SEPTEMBER GIFTS [M, 9-12-22]

 

As I sat on our patio this morning, I watched the leaves rustle above our roof. This morning there were so many yellow leaves among the green. It made me happy.

I think moving to the farm in the Forsythe Methodist neighborhood, four miles from Oakland City, when I was ten, was what gave me my love of baseball and of school. And why I’m happy when I see the leaves turn from summer to autumn. They mean the World Series, the fulfillment of the baseball season, and school, the end of a long hot boring summer.

 

It would seem that autumn would not be the best season for a baseball fan, since that is when the season ends, but…

Until age ten I had been a city boy in the near-east working-class inner-city of Indianapolis, running from bullies, walking to the store to do errands for Mother or Mrs. Dickerson, who lived next door, the only black person for blocks around, and riding the street car downtown to Cadel Tabernacle with my sister to see some religious vaudeville act.

When we moved to the farm, older sister Mary V and I walked the half mile down our little gravel road to the main gravel road to catch Jimmy Bigham’s school bus. On that bus was an eternal baseball conversation among the boys, eternal in the sense that it had no beginning and no end. I knew I was a Cincinnati Reds fan, because Grandma Mac was a Reds fan, and I gladly waved the pennant [virtual] for my team. We eagerly shared any information we had about our teams, and asked the older boys for guidance if we needed to judge whether Don Newcombe or Preacher Roe was the better “hurler.” [We learned that true fans never used a normal term, like “pitcher,” if a reasonable facsimile could be found.]

Summer on the farm basically meant three months of unrelenting heat, humidity, and isolation. We had no car. We had no money. So we didn’t go anyplace. We hoed weeds and picked tomatoes and put up hay and chopped kindling and made jelly and plucked chickens, all by hand.

Many people, old people in particular, miss the joy of autumn, because they know that winter follows. They spend autumn dreading winter. To me, the joy of autumn was so great that I knew it would carry me through the winter. Because autumn wasn’t just about baseball and school. Baseball and school meant…friends!

 

Friends. The true eternal gift. The gift of baseball and school.

Baseball and school, yes, they are gifts in themselves, but it is friendship that has been the true gift of autumn for so many years. Thank you.

John Robert McFarland