Continued from page 3 (The Best Seat in the House) It’s a simple question. Where are we sitting? Are we in the outfield? Along the first base line? Back in the upper decks? In many ways, where you sit affects your whole view of the game. Indeed, I thought the same thing myself when my friend offered me his season tickets a few days earlier. It was an incredibly thoughtful offer; Chuck’s seats were 20 rows behind home plate. As he said, they don’t get much better. But as I prepared for our visit to the ballpark, all I kept thinking was: “If I take Ryan to those incredible seats, won’t I be sending him the wrong message? Won’t I be spoiling him, potentially ruining all of his subsequent ballpark visits?” Sure, I obviously was overthinking it, but I made my decision: It’s better to take him to seats in the bleachers, then slowly—after a few games—work our way to the good seats up front.

Teach him to appreciate the world. That’s the better life lesson. So there we are, walking up to our seats in far left field. In truth, they are bad seats. We can barely see home plate, much less the infield.

The only thing we are close to is the scoreboard, and even then, it’s on our far left. But as we find our aisle and make our way over to our seats, Ryan studies the view and takes it all in. He looks at the brightgreen grass—the glare of the lights—and all the people surrounding us. And then, this 10-year-old boy who never has been to a ballpark in his entire life turns to me and says, “These are the best seats in the whole place.”

I almost fell over right there. A wide smile takes his face and mine. As I said, it was a perfect night. But somehow, it just got better.

Brad Meltzer is an American author of several New York Times best-selling books including The Tenth Justice, Dead Even, The First Counsel, The Millionaires, The Zero Game and The Book of Fate. His books have spent over ten months on the bestseller lists, and have been translated into over 25 languages, from Hebrew to Bulgarian.

The Book of Lies, his seventh novel was released on September 2, 2008.