Probably to be human means that we sometimes pretend to be something that we’re not.

Walking my dog beside Dow’s Lake I came across an old guy sitting on a park bench, wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. He was by himself and looked to be, oh, a little older than me.

I liked that.

Between him, me and my dog Jasper who had just had his fifteenth birthday last month I figured we had lived through 250 years. (That’s factoring in dog years to people years of course.) And to come clean, I have not been a truly impassioned baseball fan since 2004, when new owner Jeffrey Loria packed the Montreal Expos off to Washington, D.C sometime in the middle of the night. But this guy looked like he was old enough to have followed the Red Sox ‘Impossible Dream’ season in 1967 when they went from last place to first and only narrowly lost the World Series in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals. So I sat down beside him on the bench. Frankly, I needed the break. My knees, both without cartilage, ensured that I walked like a crippled cowboy.

“You a Red Sox fan?”. Stating the obvious, I’ve found, is always a good conversation starter. It also ensures that people don’t overestimate your intelligence from the get-go.

He looked over at me. Ottawans don’t usually start conversations with strangers, especially since civil servants virtually all work from home now, making real human introductions about as rare as an encounter with an alien.

“Yeah.” He looked over at me, wondering how long it would take me to ask him for some spare change.

“I used to play pickup ball with Bill Lee on Sunday mornings back when he played for the Montreal Expos.” Every Red Sox and Expos’ fan has at least one Bill Lee story to share. He had played for both teams during his major league career.

He looked over at me… blankly. “Uh… Bill Lee?”

I was starting to think that this guy didn’t really know what the ‘B’ on his cap stood for. I don’t know… probably he found the Red Sox cap in a bargain bin in some hardware store when he was on vacation in Bar Harbor, Maine. “You know, Bill Lee, the pitcher…. nicknamed the Spaceman . He got traded to the Montreal Expos after the 1978 season.”

“Okay.” He seemed to be more interested in watching a Canada goose clean his feathers a few feet away. I was getting suspicious about this guy’s baseball knowledge. Maybe he didn’t even know what pickup ball was. I could understand that for someone under 40 years of age, maybe those kids only play it on their phones now, but hell, this guy looked like he started school during the Kennedy Administration. If I brought up the name of Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski, he’d probably think I was talking about the Polish ambassador in Ottawa. He was still more interested in the goose, now cleaning his tailfeathers. He stood up and nodded. “Well… gotta go.”

Well, no wonder people don’t talk to each other anymore. ..I got up to go as well. There must be someone else in this park interested in talking about baseball players from the 1970s.