The unexpected expert

I don't mind when my colleagues seek my assistance on some sticky aspect of grammar--I mean, I definitely struggled through all those years of grad school just so I could become an expert on the use of the semicolon--but once in a while it's nice to be consulted as an expert on a topic totally outside my field. Yesterday it happened twice, concerning very different topics on which I'm not really much of an expert, which suggests that all you have to do to be considered an expert is to know a little more than the person asking the questions.

It all started when I went across the Ohio River into West Virginia to visit a wetland where a great egret has been hanging out for the past week. It's a highly accessible wetland surrounded by a very nice boardwalk, so naturally lots of folks have been stopping to take a look, and sure enough there it was, and I even got a (blurry) photo of the egret with a fish in its mouth before it flew off across the road to the less accessible part of the wetland. But I didn't leave right away because, as an added bonus, I'd found a little flock of yellow-rumped warblers flitting about catching insects and perching on the cat-tails. My first warbler of the season! And they're just as cute as can be so I took a lot of photos.

Then while I was heading back to my car, I encountered a couple carrying very nice cameras. They asked me whether I'd been taking pictures of "that big white crane" in the lagoon, and I gently pointed out that it's a great egret and that it had already flown the coop, "but there's a very nice group of yellow-rumped warblers posing on the cat-tails." I didn't explain why I was so excited about this harbinger of the spring warbler migration because I didn't want to be an annoying know-it-all--and besides, they were clearly disappointed by the absence of the great egret. "It may come back eventually," I said and moved on.

Then I went to the college baseball game, where one of my Chinese students kept asking me to explain certain finer points of the game: "Wasn't that guy just catching? Why is he hitting now? What's a designated hitter? What's an error? Why was that called a strike when the batter didn't swing at it?"

Baseball is the only sport on which I can reliably provide answers to these kinds of questions, so I was happy to help, and when I occasionally dropped the ball, people sitting nearby were willing to pinch-hit. The student had a lot of trouble comprehending why a batter can keep hitting foul balls all day long without being called out (unless the ball gets caught), but by the end of the game she had a better idea of how baseball works, and I'd learned something too: how silly some of the rules of the game sound when explained to a neophyte.

Not so long ago I was the neophyte, learning about baseball from my husband and about birds from my birding-and-botanizing colleague, so being consulted as a sort of expert feels really good. No one ever asks me to explain Derrida or enjambment or even semicolons out in public, so it's nice to know that a certain portion of my hard-earned knowledge is not going to waste.