Alexander’s prize for being one of the top picks in his school’s science fair was a pair of tickets to this afternoon’s Portland Beavers baseball game. We turned it into a bit of a father-and-son outing, traipsing through the rain to the MAX station, buying food at the vendors, and climbing up into a relatively uncrowded portion of the station with a good sidelong view of the action.

And then came time for the singing of the National Anthem. The PA system at Civic Stadium… I mean PGE Park… isn’t the greatest in the world, which meant that we missed the introduction of the Anthem’s singer for the day. We could only tell that it was a youngster of some sort. “This will be cute,” I thought to myself.

I was wrong.

Oh, it was bad. Beyond bad. The kid had Celine Dion pretentions with Roseanne Barr singing talent. At first people were smirking. After about thirty seconds, most everyone around us was giggling, cringing or both. Me? I was struggling to keep from howling.

Allow me to illustrate. The poor kid apparently labored under the mistaken notion that all instances of the letter “a” should be pronounced long, which turned “The Star-Spangled Banner” into “The Stare-Spayngled Bay-ner.” I swear to you, this is the gods’ own truth. I heard it with my own, tortured, bleeding ears.

Once the song (and the crowd’s laughter) subsided, Alex and I looked at one another in disbelief. I said to him, “You know, that’s pretty much got to be the high point of our entire afternoon. It can’t possibly get any better than that.”

I was right, as it turns out. The visiting team vaulted into the lead right off the bat, as it were, and then during the top of the 6th the rainclouds arrived, sending the players scurrying for shelter. We chose that moment to bail for warmer and more entertaining locales.

You know what the really sad part of this is? Somewhere, a bunch of people are telling that kid, “You did great! That was wonderful!” Wow.