Post Season Play Offs

The first week of October in my renewed home state in my renewed hometown. Safely past the unprecedented monsoons of late summer, we are, by and large, enjoying what used to be called Indian Summer. Temps in the eighties, abundant sunshine, old men with fragile bowed legs so white they look porcelain still tiptoeing out of the lake behind my house from their daily morning dip. I'm not sure what happened to the term Indian Summer; it seems to have been banished from the lexicon of weather forecasts. Perhaps it is somehow insulting, like tribal names for baseball teams. I mean, I really do understand why some of those team logos are insulting, but I am, you must know, a childhood Braves fan. Milwaukee Braves, that is. Hank and Tommy Aaron Braves, Warren Spahn Braves, Joe Torre and that ultimate heart-throb of heart-throbs among 8 year old girls in 1960's Milwaukee suburbs: Eddie Matthews. Ah, yes. Hank is still up there in my personal pantheon; Barry Bonds, meanwhile, is relegated to janitorial duty, sweeping up dustballs in the most remote corners of baseball history, with those preternatural muscles of his.
But back to Indian Summer, as it was. It is, of course, the MLB play-offs. Back in my recently relinquished home of Colorado, the Rockies are more astonishing than even Mr. Bonds' neck. They are, in short, behaving like champions. They are winning, and they're filling the end days of summer with champagne filtered sunshine out there at the foot of the Rockies where sunshine knows how to be its most resplendent self. Coloradans have waited long for this post season sunshine, fourteen years. When the Rockies first arrived back in 1993, we enjoyed a couple of years of full seating in the impeccable new stadium with the tainted name Coors Field, stands and hearts full of hope. My son, at 5 already an inveterate Yankee fan, occasionally experienced enough misgiving to don, for a day, a Rockies cap.

Here in Wisconsin, I feel the furthest echoes of the tumult of joy emanating from Coors Field, like the last visible rings from a rock dropped into water. My friends are ebullient. It makes me wish to be back there. There is nothing better than the end of summer in a pretty baseball field, the green grass so painstakingly mowed, the white lines, the brick and the iron and the lusty, swaying crowds. Even the hot dogs. I could be a vegetarian and still lust after ballfield hotdogs. Only hardware store hotdogs come close, another ancient American ritual, and one that makes home improvement projects nearly worthwhile.

This week I used what I feared might be the last absolutely dry and sunny day of the year to wash and wax my car. I have been here about six weeks, and a few days ago I was alarmed to notice the first speck of rust on my eight year old Civic. I cleaned that speck with diligence this week and dabbed on a spot of clear nail polish. It is not an advertised use of nail polish, but I have hopes of patenting the process if it works. Once I find a new mechanic who can switch the antifreeze from its presently wimpy freeze level to the subzero version recommended here, my little car will be as ready for a Wisconsin winter as I can make it. I wish I could do more. I wish I could do more for my drafty and thin skinned old house. I wish I could do more for me.

This week, big blue barrels appeared silently on the street corners, as if someone had pushed a button to make them rise from the cement. They are the sand barrels. For those of you who fail to comprehend, they are there so when your car is spinning its tires on sheets of slick ice or packed snow, you can use city-supplied sand to throw on the ice and provide some traction. The sight of these big blue barrels on the street corners makes me gulp and wonder what I've done here. In the distance, I hear the cheers of my friends from Coors Field.

Meanwhile, it's Indian Summer here, though, and I think I'll walk down to the beach now and wade out into the water of Lake Monona one more time today before the tall orange pennants are inserted into the tops of the fire hydrants. Yep. You guessed it. Marking the location of the hydrants in case the snow mounds hide them from the fire fighters this winter.

My local friends assure me winters here have become milder with indisputable global warming. They no longer count on cross country skiing on the city's golf courses in January. "We hardly get snow any more," they assure me. Still, there are the big blue barrels standing sentinel on the street corners and soon I anticipate the waving pennants on their thin and flexible sticks. At my neighborhood hardware store which doesn't sell hotdogs, I gather up armloads from the prominent display of plastic sheeting used to weatherproof windows. But once home, I fling open all the windows wide, because it is sunny and eighty today.

If it's insensitive or just plain wrong to call this Indian Summer, maybe we could just call it the Play-Off Season. The Rockies versus the Phillies, eventually (or maybe not!) the Yanks against the Sox, the Cubs disappearing again, as is their wont. The blue skies playing off against the blue barrels. The pennants of the teams waving with just a little more snappiness than those of the fire hydrants. It's the play-offs; it's the best, the moment of enhanced awareness of what we have enjoyed in summer and what we expect from the winter. On the fulcrum, waving wildly.