Sunday afternoon brooding

Sunday afternoon.  I am home alone, except for a napping toddler, in the hours before the Sunday evening blues set in.  The Twins trail the Tigers 4 to 2 in the fifth inning.  In the game yesterday, the Tigers were ahead 2 to 1 for about two hours.  Then, when we were eating supper, the Twins batted in the bottom of the eighth and the result of five consecutive at-bats was: single, fly-ball double, intentional walk, soft single, home run.  Twins win, 6 to 2, and are now just two games behind the Tigers with thirteen to play.  Life can seem like that, too.  For the longest time, nothing; then suddenly important events, you are caught up in it, but, always, the sun rises and sets, the water returns to the sea, and there is another game tomorrow.

I think maybe Linda Pastan was in a similar mood, having similar thoughts, when she wrote the following poem, which I came across once when reading Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, selected and edited by Elinor Nauen:

Baseball

When you tried to tell me baseball was a metaphor

for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,

to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win

approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down

in the last days of the season--
I didn't believe you.

It's just a way of passing
the time, I said.

And you said: that's it.
Yes.