The End of Summer

As my girls and I were walking our dog the other day, I spotted a lone firefly blinking his way through the dusk. He was floating around the rear bumper of an old Buick, perhaps looking for his friends. I watched his self-illumination with longing, and wished him well as the dog pulled me away.

I guess that firefly didn’t get the memo. Either that, or he was granted one of life’s greatest gifts – an eternal summer. Ah, perchance to dream.

For those of us not living in San Diego or Miami, summer does come to an end every year. We try to ignore it, but those fireflies depart so that fallen leaves and carved pumpkins can take center stage. Baseball’s regular season gives way to baseball’s playoffs, which yield to pro football. It’s a different season, with different rhythms.

Most of us who work as educators in the Northeast have started school this week. The first week of school always feels like you’re going from zero to 75 miles per hour in about 10 seconds flat. Even if we’ve spent days preparing our rooms and curricula, there are just so many new variables that can only arise when those students first walk in the door. They’re here now, and the marathon has started – as it always does – with a sprint. But we will manage our new challenges as they arise, and make sure we’re nurturing our new students in all the right ways. It’s what we do.

And as we do so, we’ll glance over our shoulders and notice summer cruising away. Maybe it’s attached to that Buick, with the firefly serving as escort. Most likely, though, it’s somewhere we simply can’t be right now – like down in the Caribbean, or out in the desert. Last weekend, my wife and I took the girls to the USS Intrepid museum on the West Side of Manhattan. It was fascinating to be on an aircraft carrier and inside a submarine, and the girls enjoyed it quite a bit. But every time we stood on the port side of the ship, we all found our eyes drifting to the giant cruise ship docked just north of the Intrepid. This Carnival ship was boarding for a late-afternoon departure. Some passengers sat in the boat’s restaurant, visible through tinted windows. Others walked around the place, checking out their home for the week. Still others sat on their balconies, staring at us.

It was just too much to take – these lucky souls, boarding their ship for a summer extension. Finally, we turned away, and began walking southbound along Hudson River Park. We stopped to watch some tiny waves lap up against rocks and soda bottles near the Circle Line dock. We watched bicyclists and in-line skaters zoom past us. The girls got to pet a horse from the police department’s mounted squad. And then, as we neared the end of our sun-drenched, late-summer walk, I overheard two women talking as they strolled by us.

“I love the Dairy Queen near me,” one woman said, “because it only accepts cash. That way, I can’t stop there unless I have the money on me.”

The other woman nodded, about to say something. And then they were gone. I had no interest in eavesdropping, so I kept walking. But I took some small consolation in the fact that this conversation was every bit about summer. I could taste that Blizzard – soft-serve vanilla with bananas, please – as we made our way back to Penn Station.

Summer is a collection of strikingly vivid details, photographed with slow exposure. We savor these details, filled as they are with wonder, serenity and – cue the ice cream – even temptation. But this season always manages to leave us. And, like any great romance, the longing makes us love it all the more when it comes back.

I Want to Win (One Sixty-Two: Day 78)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Seventy-Eight: Roy Oswalt, Houston Astros

“I’m going to take my talents to South Beach,” LeBron James said. “I think it will give me the best opportunity to win, and win for multiple years.”

For a man with all the money he could ever need, the focus turns to winning. So as the fans in Cleveland fume, and some even turn to burning his No. 23 jersey, James leaves his hometown for the sunny skies of Miami, and the opportunity to play with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh under the tutelage of Pat Riley. It’s a winning combination, one that will likely bring these men some NBA titles.

Ho-hum. The rich get richer – again. What’s new?

We see it in sports all the time – players who’ve made more money than most of us could ever dream of choose a franchise with a tradition of winning over another that lacks said tradition. They search for the best chance to claim a title, and leave their old team without much hope. LeBron James did this last night, but he’s not the first. Nor will he be the last.

Roy Oswalt is 32 years old, and he’s in his 10th season pitching for the Houston Astros organization that drafted him. Oswalt has won 143 games for the Astros, one shy of the franchise record for career wins. Oswalt’s right arm helped lead Houston to its only World Series appearance in 2005, and to playoff appearances in ’04 and ‘01. But in 2010, the Astros are well on their way to their third losing season in the past four years. And Oswalt, who has earned approximately $75 million during his 10 years in Houston, is ready to leave the Astros behind.

It happens every year. Oswalt won’t be the only big-name baseball player traded this month – Seattle Mariners pitcher Cliff Lee could be traded as soon as today. But like LeBron James, who played seven seasons with the Cavaliers team that drafted him, Oswalt wants to win now. That means leaving behind the franchise that had been his home.

So if you’ve got a No. 44 Astros jersey, wear it today. Tomorrow, it might be out of date. Someday, after he retires, the Astros might bring Oswalt back and retire that number. But for now, in July of 2010, that number is about to be exchanged for Double-A prospects.

Oswalt wants to win. If he could shoot from the outside, the Miami Heat would love to have him. But he’ll settle instead for a pennant race. In a new town. It’s kind of like shopping in a mall – you feel no connection to the place, and there’s nothing there that feels like home. But you get what you want, and you go home with stuff.

Everyone wins, in a way. Except that no one establishes roots. And when there are no roots – when you don’t hang with a place long enough to live through the ups, downs and everything in between – it’s hard for you to ever become what the greatest of our athletes and coaches have been called:

A legend.