A Moment on a Train

The e-mail from a Cardinals fan, a former roommate and close friend of mine, came through last Thursday: “So your Cubs are finally in 1st. Congrads. After the year we're having I'm pretty happy to be a few games from .500 and only 6 out. Look for us to make a late run :)”



I thought to myself, “Wow, that must be fun right now!” Well, after I thought, “Yeah right – there’s no way the Cardinals will make a run,” which of course may very well be undeserved because I actually don’t know a single thing about how the Cardinals’ season has gone other than a few games against the Cubs that I happened to read about. In any case, it was emotional potpourri on hearing the Cubs had reached the top of the division, something like homesickness (but not exactly because I’m also glad to be where I am) blended with happiness and excitement knowing the team is playing well and will be in the race when I return to Austin where I can watch every game, and that there’s a chance the wins will mean even more when my girlfriend and I travel to Chicago in late September for the final homestand. The familiar feeling sprouted all over again when I read that e-mail, the feeling of wishing you could be more than one place at once.

Here’s hoping many of the season’s best moments are still ahead. I have a feeling they are. A large part of me is counting on it.

Today it’s Monday, and I’m en route to London with my brother, on a train from Aberdeen, Scotland. It’s dreary. A good day for travel, actually, although there’s fewer decent panoramas out the window because of the weather. Yesterday it rained hard, which made the Strathisla Distillery tour feel authentic but also made the walk back into town annoying, and wet. After 7 or 8 straight cars avoided the puddles collected on the roadside to avoid splashing us, the 9th car nailed us. Even wetter jeans on the ride back to Aberdeen, then, as the taste of the whisky fades. But then, a change of clothes, a good meal, and a few last glasses of whisky at the pub next to the hotel and you can go to sleep with a smile.

Such is traveling. The happy traveler’s mindset is never far from a shoulder shrug because after all, what could you have done differently, knowing what little you knew before you started the day? You did the best you could with the day you had. So you sigh, that’s all, and get on with the next step of the journey, hoping you’ve collected a story worth telling.

For my brother, it’s back to the states tomorrow. For me, it’s off to Dublin for one more week of traveling across Ireland with my girlfriend. A good day for traveling indeed, this one, 7 hours on a train across foggy, misty Scottish countryside that amounts to a long, deep breath before one more summer adventure on another island. I guess it’s all about mindset, isn’t it? One paragraph’s dreary is another paragraph’s misty, and before I know it I’ve written myself to where I need to be, pausing at a point in time where I can look both backwards and forwards.

A summer almost behind me filled with great work and romance and great classes and travel. A little more of that yet ahead. And then it will be back to the US. Back to nights out in Austin. Back to barbeque and Tex Mex. Back to law school. Back to HBO and ESPN and NPR and Austin radio stations. Back to writing and reading and music and conversations and all the patterns and rhythms that will materialize this fall, old rhythms but new again.

Back, of course, to baseball.

I’ve followed the Cubs from a distance, but only slightly. I watched a few games on MLB.TV, and streamed a few on the radio during my class term in London. My father sent me e-mails with game reports. (When I told this to my brother he remarked, “Yeah, but if you can get e-mail you can go to the website to read about the game,” which is true, but when time is so short I’ll be the first to concede that while I check e-mail regularly, I only visit the websites when I have time so it’s nice to get a quick note from dad saying, “Was in the high 90's here today, but even that's not as hot as the cubs.”) My girlfriend watched a few games here and there too, and told me about them, like about how Ryan Theriot landed a game winning hit late one game a few weeks ago. I felt the excitement.

So, a week and a half more of traveling. Somewhere after that I plan to post an essay that’s in the works, about life and happiness and identity and traveling and wringing the most we can out of our time in the ways that work for us – the old themes revisited – written at several points this summer, once I have a chance to weave them together. And I plan to return to watching nearly every game, keeping score. Picking up the parts of the story I missed, and relishing my chance to watch the final weeks of the season unfold.

The narrative of a baseball team -- and especially a team like the Cubs, whose story is deeper than most – ambles along whether you’re participating or not, and while there’s a part of you that wishes you were watching and hating that you’re not, it’s also a measure of comfort knowing that it awaits your return. Which is sooner every day.

So I guess I’ll stare out the window a while. Put my headphones on. Probably listen to Blonde Redhead and Patty Griffin and Bob Dylan. You can’t hurry time, and you can’t slow it down, but you can do your best to use it.