Dear Ernie:

Thank you for joining us for the beginning of the 2010 Detroit Tigers baseball season.

I grew up in Michigan in the mid to late 80s and (like a lot of people, I am sure) there were times when there were few constants in my life.  For about 5 years, we moved a lot, and I had to deal with a less than great family situation.  In 1985 my grandfather gave me a small hand-held radio so that I would always have a way to listen to the Detroit Tigers games.  I carried that transistor radio around for years and, no matter how morose I may have been feeling, often had an escape into a happier world, a place where a calm southern voice made men playing a kids game seem like magic.  Listening to you meant not that everything was ok, but that there was a port in the storm.  Over time, I think this (along with time spent with my grandfather, who took me to my first Tigers game at Tigers Stadium in 1986 on a charter bus from Grand Rapids)  taught me that everything does not have to be going perfectly for something to be going right. 

Death is a hard thing to come to terms with and I think that there are a lot of people, myself included, who will take yours a lot harder than you will.  Which I guess means that you are still, in your own way, teaching us lessons.  I buried my grandfather 19 years ago and my father last year.  I am sure that your children and grandchildren will honor you when the time comes.  But that doesn't make it any easier, at least for the rest of us. 

Thank you Erine, for being a part of our lives.  Thank you Erine, for all the lessons, even the ones you may not have been trying to teach us.  Thank you Erine, for telling us that a ball is loooooonnnnnnnnggggggg gone. Please know that, in our hearts, that foul ball in the stands will always go to a man from Novi.

Josh