Elwood P. Dowd is a Nats fan?

...and he goes to a lot of Nats games, maybe as many as I do judging by how often I see him, which is not to say every time, but I don't go to every game, either. He wears one of those replica helmets, you know, the ones you get for winning the speed pitch at county fairs (yeah, I'm from Ohio.) His helmet is still an effulgent red like new, with a pristine curly W sharp as if it had never left the plastic bag (do not let children play with bag), and he carries around a beat up scorebook covered with pencil markings like gray thread holding the book together, holding his memory together, every minute detail, including the weather and the wind direction of every game he's attended. I know this because he told me and I saw it. He told and showed everyone on the train, including Harvey, who was sitting next to him, God, who was in the window, and the alien, who was floating near the ceiling.

At least, that's how he seemed to me. I've seen him several times on the train on the way to RFK since then, but that first time, I had pompously assumed he was just another crazy crackhead talking to the Great Wall Spirit, a staple of DC's concrete landscape. The guy did, after all, tell the air he had attended sixty games this season when the Nats had only played forty, so you can understand my initial judgment, right?

A trio of high school kids sat behind me that first time when he began talking about the sixty games and the wind direction. The kids were having a good time mocking him, and caustic smiles abounded on that train, including my own. But then it just stopped being funny to me. See, the guy isn't a crackhead at all. After watching him in action on that 15 minute train ride, I learned the guy's a little mentally slow. And the guy is in love with baseball.

If I don't catch him on the train, I see him at the ballpark. Each time, the train ride is the same, those same rancorous smirks plastered upon the faces of game goers when he starts talking about his sixty games or his wind direction, always alone he is. Does he have no family? No friends? Why is he always alone?

If I had more tolerance, more patience, a nurse's heart, I'd take the guy out to a ballgame. Truth is, though, I don't - I admit that. We all have flaws, and the bleeding heart of which I have been accused just doesn't extend to personal interaction. So yes, Elwood P. Dowd is a Nats fan. Elwood P. Dowd is me, seeing six foot rabbits where a man should be.