To Everything There Is a Season

It’s almost October. Here come the playoffs, baseball that is. It can be confusing. It’s football season. I bleed blue, big blue. If I had another child to name, I’d seriously consider Eli. So, how do I do justice to my Yankees? Baseball and Football, two very different sports, played in very different seasons.




One has to do with finesse, fine motor skills, with a rhythm that matches the heat and humidity of summer. Baseball breaths with a rhythm that watches the shadows move across the field for hours. It inhales as the pitcher waits for the catcher’s signal, winds up and slings the ball toward the plate. The batter swings, lifting it high into the blue, as the left fielder shifts slowly, gazing upward, waiting, waiting, accepting it, a gift from the sky.



The other shoves armored monsters into each other, trying to knock each other down. They rush, tackle, claiming territory until they can make a strike that dominates the opponent. Its rhythms are brutal, radical, moving up and down quickly like the temperatures of the season, temperatures that break and kill.



How can I enjoy both? Either I’m schizophrenic, or the rhythms of the seasons do something to my sensibilities. Perhaps to everything there is a season.



But I still wonder, what do I do about October?