Got 'Til It's Gone

No team in baseball has ever come back to win a five game series after having lost the first two games. No team, that is, except for the New York Yankees who, in their defeat last week of the Oakland Athletics, made baseball history. The Yankees lost two home games in a row, forcing them to make a comeback in the foreign land of California, far from fans, far from home. But the Yanks made it back to New York intact, did a bang-up job on those pesky A's, and proved to the American public the power of perseverance.

But baseball feels different this year. The win, win, win attitude has become a little less pronounced. (Or, at least, the "lose, Yanks, lose" attitude has dissipated some). My own mother, devoted Red Sox fan that she is, conceded: "I hate the Yankees, but this year I'll give it to them. New York deserves it." Baseball means something more than it did last year and the year before that. Baseball means more this year than perhaps it ever did, because it signifies that American enthusiasm is still alive and kicking: We will not go gently into that good night.

Because even with anthrax threatening our respiratory systems, people are still congregating in public places, indeed in the most sacred of public places, the ballpark. I can hear the crowds cheering and there is no sense at all that the American experience has been ruined. Tickets are sold out. Bars are packed with rowdy fans. This is not the atmosphere of tragedy.

"Don't it always seem to go," Joni Mitchell sang, "that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone?" Not so true, Joni. We know what we have, what we still have. We know our rights and our freedoms. We know the feeling of a crisp October evening, the wind brushing against the window, the drone of the sports commentators, the distant cheers of fans. We know and appreciate all of this more than we did last year or the year before because this year we are at war. This year looking ahead seems grim, so we look at the now.

This is the now: It is October. The weather has started to change, which means no more shorts or T-shirts or days spent in the sunshine. This is the now: It is the precious few weeks before the World Series begins, which means the crackle of AM radio and the fizz of a good beer. This is the now.

I was out walking in the fall chill and a friend said to me, "I hate this weather." He was shivering, as was I, and he tucked his hands into the pockets of his jacket with force, as if to say, "Six more months of this?"

"No," I replied. I had waited weeks for the first sharp breeze, the first sign of fall and, despite the cold, I was enraptured. "I love the changing of seasons."

And I do love the changing of seasons, the reminder that everything is constantly in flux. And I do love baseball, and it is only when I sit down and think about these things--really think about them--that I truly appreciate them. It is only when I think about how short this life is that I know that I wouldn't want to spend it anywhere else.

And so I learned to appreciate life without forgetting how to live. I continued to listen to the games, to immerse myself in the glory of baseball--and so did everyone else.

The point of all this, of this terrorism, of this relentless series of attacks on American soil, is to make us fear our own freedoms. The point of all this is to make us fear our culture, to make us wonder if maybe we are too lax in our laws, if maybe our society deserves some major renovation. The men who flew those planes expected us to stop everything, to stop living the way that we live. It was a well-organized exercise in uprooting American values, in removing the Americanness from America.

And yet baseball goes on. Baseball, which is Americanness in a nutshell. And if we can do this, if we can find enjoyment in the simple majesty of the game, if we can keep living the way that we live, then we can do anything. "Rage, rage," wrote Dylan Thomas, "against the dying of the light."