September 17 2008, 11:02 PM The Wind Up

Earlier in the week, there was a wind. I took advantage of this, and carefully opened windows in the house to welcome in the air, pulling off mill runs from the rivers outside. There were some stacks of paper that took this badly, and some of the ornamentation shifted from their places on the mantles, but it was worth it. Air from the outside, filling the rooms, pulling in freshness and chasing the stale from every corner in a merry whirl. These recent mornings have turned cold, so I have shut the windows again, in part because of my own cold, nasty and lingering congestion that has taken up station in my head. I am beating it back with the harvest: tomatoes of many kinds, garlic and potatoes roasting in the oven under oil and pepper, cups and cups of tea. In the mornings I walk in anyway, through valleys of trees still fluffy from the winds, giant hands having reached down to shake them well.

Yesterday I was offered an unexpected ticket to sit a while in the ball park. I've said this before; we have a beautiful ball park. There is a dignity to the stands, built in their dark metals, but not an unkind one: it is not so proud a place to not offer protection when the rains come. There were no rains last night, as the evening ran through dusk and beyond, and the little blue lights came out to mark the structure in the darkness. The city was framed by the cozy space past the outfield, looking for all the world impossible, a thing too pretty to be anything less than expensive set dressing for a Hollywood picture about dreams, love, baseball. The broad sweep of the yellow metal of the bridge led our view up to that cheerful gathering of buildings, lovely in the night. The moon clambered over the tops of the bleachers, very nearly full, gaining clarity as the cool air came on. It was wonderful.

There was also a game down there, of course. They never do anything to formally begin; they just start. I love that.

I missed most of the carnage; I spent the second inning buying a sandwich. It says something about this place that the All You Can Eat section was neigh empty, while the line for the sandwiches was bizarrely huge. Or that one can even get a decent sandwich at a ball park, these days, in among the nachos and the odd hamburgers and other assorted things. It could be said that I should obviously not buy sandwiches and thus avoid angering the gods, but I would honestly fear the gods more for not honoring the sandwich, here in this place.

(Besides, I have no illusions; they are my ball team. I come to watch them play: I have no expectations they will do anything else.)

I was enjoying that sandwich and musing over the notion of karma and ball park food when I got to strike up a conversation with an usher. I lamented the absence of the Turn Back The Clock inning; he said he thought they did entire games like that, now. That requires further investigation; I would become a regular of those. I would also need to drum up support to ask (nicely) for someone to have all the damn signs on the tops of the buildings turned off for those nights. It is worth it, though: there is little like a ball game where the noises are crowd and crack of bat, the only music comes from an organ, and the scoreboard does what's it's supposed to do, and only that: show the score.

(The nine on the field did a bit better tonight, I hear. Well done!)

This morning, the hills lay under a carpet of fog, all distances made soft. The sounds were soft, too, engines becoming distant humming. A train whistle found its way up through the valley, but was too far away; a caution call from some other place, some other time. In short order the sun burned it all away, making the day warm again.

That trick will not work for much longer: there will be apples, soon.