I’m watching the Boys of Summer play a game. It’s the next
to last game of the year, and I like to be informed at the water cooler about
who won (Royals over the Giants 10-0 – sheesh!). As I watch, it occurs to me
that I dislike baseball partly because I never understand what the officials
are signaling. In football, the calls are exaggerated motions: hands clapped
over head as if preparing for the Sun Salutation yoga pose, hands chopping at
knees, fist drawn down across the face from forehead to chin, two arms held
aloft, straight overhead, an obvious sign of victory. In baseball, the umpire
makes a secret wrist move that might mean ball, might mean strike, or might
just be a fist bump of encouragement.
I realize I reveal my ignorance of such things with this
confession.
My father tried to teach me baseball – a love of watching
it, not playing it. For Dad, baseball represented warm summer evenings at the
ballpark of the Tidewater Tides (now the Norfolk Tides) from the box seat on
the first base line. He filled in crossword puzzles between cracks of the bat
(few and far between if you know anything
about baseball). He knew the beer guys by name and chatted up the other season
ticket holders in his section like he had known them all his life, even if the people
in the seats had only just been given tickets for the night.
I spent every home game in July from 1978 to 1981 watching
the Tidewater Tides play in Met Park, which was once situated, literally, in
the middle of Military Highway in Norfolk, Virginia. The Tides are the farm
team for the New York Mets to this day, and they now play in newer, larger, and
more logically located Harbor Park. In my early adolescence, I spent most games
fantasizing that the Tides’ second baseman (Kevin Something) spotted me forlorn
in the box seats between home plate and first base and fell instantly in love
with me. Other nights, not even the halide lit double header could keep my nose
out of a book. Darryl Strawberry kept things fun for a season, but then he got
called up and we went back to slow nights at the ballpark.
Tonight, I’m really watching baseball to bide time until
Master Chef – Canada begins. So is my husband, who played little league when he
was nine and got screamed at by the coach for being distracted by fresh wild
blue berries in the outfield. No one had ever hit the ball that far…until that
day when he was picking and munching sweet, warm, blue orbs of sugar and flesh
instead of watching the progress of the game. The ball landed inches from the
blueberry bush. Oops.
We don’t love baseball, but at the end of the season, we are
drawn to the ballpark to see…to know.
***
Many things end in October – not just baseball. All the
leaves are dying. Dumb squirrels, greedy in their survival quest for one more
acorn, get squished in the road. Dumb skunks too. (And I live in suburbia. I shudder to think what my rural neighbors are
scraping up.)
All Hallows Eve approaches, Samhain, if you prefer. The
sacred night marks the lifting of the veil between those of us who walk in the
illusion of life and those of us who float in the misperceptions of what comes
after. Some families will dress up, stroll around, and collect free candy.
Others will simply distribute candy. Some will light bonfires. Many will spend
the evening preparing for the next day, Dia
de los Muertos, the day of the dead. They build small altars, ofrendas, to ancestors, decorating them
with marigolds and sugar skulls. They prepare food to take to the cemetery, a
picnic with the dead to honor life.
Anne would be 70 on All Saint’s Day, if fate had allowed her
to live beyond 57. Perhaps I will shape a sugar skull, festoon it with
marigolds, and pack a picnic to remember her. It would have been a major event,
her 70th birthday party, made all the more festive by falling on a
Saturday night. Live music, I feel certain, and a catered buffet would have
been the highlights. Gifts with cat themes that Anne and I could poke gentle
fun at later, when the party was over -- so many cat-themed gifts.
***
I pulled up the stakes in the tomato garden yesterday. Most
of the plants had died, and weeds had overrun my once pristine plot. The sweet
brown bunny that has been living in the garden this summer apparently preferred
to eat the dropped tomatoes, and not the tomatillos. The ratio was 6:1 as I
cleaned the fallen fruit. I’m sure I missed a few, but I like to see which
plants “volunteer” the following spring. Gardens are amazing that way. Even if
you don’t deliberately plant the seed, they grow anyway. I, like Thoreau, can
sometimes find my faith in a seed. In the month of death, they form and mature,
holding a promise that, one day, life will return.
The Boys of Summer are almost done. One more game. Frosts
get harder. The garden yellows, shrivels, and shrinks back into the ground.
Days are short and nights long. I listen for the reassuring click-whoosh as the gas furnace fires up
and the temperature falls. Already, I miss evenings on the back deck – the sunshine
leaves my deck at the autumnal equinox and will not return until its spring
counterpart occurs in late March. I will be a year older then, if fate allows
me to be. Life is a thin thread that snaps easily, and let’s face it, no one
gets out alive. The dead are laughing at us, but I don’t care. I’m going live
each second like the thread might snap, show the ones I love that I love them,
and dance at the still point of the turning world. I will blessed be.
