Last week, there was a picture of the Essig Junior Bi-County baseball team in the paper, champions of the league. It made me sad.
I don’t have anything against that group of boys. It’s just that it reminded me how I felt this time of year when I was young and summer baseball ended.
But for kids, the season is done. The end of ball triggers all sorts of connected feelings in me. Some of those go back a lot of years and to situations in a distant past. For example, the foreboding sense that school is going to start and take away all my glorious freedom. My last September that was scarred by a return to a classroom was 44 years ago. But I still feel a bit of that dread. It remains in our bones long after the reality is gone.
The days begin to shorten. I played my own Junior Bi-County baseball at Prairieville. That was a field of dreams that is a cornfield now west of Sleepy Eye. We never had lights there. In the blissfully long days of middle-summer, sunlight easily bathed our field for seven innings after a 6:30 start. When you’re a kid, sunlight even overlaps bedtime, which is problematic when you move to the parent side of the equation.
Temperatures cool. Leaves begin their slow turn from green to autumn hues. Crops mature. Apples redden on branches. Birds gather in anticipation of getting out of Dodge. We all know how this story ends. It starts with w and rhymes with splinter.
Baseball and softball end early to make way for fall sports. Adolescent bodies need to prep for volleyball and cross country. And football. Football is still the elephant of sports. It takes the most kids the most time and the most effort. I don’t dislike football. Watching the Vikings is as fine a way to blow a Sunday afternoon as any other.
I have to admit, playing it was kind of dreadful. That may be partly due to the seasonal comparison. When I think of baseball, I think of shagging balls during batting practice: easily floating around the outfield, chatting with friends, chasing balls, and flinging them into the mound. Just writing that makes me want to go, take some flyballs.
Practice for football was sweating profusely in heavy gear while I tried to hit my friends. I wasn’t very good at either sport, but I much preferred chatting with them. Baseball was joyful; football was grueling.
This melancholy that I feel with the passing of baseball season is connected to the passing of things in general. We see ahead of us the end of summer, the end of the growing season, the end of vacation.
Everything ends. I don’t especially like that, but it is one of the Great Truths. Everything ends, except for God and eternity. Understanding God and eternity is impossible. So, on this side of the grave, we are left with things that end.
Days end. Weekends end. Television series’ end. Books end. Songs end. This column will end in about 300 words.
One can’t go down this path without coming to lives ending. We do things to postpone our own end. Eating well, exercising, getting good sleep are useful but finally futile. Knowing the Great Truth can compel us to get stuff done. Putting things off will only work so long. Perhaps that is reconciling with a family member or organizing our finances. Remember: everything ends. Us, too.
One particular end came back to me recently. In the (New Ulm) Journal’s Fifty-Years-Ago page was a story about Lobo performing at the Brown County Fair in 1973. You can be excused for not knowing who Lobo is. He wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder, more of a few-hits wonder. In the early Seventies, he was something of a star when he came to play in the grandstand in New Ulm.
I went to that show with my younger brother Dean. We listened to Lobo’s records together at home. We had pretty good seats to see and hear Lobo at the Fair. Only Dean couldn’t see him.
Dean was blind from the age of two, but otherwise healthy. From first grade to tenth, Dean attended Braille School in Faribault. He boarded there during the week. My mom drove him to Faribault on Mondays and brought him home on Fridays. During summer, Dean was home on the farm and a fulltime playmate. It was another reason I didn’t care for the end of summer; I would lose my best friend to school.
Anyway, fifty years ago, I can picture Dean’s foot tapping to Lobo and his band. Months before that night, headaches led to discovery of a brain tumor in Dean. When we were at the Lobo concert, we were hopeful radiation and chemotherapy could defeat it. This was before my senior year. Dean was a junior. He would not make it to his senior year. He died the next spring, days before my graduation.
I don’t know if anyone handles such situations well. I didn’t, and fifty years on, I feel like some processing still needs to be done. I might come back to that in the next year if you don’t mind me using this space as therapy.
We all have songs that sit on a shelf in our brain that we take down regularly. A Lobo song that I can’t defend as great songwriting is there for me. I can sing this in my head right now, and go back to the Brown County Fair, 1973:
“Me and you and a dog named Boo,
Travelling and living off the land,
Me and you and a dog named Boo,
How I love being a free man.”