My phone buzzed on my nightstand table: the Dodgers had won their first World Series since 1988.
I looked out the window from my bed. My wife was still asleep next to me. Our dog was snoring. The sky was that familiar gunmetal, middle-of-the-night gray. I thought for sure it was four in the morning. I could hear it raining, which sounded like bacon sizzling in a skillet.
The World Series seemed impossible. I wondered for a minute if it was just another annual event that had been bumped forward because of Covid, like The Masters, which usually takes place in April but was moved to November. I lay in bed, my eyes open, trying to place myself in time. And for a few very long moments, I couldn’t.
I couldn’t remember where I was, or when I was, or what day it was, like the moments after one wakes from general anesthesia.
“What have we done with our days?”
My mother’s birthday had just happened, so: end of October. I drove two hours to the city to get her and another two to bring her to my house. We made her dinner, gave her gifts, and drove her back the next day. No one mentioned years or time, or that she is eighty-five. That she is, as Doris Grumbach called it, coming in to the end zone. She looked good. She ate. She left. Normally, her birthday would be celebrated with the fanfare that makes her happy for a few hours: lunch out at Cafe Luxembourg or Raoul’s in Manhattan, shopping for makeup, gift-opening. Five years ago, we took her to the Franco Zeffirelli production of Turandot at The Met. We bought her Prada sunglasses. That was the last big birthday.
Remember when she was eighty, I said to Susan. We were standing at the sink, washing dishes. Five years ago. So I guess she’s eighty-five.
The water ran from the faucet. We were silent. We gaped at each other, surprised at the passage of time.
What have we done with our days?
The leaves have fallen. There’s no Halloween candy in the house. My neighbor’s kids aren’t talking about their costumes. I have not yet had my annual conversation with Paul, my butcher, about the type and size of turkey I’ll be ordering for Thanksgiving: heritage or traditional organic. Two birds or one. One big and one small, or two smaller ones. One on the grill, one in the oven. Or just one. Will we make Laurie Colwin’s spinach casserole. We bought Christmas cards when we were in Maine a few weeks ago, but I have no idea where they are.
And now: the World Series.
“Human gestation: it is almost nine months since our worlds were turned upside down.”
But doesn’t the World Series happen in the fall?
Is it fall?
Human gestation: it is almost nine months since our worlds were turned upside down. We canceled plans. We checked to make sure our papers were in order. Powers of Attorney. Wills. Healthcare Proxies. I made sure Susan knew, in the event that I was among a number in hospital, separated forever from the woman I love by a parking lot and a FaceTime screen: I want to be laid to rest in the waters of Penobscot Bay. We wept. We made sourdoughs; our friends made babies. How will they be known. How many Covid babies will be named for the heritage flours that now fill our pantries. Can you imagine: My son is named Fife, for the flour we used in our starter. Mine is named Canus and is smut resistant.
I remember reading somewhere about how prisoners mark time behind bars, when every day is like every other day. It requires concerted, mindful presence. We have done things during the last months that I’ve never thought of doing, that I’ve always left to the romantic sensibilities of others: we dried wild rose petals from the rugosa in front of the cottage we rent in Maine. We shared a massive puffball with our neighbor, sliced it, breaded and fried it in olive oil and lemon; it tasted like packing peanuts, with a faint perfume of fox scat. A huge chicken of the woods emerged from the side of a tree in our backyard like a cauliflower ear; we sliced it from the trunk, split it, and gave half to our neighbor-of-the-puffball, who, in turn, gave us two pounds of maitake that she found in a local meadow. We ate wild mushrooms every night for two weeks. And then, it was a new week.
And then, it was fall.
And then, one day before the sun came up, my phone announced that the Dodgers had won a World Series that I’d forgotten was being played. My grandmother, Clara, stopped being a Dodgers fan when they left Brooklyn. The bastards, she’d call them.
“We made sourdoughs; our friends made babies.”
The last letter she wrote to me before she died is dated August 1981. I am about to leave for college and she wants to know: what do I need for the chilly New England autumn. She writes that she has to go because Reggie is up at bat and she needs to watch. She signs it Your Baseball Gramma. She will be dead eight months later.
Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, wrote Roger Angell.
Fall is baseball season, and this year, the Dodgers won. Silently they came, and silently they went.
It must be nearly November; it is supposed to snow this weekend. Toilet paper and hand sanitizer are getting harder to find again.
Is it March? Because tonight, as I write this, it feels like March.
Looking outside, it’s hard to tell.