The last day of baseball's regular season: an objective correlative for the elegiac mood. Everything conspires to attain the strong effect, the season of fall, long shadows, the murmuring and half-empty stadium while the tvs in bars are turned to football games, a sudden cessation of quotidian days, one game after another, every day all spring and summer, endless games after hope for success is gone and then, all at once, a three-hour hole in every October day, a chilly wind and the promise of winter. I'm not the only one who feels this way. Here's a poem by Linda Pastan. I came across it in a book someone once gave me as a gift, Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball:
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.
She's not always so earnest. Here's another:
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