162

The regular season is over. A new one's started. Yellow leaves first appeared a couple weeks ago, but it only just got cold. The air feels like fall and fall feels like the postseason, the afterlife of summer. Or the half-life of summer which will be measured in wins and a team that takes a (hands clasped in prayer) long time to decay. It's the days of return. Return to October baseball, return to hopes and to turn back to the World Series wins of the 90's. It's time to return to the church where reform Rosh Shashanna services gather to drape a tapestry over a wooden cross and echo lines sung for centuries. I fought religion for the first half of services, as usual. Thinking of a lecture by dean of grad school last week organized for St. A's, The Problem of Religion in Modern America, I strove with my own. I admired how easy it was to give loyalty to baseball I'd been brought up on and how hard it was to be faithful with a mass of people cheering for one god.