No? Okay...
***
This is my favorite time of the year. It doesn't have much to do with the calendar, although Spring is always welcome after the rigors of a Michigan winter. It has to do with how high in the sky the sun is. The warm weather surely does make this old body feel better, looser, younger.
It just coincides with, y'know, baseball season. They always call the ballplayers "the Boys of Summer", but Opening Day is in early April, and they don't wrap up the World Series until sometime around Halloween.
Sometimes the tri-seasonal warmth stays around that long, too... Those hot, hazy days that can rise up even if there was frost that morning, even if it gets cold again when the street lights come on. They make you lazy, those days do. They make it hard to get much of anything done.
Baseball is timeless, not just in that sense but also because it is a game that does not abide by any timekeeper. It's a matter of innings, not quarters or halves or periods. (So is golf, technically, but golf involves a frustration level that is not often found in America's Game.)
The season is long, see. It wears down the players, the press, the fans, weighing on them all in humid languor, especially in the long haul when the buzzing cicadas compete for one's attention with the ballgame on the radio.
How long does the season last? Hey, it ain't over 'til it's over... When one team wins. If Game Seven of the Fall Classic is tied at the end of the ninth inning, they keep playing.
Yep. 'Til it's over. If your team wins the pennant, and then the championship, you're lucky. If they don't, you're just like everybody else.
Then, the smile finally slips a little, as you realize that the warm days are over, too. The cold nights will stop yielding the mercury to the daytime, and Spring Training seems like it's not just on the other side of the calendar, but on the other side of the world.
Something worse, something less desirable, than hibernation settles in. We go back to our indoor beehive lives. Whether we like them or not...
But everybody loves beisbol.
Even if maybe you lose some of that warm, magical feeling when you stop being a kid... Even if some of us will never stop being kids.
pH 4.27.17
***
