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b'Jon Mooallem, the author of today\\u2019s Sunday Read, had a bad pandemic.\\n\\n\\u201cI began having my own personal hard time,\\u201d he writes. \\u201cThe details aren\\u2019t important. Let\\u2019s just say, I felt as if I were moldering in place.\\u201d\\n\\nThen, The New York Times Magazine offered him the opportunity to fly somewhere for its travel issue \\u2014 at that point he had spent 17 months parenting two demanding children. So, he asked: \\u201cWhat if I drove to Spokane?\\u201d Jon had been curious about it for years.\\n\\nSpokane, Wash., is the birthplace of Father\\u2019s Day, the hometown of Bing Crosby and a city with a sequence of wide, rocky waterfalls pouring through its center like a Cubist boulevard.\\n\\n\\u201cI also knew that Spokane was a city with a history of minor-league baseball that stretched back more than a hundred years,\\u201d Jon writes. \\u201cA minor-league game felt like a manageable, belated step into the mid-pandemic lifestyle that people were calling post-pandemic life.\\u201d'