game to cheer on the local team but to support his nine-year-old son.  Apparently, it was scout night and his son was a scout!  Whether he was a boy scout or cub scout remained a mystery.  However, what didn’t remain a mystery was when his wife walked past the stands with the announcement that the game was done as far as she and her two kids were concerned, even though the game hadn’t even reached the fourth inning yet.  They had made their appearance and were more than eager to escape the heat for the day!

The Shadow Cats’ opponent for the game was the Brazos Valley’s Bombers, and since the opposing team had made the three- and half-hour drive, I felt obligated to stick around to support their effort, regardless how much sweat was gushing out of my body!  Not only was the blazing sun about to kill me, but for some reason the game had been declared Disco Night!  As if the scorching sun wasn’t torture enough, the team had decided to contaminate the great American pastime of baseball with the evil scourge of 1970’s dance tunes!  Good gosh!  Is nothing sacred?  To make matters worse, my seat was right next to a speaker.  So for over three hours I was pounded by the driving sounds of ABBA’s Dancing Queen and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive!  I felt like I was living through my torturous days of jr. high all over again!

The game was never really close, but there were a few remarkable plays.  What was even more remarkable was the number of fans who had shown up for the evening, despite the Death Valley heat.  Unlike my Chicago Cubs game where defense ruled the game, keeping the score 2 to 2 until the bottom of the ninth, this game held the philosophy of “Defense be darned” and there were so many runs in the game that the final score looked like a football score!  To add to the fun, there were a few questionable calls by the officials.  The best plays though, came when several batters found those sweet pitches and knocked the balls out of the park!  However, the big cheer went to the home team’s right outfielder when he stretched his arm out over the back fence and snagged a ball that everyone thought was gone!  Speaking of balls gone, there was an announcement before the game asking us fans to return any wayward baseball that might just get knocked into the stands.  I’m guessing the budget is a little tight this year, and they needed all those balls!  Now there’s something you don’t hear at an MLB game.

Around 10:20 at night, one of the local outfielders caught a pop fly and the game was finally over!  Like the dreaded disco song I Will Survive, I did survive the heat along with the bad music.  I will give a shout out to the ballpark for not making me listen to the Village People’s Macho Man or KC and The Sunshine Band’s Shake Your Booty.  Maybe the next game I catch will be death metal night, and the home team can play baseball to old Slayer tunes or something like that.  As for this game, the Shadow Cats blasted the Bombers 17-6, and I had sweat off about five pounds.